33. Why Are They Holding Harris Back?

24:50You can't possibly vote for him. That didn't work. Joe Biden responded by appealing to his own base and getting just more numbers out than Donald Trump did. He kind of made fun of Trump. I think Joe Biden is the only politician who really enjoyed going after Trump. He got the joke. And this time around, it's not clear how Kamala Harris should respond. She did great in that debate, okay, because she never took his bait. Biden never took the bait. But what I would say to her, if she was sitting right here with us... Which, by the way, we should try and make sure we organize that. Let's try to get her on.

25:23But I would say, Madam Vice President, listen, okay, you don't have to win everybody. Go find the people that like you and dislike him and go hard at those people over the next 650 hours. And if you do that, you're going to win the election. If you don't do that, he's doing that. And he has enough people, Caddy, where he could win the election because it's going to come down to those seven swing states. So that's why she's been doing podcasts like Call Her Daddy. And I listened to that one. And I thought actually she did a good job on that. Actually, that's what we need to do, Anthony. Clearly, we just do need to do a podcast about, you know, sex and women, and then we'd be fine because she'd come and join us.

26:00She did this podcast that had 2 million listeners in America, and she was sat with her for 40 minutes. It wasn't a policy conversation, but I thought she did a pretty good job in kind of reaching out to exactly those kind of people who would like her. Okay, we did promise that we would talk about this thing about Wall Street. I wanted to get your take. There was an article I read over the weekend in the FT that got me thinking about this, whether Kamala Harris has done enough to persuade people on Wall Street that she is more like a kind of Bill Clinton, pro-business, centrist Democrat than like Barack Obama or Joe Biden, who had a kind of antipathetic relationship with the business community.

26:40What do you think? Here's what I would say. Because it's important to provide some context. I'm 35 years on Wall Street. Wall Street likes inertia. There's a great line on Wall Street about money being a coward, Caddy. What do I mean by that? Money wants to go where there's no conflict and there's low volatility. And so they want stable government. They want peace and prosperity globally. Obviously, they want global trade and they want rising earnings. And that's really what they want to do and they want to go play golf. For many, many years, it was a group of Democrats that were on Wall Street supporting Democratic candidates and there were a group of Republicans supporting Republican candidates.

27:20I was among the Republicans. Trump changed all that. So what Trump did was he got the Schwartzmans and he got the different garden variety Republican support. And then he started acting like a lunatic inside the White House. And guys like Schwartzman had to come off of his industry policy committee because they were, you know, they didn't want to be seen as a racist. They had board members that were very upset with his reprehensible behavior. So what's happened now is there's been a withdrawal of Republican support in general. Guys like Ken Griffin, as an example, one of the richest people in our country, very big supporter of Republicans for multiple decades.

27:59He has not supported President Trump. He is using his money for Senate races, but he's not supporting President Trump because he doesn't want the controversy. And again, Wall Street likes this low confrontation, low volatility sort of stuff. And so now what she's done a good job of is she said, okay, listen, I started out as a progressive, reasonably left to the hard left candidate, but I'm basically running as a centrist. I understand that I can't be that and be president for all people. And so they like her. They quietly say to each other, she wins, things are going to be okay. And what I would like the vice president to say, not only are things going to be okay, we're at record stock market levels.

28:41Inflation is coming down. This other nut wants to end the independence of the Federal Reserve. If I was her Wall Street advocate, I'd be like, what the hell? You can't have this nut end the independence of the Federal Reserve. Look at what happened to Turkey when that happened with Erdogan. So for me, she's doing a good job on Wall Street. They're never going to come out and support her the way they used to. And the Republicans are not going to support Trump the way they used to because of the danger of his volatility and the way he sounds. But I just want to segue into Musk for one second, because I'm really thinking about this.

