50. President Elon Musk

24:28And if really my Christmas gift to you, if you have nothing better to read, I'm sorry, I don't have a good novel to suggest, but just go through the hundred plus tweets that Elon Musk sent out yesterday around this and managed to kill this important piece of legislation. We'll be back in a second.

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26:10Welcome back to The Rest is Politics US with Katty Kay and Anthony Scaramucci wearing a very fine Christmas t-shirt. I'm so glad. This is an ugly Christmas t-shirt. For those of you who are not watching on YouTube, Anthony has a t-shirt with a big Superman S and then rather randomly a bunch of Christmas trees underneath it. Okay. You know what? You can be derisive about my wardrobe, but I don't care. Okay. I own, I own who I am. Okay. And I see myself as the Griswold character that Chevy Chase played. in National Lampoon Christmas Vacation. And by the way, and you haven't asked me, I'm going to tell you this anyway, you can see my house from outer space.

26:49We're burning more power here for our Christmas lights than the entire Bitcoin network. I just want to make sure you know that. Just doing your bit for global warming. Yes, I am. To make sure it warms a little more. We are lit here at the Scaramucci house. I was offended when in early November, before we had even got to Thanksgiving, we were just out of Halloween. You turned up on the program in a Christmas t-shirt. And for me, that was just, it was a little much. You know, it's a bit too early, really. Yeah, that's because your birthday's in November. You want to celebrate that before you get to Christmas, not me.

27:19Yes, I wanted a t-shirt with a K and a birthday cake on it. And what did you have? You know, that would have been a lot more appropriate. Anyway, I'm rather hoping that you'd be wearing a Christmas t-shirt today. So I'm glad that you are. I am. And that the Scaramucci house is all decorated. We have our tree up. I had eye surgery last week, putting new lenses in my eyes, which is why I'm not wearing glasses. It's amazing. I can actually see things. But at night, the Christmas tree lights, I feel like I'm tripping. They've all got halos around them. So I'm the sort of Grinch in my family that keeps turning the lights off around the Christmas tree.

27:49But we are getting there. Okay, we talked in the first half about what Donald Trump can and can't do in the chaos up on Capitol Hill. And I had a really interesting conversation with somebody in your world, a senior figure in finance this week, who was kind of dividing what Donald Trump can do in terms of what he can do economically, what he can do to change America in terms of the judiciary, in terms of the military. And in those areas, he actually thinks that the impact that Donald Trump can have to fundamentally change things is pretty limited because of lawsuits, because of the markets, he will be constrained.

28:25And I think we're seeing some of that constraint already happening up on Capitol Hill, that you have to be able to bring Congress with you. And you can only really make massive changes if you have a big majority up on Capitol Hill, and clearly he doesn't. One thing this guy did say was that actually you could distinguish those three things, the judiciary, the military, and the economy, from society, and that there is a real impact that Donald Trump can have in terms of potentially degrading the norms of American society. I wanted to talk about some of the lawsuits that we've seen against the press over the course of just the last couple of weeks, because I think that is the kind of way that Donald Trump can have a kind of chilling effect on a branch of American society that Americans have kind of always taken for granted, which is the free press, but which may start to censor itself because of some of these lawsuits.

29:18We saw ABC News last week settle a defamation suit from Donald Trump against one of their lead anchors, George Stephanopoulos, for$15 million. Now, most legal experts that I've spoken to about that case say that ABC would have won the case, that the protections of freedom of speech in the United States are very strong, and it was unlikely that ABC News would have lost it. But ABC News's parent company, which is Disney, just felt they didn't want the kind of aggravation of having a lawsuit in contestant with Donald Trump. And I you could start to see, Anthony, how news organizations and journalists, and news organizations don't have a lot of money at the moment, and they might look at lawsuits like that and say, you know what, let's just be careful of what we say about Donald Trump if he's really going to start suing the free press.

30:08Let's start with the first thing about the lack of getting anything done. I think it's important for people to understand that Trump has always been fire, fire, ready, aim. He's not ready, aim, fire. He's always been fire, ready, aim. And it's very important to understand his entire life is based on intuition. So he's intuitive and he's reflexive. So he will react to what's going on in front of him intuitively. And sometimes he'll be a contrarian on that. And sometimes he'll surprise people with going with the consensus. And so what he is not is strategic planner. That's not him. Because if he was a strategic planner, he would be not meeting and greeting all these tech people and having them kiss his knee because of course he wants that.