29:16He's a brilliant guy. Anybody that can land a rocket, launch a rocket, and then land it back on a landing pad, brilliant guy, one of the richest people in the world. When Musk is told he's the richest person in the world, he says, no, Vladimir Putin is. That's probably true, Caddy. But he's a weird guy. And so I'm going to say three things. And I want you to think about these three things. Number one, Trump despises this guy. He despises him. He'll accept his support. But when he's jumping around like a lunatic on the Butler PA, I think he doesn't like it. Just trust me. He also doesn't like talking to him because I know Trump's personality.

29:50He don't like talking to him. It looked really awkward. Yeah. Okay. So he doesn't like Musk. He'll accept his support. Number two, okay? I think Musk has good intentions, actually. I know other people will say no. They say he's malevolent. But I think there's actors around Musk that don't have good intentions. These guys see Trump as an American Putin. They're all oligarchs. They want to maintain their oligarchy. They don't want to be overly taxed. Each one of them sees themselves as an eventual trillionaire. And the way you get there is you've got to consolidate yourself up against political power.

30:23That's very dangerous for the United States. Okay, I'm a middle class kid, blue collar kid. Okay, very, very dangerous for that to happen in the United States, because that would really dissolve the American dream. And I think Harris has to tell people that the hell are you guys doing? Okay, you want to crowd the top with multiple billionaires and trillionaires? You guys are not that smart, and you're not that important. Okay, we got to help the lower and middle class with equal opportunity. I don't believe in equal outcomes, but I got to help these people with equal opportunity. You guys got to knock it off.

30:55Okay. And Teddy Roosevelt did that, caddy, to the robber batter. It's in the 1890s. Okay. Guys like Teal represent these people. Okay. David Sachs represents these people. Okay. These guys see themselves in a different light. And F. Scott Fitzgerald, the famous American novelist once said that they're rich or different than you and me. Okay. And they're not, Katty. You know, they're not different, but they think they are. Okay. And that's a danger in a society. And so this cavorting is very, very bad for the country. And I wish Musk would wake up, but he doesn't have the social or emotional intelligence, okay, to really understand what I'm saying.

31:35And he would reject everything that I'm saying. Interesting. A bunch of white South African men or men with connections to South Africa who are kind of hanging around Trump at the moment. I don't know exactly what that means, but it is a random thought that I had the other day when you think about people like Peter Thiel and Sachs and Elon Musk. Okay, we are going to take a break and come back and have a quick look at what these two candidates would mean for the rest of the world at a time when there is so much going on around the globe.

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33:16Welcome back to The Rest is Politics US with me, Katty Kay. And I'm Anthony Scaramucci. And we are going to take a few minutes just to kind of do a whiz around the world since I have jet lag. Having come over from America, we think all of you should have jet lag and join me. Because obviously, there's been a lot going on in foreign policy. And I think it is worth stepping back a little bit and thinking on the big hotspots of the world, what would be different under Trump and what would be different under Kamala Harris. I'm just going to lay out a couple of things. I think there are things that will not change.

33:46We are in an era of protectionist economic policies. That's not going to change very much whether Harris or Trump is elected. We are in an era of hawkishness towards China. That's not going to change very much if Kamala Harris is elected or if Donald Trump is elected. I think the things that will change, the biggest difference between the two will be commitments to international action on climate change, which I think Harris will be much more committed to than Donald Trump. Europe, there's this expression going around in kind of Trump world that make America great again and America first really means Europe last.

34:25I think there'll be less commitment to Europe and allies under Donald Trump than there will be under Kamala Harris. The other big issue is Ukraine and NATO. And there's been a couple of things that Kamala Harris said this week in those interviews, which I thought were telling about Ukraine and NATO, because I think that's an area too, where She is probably more pragmatic than Joe Biden is. He came out of that kind of whole Cold War era, has always been dedicated to the principle of America leading. He's very transatlanticist. She comes from Silicon Valley, grew up in California, is younger than Joe Biden, is also committed to the idea of America as a good role model in the world.