30:55But he would be sitting down with Musk and his team. He'd say, okay, how do we execute? What's our big game plan? Is it to shrink the size of the government? Is it to isolate America from the rest of the world? Is it to put up walls literally, metaphorically around the country through tariffs and anti-immigration policies. Whatever it is, he would have to sit down. He would plan it out. You know who did that? Ronald Reagan did that. Ronald Reagan sat with his team. He said, okay, we want to have a really good, brisk, crisp 100 days. We're going to roll in some taxes. We have some budget cuts. We're going to get a tax cut going.

31:31We're going to be more muscular with military defense. And they implemented the plan. And then Reagan was the salesperson for that plan. So that's not Donald Trump. And Donald Trump, because of this fire ready aim, I think people are like, wait a minute, this is probably going to be okay. There will be chaos. But this other point that you're bringing up does worry me. Because Donald Trump hangs out with a guy named Viktor Orban. So who is Viktor Orban, Katty Kay? President of Hungary. Curiously, he's become the European darling of the right in America. People like Tucker Carlson are always invoking Viktor Orban, Donald Trump, one of the first foreign leaders who he mentioned after getting elected was that he'd had a very good conversation with Viktor Orban.

32:14Authoritarian bent has had quite a lot of control over the press and over the courts and over business in Hungary. And what does Viktor Orban like to do? Doesn't he like to sue the media? He likes to sue the media. And who hangs out at Mar-a-Lago with Donald Trump? Elon Musk. Yeah, but also Viktor Orban, right? Yes, Viktor Orban has been down there to visit him. Yeah, several times. And so what's happened here is that he's taking Orban's playbook and he's executing it with the media. Now, ABC News would have likely won that case. I do believe that because I've read enough of this stuff. I did take constitutional law.

32:51There's a very famous case called New York Times versus Sullivan. The standards on a public figure, and clearly the most famous person in the world. It's very different here in the US and the UK. You can make a lot of mistakes with public figures and the free press is protected by the First Amendment and the Supreme Court. But ABC News said, ah, can't be fighting with this guy. He's got a rogue FCC commissioner. Well, ABC News's parent company, Bob Iger at Disney in particular said, we cannot be fighting. I think ABC News may have been happy to fight this one to set the standard that the news media won't be kowtowed, but Bob Iger and Walt Disney decided no.

33:32Yes. And so they set a precedent. Now he's going after the Des Moines Register. And we spoke about that poll, right? That this is the subject of this story. This was a poll that came out just before the election that was very odd because Iowa is a red state, very Trumpy, and out comes this poll from this very respected pollster called Ann Seltzer and her newspaper, for the Des Moines Register. And the poll has Kamala Harris leading. And of course, he goes on to win Iowa. And what Donald Trump has done this week, which is interesting, is he has not accused the Des Moines Register and Ann Seltzer and Des Moines Register's parent company, Gannett, of defamation.

34:14He's accused them of brazen election interference. And he's alleging that she has violated something called the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act, which is an act that prohibits deceptive practices that occur in sales and advertising. So he's being a little bit more strategic here, Anthony. He's using different areas of American law to go after his political enemies. And we're seeing it in the House at the moment with an oversight committee that is kind of laying the groundwork for criminal charges against Liz Cheney. That is one way that he's trying to go after his political enemies. But what he's saying in the Ann Seltzer case is that they deliberately misled the public and that interfered with the election.

34:54It's not the first time he's done this. He's also sued CBS's news program, 60 Minutes in Texas, over the editing of an interview that they did with Kamala Harris that he said was unfairly favorable to Kamala Harris, again, using these accusations that they misled consumers. I think that's partly why people are looking at what Donald Trump is doing. And we've had the ABC case, then just a few days later, the Des Moines Register case, and Donald Trump saying, I have to do it. We have to straighten out the press. And at another point, he's used the phrasing taming the media. And I know people that work in news organizations like the Washington Post that pulled its endorsement, owned by Jeff Bezos, pulled its endorsement of Kamala Harris just before the election.