35:05But she's a little less fervent, I think, about being a transatlanticist and about America being a global superpower and what that means for America. I think she's more pragmatic. She doesn't seem to have a very clear ideology when it comes to foreign policy. I wouldn't put her in the kind of Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush's national security advisor type role of somebody who's steeped in Cold War thinking. And she said something in the interview with 60 Minutes that I did think was interesting. She pushed on whether Ukraine would be allowed to join NATO and whether she would push for that. And interestingly, she demurred.

35:41And she said, look, we will talk about that when we get to it, which is probably a sensible, tactical foreign policy thing to do. I can imagine all the diplomats around her saying, phew, thank goodness she didn't go out on a limb. I felt that was a little kind of departure note, even if he wouldn't say it from Joe Biden, who absolutely would want Ukraine to join NATO. And I think you're seeing a little daylight there. That's the area I think there is potentially the biggest difference between the two of them. Super tricky for her, right? She's the vice president, sitting vice president. He endorses her.

36:12She's asked, would you have done anything different in the Biden administration on the view? She can't say that she would do things different. She was in his administration. She was his teammate, you know, and that's how she should have answered. He said, listen, It's his administration. I'm his teammate. Here's what I'm going to do 2025 to 2029, if you give me the opportunity. But I'm not going to say anything about him. But, Caddy, here's the issue. Where do you want America to be? What is the vision for America? And so I want to ask you, what does Vladimir Putin want for America? If you were sitting with Vladimir Putin, he was a close friend of yours, and he said, this is what I want to have happen in America, what would it be?

36:55He wants as much internal division in America as possible so that people start to lose faith in the American system of government. Okay, what else does he want? He wants America and Europe to have as much of a fractious relationship as possible. He wants to have an America that is not particularly interested in being part of NATO. In fact, would love the idea of Donald Trump pulling out of NATO altogether or undermining at least Article 5 of NATO, the commitment that if one country's attacked, all the others respond. The strategy is to make America weaker. The tactic is to divide Americans amongst themselves and to divide America from her allies.

37:36Okay. So, I mean, I think that's a brilliant rendition of it. And so, So I've been spending some time on the weekends reading about Franklin and Washington and Madison and Hamilton, and not just reading about them, but reading their writings. What were they writing at the time that they were forming America? And what is so fascinating about that is they were like, whoa, this is such a big opportunity here. We have this new country. We have this enlightenment ideas. We can break the aristocratic sclerosis that goes on in Europe, this sort of caste system that Europeans have. And you'll have to tell me they still have it, but they certainly had it in the 1750s.

38:18It's alive and kicking. Okay. And so we can create this flat society where we can create this opportunity, right? Harris talks about an opportunity economy, but the founders were like, wait a minute, this is an amazing opportunity society that we can create. And they go about creating it and they get people in public service that are thinking about it from that way. So the end of the war happens and the United States does three things that very few countries do at the end of a war. They invoke the Marshall Plan. Okay. That was$14 billion at that time. It's worth about$150 billion of 2024 to help rebuild Europe and parts of Asia.

39:00They go into the general agreements of trade and tariffs, and they unbalance the situation. And why is it unbalanced? Well, the Americans are going to accept tariffs, and we're going to reduce them on the way in so that goods and services can flow into the US relatively untariffed, and we're going to accept tariffs from these other countries. Well, why are you going to do that? Well, they're war-torn countries, where 65 % of the economic output, 2 % of the world's population, and if we can get rising living standards around the world, we won't have another conflict. This is what these people are thinking about and architecting it.

39:32So the trade tariffs are uneven. When I tried to explain this to Trump on the airplane traveling around with them, he more or less gave me the finger. I was trying to explain to him why it was imbalanced. And then the third thing that we did at the end of the Second World War is we binded ourselves to other free countries. And we said, if we bind ourselves to these other free countries, we can reject totalitarianism. And so what that was about was what Washington said. I don't need the power. I'm like General Cincinnatus, the famous Roman general. I'm going to go and put the government in place and I'm going to go become a farmer again.

40:08I don't need or want the power. Let me show you how it's done because I'm only visiting this earth anyway. I'm not here permanently. But now you've got people like Putin and you got people like Trump that they want the power, Caddy, and they want the power for their families and they want power for their lifetimes. And they think about this in a totally different way than the way it started. And the reason I'm bringing all this up is that we got to get back to what I'm saying. We got to get back to the opportunity economy. We got to get back to the flatness and the freedom. And we've got to explain to people in the United States why we have to engage with Western liberal democracies to protect each other from this nonsense.

40:49We have 5.7 billion people living under some level of totalitarianism right now. And if we don't hook up with each other and we don't reject that, it's going to be a catastrophe for the United States. But everything you said about Putin, Trump doesn't give a shit about one of those things. He's like, that's fine. Let there be unrest. Let there be division. My team, the white team, that's the one that's going to be winning and I'm going to be in power with my family. No problem. I don't give a shit. And I find that reprehensible and I find him very un-American, okay? And I'm not sure that the Democrats have come up with the narrative to reject that.

41:27I mean, the alternative narrative to Trump's very transactional view of foreign policy, which is you scratch my back, I'll scratch your back, whether you're an ally or an adversary didn't really make very much difference to him. The big distinction between that and an America as, you know, the shiny city on the hill that leads the world and promotes democratic values around the world. I think back to George W. Bush's second inaugural address where he literally said, our role is to help people who are oppressed and living in authoritarian countries. It was an incredibly robust defense of America as a global leader for good.

42:06I mean, at a time when the rest of the world was pretty skeptical about that. but that's the big split. That's the big fault line. And I don't know where Kamala Harris, I feel, is somewhere in between those two views. She's not as much of an interventionist. I mean, maybe she learned from Barack Obama, who was desperate to kind of pull out of wars by the end, having sanctioned a surge in forces at the beginning of his administration in Afghanistan, got to the end and said, Jesus, I'm done. We can't do anything around the world at the moment. And maybe that's more the Harris point of view. You don't want to get involved in military expeditions unless you really, really have to and you want to try and do everything you can to avoid them.

42:45She's a little more of a pragmatist than George W. Bush was or Joe Biden was, that that generation was. And what I'm trying to figure out is in terms of other countries, Ukraine, the Middle East, what's the difference between her pragmatism about what America can actually do and his transactionalism? So I think one difference is that as a pragmatist, she sees the value of alliances. She actually does think you get more done by getting people on board. About Trump, we know that he really doesn't like a few things. He doesn't like trade deficits for America. He doesn't like multilateral organizations.

43:24He really doesn't seem to like Europe very much and those old alliances very much. And I think that ironically probably gets on well with some people. I think Narendra Modi of India fits very well into the kind of Trump way of doing things. It's very transactional. How do we get what we need in this particular outcome? And maybe there's a value to some transaction. I do think there are things that Donald Trump did as president, the Abraham Accords between Israel and various Middle Eastern countries that might look flimsy now, but actually had value, kind of focusing hard on China and China's unfair practices.

43:55I think that was something that other presidents hadn't taken on. Obama didn't manage to take on. But I think that there is a limit to it because once you start alienating alliances, there is only so much that America can do by itself, especially if it's an America that allows itself to be weakened. I mean, I happen to believe the world is better off when America is strong and healthy and engaged. And Of course, there have been blips along the road, but generally, you know, Europe, we know that from World War I and World War II and the Cold War. But I don't know where Kamala Harris, I mean, it's interesting.

44:24You have to look at some of the people who are around Kamala Harris, like Phil Gordon, who's likely to be her national security advisor, who is kind of a committed Atlanticist and also a committed realist. And I guess that's the difference between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump is that one is a kind of realist pragmatist with a focus on alliances and what do we need to get things done for the better. and one is purely transactional. I don't know, just quickly on the Middle East before we wrap up this section, we should talk more about this later, but what do you think the difference in outcome, is there any difference in outcome for the awful situation in the Middle East at the moment, kind of hornet's nest that the Middle East is becoming between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump being elected in November?

45:05Again, my issue is the wildcard nature of Trump. Maybe I'm talking like a Wall Streeter now because we like lower volatility. but there's a wild card nature to Trump. If he's taking seven calls from Vladimir Putin, sending him COVID-19 tests, and he's in cahoots with them, Putin has an OZ to the Iranians. And so what's going to happen there? And what does that mean for the Israelis? We don't know. We do know that Trump doesn't care about anybody. And so if it suits his interest to betray the Israelis, he'll do that. If it suits his interest not to, he'll do that. So there's no steadfastness, there's no consistency.

45:41What the US benefited from in the post-World War II era, we lost our way in Iraq and Afghanistan, was, okay, this is what we stand for. We made mistakes, made mistakes in Vietnam, but this is what we stand for. This is what we're going to do. When that wall came down, it was 40 years of bipartisan commitment to a containment strategy of communism. And it led to the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union and obviously great pain for Vladimir Putin, but great prosperity for Europe. And so where is Trump on this stuff? I don't know where he is. I would rather go with her and her national security team who are steadfast with Israel, understand the Sunni-Shia dynamic in the Middle East, understand that there's always going to be a tribal conflict because of the way the borders were put together, okay, and are trying to figure out a way to balance the power the way Kissinger or somebody like Von Metternich would have said.

46:36I would rather go with that because, Caddy, you know, and I know, when I was a kid, I said, okay, the Middle East is a disaster. When I get to be 60, it's going to be all fine. Everyone's going to figure everything out. We're much more mature than our grandparents. We're going to do a better job than them. It's an even greater disaster today. But what Nixon would say, what Kissinger would say, what George Shultz would say is that we got to have a plan and we got to stick to the plan. Okay. And Carter would have said that. Clinton would have said that. And Harris's team is saying that. And so for me, I would rather go with that than this level of wild unpredictability.

47:16And oh, by the way, who's Trump's national security advisor? Who's he going to be? And where is he going to be? Because if he's in Trump world, all of the people like McMaster have left. So where are they going to be? They want an isolationist America. And I'm telling you, the world is not ready for an isolationist America. There's people listening that may or may not like the American government, may not like the American people or its standing in the world. But trust me, you're not going to want an isolationist America. You're going to want an America that has one third or one quarter of the global economy and almost the largest military by a factor of 10, you're going to want them engaged with the rest of the world.

47:57Yeah, I agree with that. One interesting thing that Senator Chris Coons, who's close to both Joe Biden and also to Kamala Harris said about her view of the Middle East was that she doesn't see it as a two-state solution. She sees it as a 23-state solution and that she puts the Israeli-Palestinian issue in the context of broader Middle East instability. Having lived the first 20 years of my life in the Middle East, that sounds like a pretty sensible approach to me. And with that, we will wrap it up. We've given you jet lag this week, but it was worth going around the world and looking at all these different hotspots.

48:28We will see you next Friday. And if you are a member, a founding member of the Restis Politics US Club, then you can get our thoughts on how Trump won the White House in 2016 this Saturday in our question and answer session that is just for club members. So if you haven't signed up, please do so. It's great. We We have bonus content for you every week and we'll be diving back into some of the Trump 2016 trauma that Anthony is still suffering. And we're also in the UK this week. So come and join us. We're going to be live in Glasgow on Saturday night, Cardiff on Monday night and the O2 Arena in London on Tuesday night.

49:09So do join us for that. And we're going to be live in New York City on the 28th of October and live in Washington, D.C. on the 30th of October. go to the restispoliticsus.com for tickets to that too. Thank you guys.