35:38And both individual journalists and news organizations are going to feel this. And I wouldn't be surprised if you have some news editorial rooms or some news organization owners who say, look, we have to just be particularly careful because we can't afford to be sued. And we know Donald Trump's view, any unfair coverage merges with kind of critical coverage. I mean, he describes coverage that's fair as coverage that doesn't challenge him. Do you think this could have a chilling effect on the way that the news media holds this administration to account? I do, actually. I think that we're transitioning the society from a principle-based society to a transactional society.

36:20And it's unbelievable to me that one man could do that. Okay. So these other presidents, like them or dislike them, they adhere to certain norms and they adhere to certain principles that make the country free. And what makes the country free is the free press. And you know, we've talked about this. Not that they all loved the press. I mean, Nixon famously hated the press. Loads of presidents hated the press. Katty, you are the exception for me with the press. I've been excoriated in the press. You know what got me in trouble with Donald Trump? I wrote an op-ed in April of 2019 in The Hill that said the press is not the enemy of the people.

36:58And I pointed out, it's not just to hold people like Donald Trump accountable, but we teach our children to speak freely. They go on and create great economic innovation. When you curb the thought process of young people like they do in authoritarian regimes, they have to steal our intellectual property. They don't make it themselves. And so the free press is a very important element to the capitalist system. It's a very important element to innovation. And so this chilling effect, moving from principles to transactions, is going to be very dangerous. And Bob Iger, quite transactional. Somebody should have said, hey, man, we're going to shove it to this guy.

37:37And by the way, one thing about Donald Trump that I know, he respects that. When you're fighting back, he looks around and says, wow, that son of a bitch is tough. And he laughs when they cave so quickly. He laughs when they fold like cheap suits. You think he respects Lindsey Graham? No. He's made it clear he released his cell phone number out to some crowd of supporters to kind of go after him. He doesn't respect Lindsey Graham, and Lindsey Graham's a... I mean, come on. Give me a break, man. Come on. At some point, somebody in the press has got to say, hey, whoa, man, I'm going to take this right to the bank.

38:14But then the lawyers are out, and they're saying, oh, no, Donald Trump is the Victor Orbán of the US, and he could hurt us. He could pull a license from us. He could knock our block off. But the point is, oh, let's wait him out. They'll say, let's wait him out. And when they do that, it degrades the system. And so they'll likely do that, but I would recommend that they not do that. I think that, obviously, America is a much bigger, more complex country than Hungary. The press is more diverse, has deeper roots. The democratic roots are deeper and stronger here. So I've had very smart, sensible, Democrats say to me, oh, this is how it started in Hungary.

38:51You take over the press. And I've heard that. But I do think it's worth pointing out that Hungary is not the United States. But one of the reasons, and I want to talk about what we're seeing down in Mar-a-Lago, because it's the same kind of thing of all the business leaders going down there as well, and the tech leaders going down to Mar-a - Lago. Trump, a while ago, sued a writer called Tim O 'Brien for writing that Trump's net worth was less than Trump claimed it was. Trump was furious about this and he sued him for defamation and the case played out over years. Trump lost the libel suit, but he still said afterwards that it was worth it.

39:28And this is why he said it was worth it. I did it to make his life miserable, which I'm happy about. Yes, of course. There you go. Merry Christmas from Donald Trump. You know, somebody, I think Sean Hannity said to me, you know, you said something about him he's not going to like, he's going to sue you. I'm like, oh my God, what could make a person like me happier than if Donald Trump sued me? Okay. Because I would depose the son of a bitch. Okay. He would have to be in the court with me and my lawyers under deposition. And by the way, in the country known as the United States, if you're suing me, you're going to have to show up.

40:04Okay. Even if you're president, you don't get an exemption from that. Maybe they'll do it by Zoom. but the point is he doesn't sue the people that won't cave. Okay. And he doesn't sue the people that would delight in the lawsuit. He sues the people that you just said, oh my God, I'll make them miserable and stressed out. You see what I mean? Yeah. And any individual that gets hit with a very expensive lawsuit. I mean, ABC has paid a million dollars in legal fees as well as that 15 million, but it's not just, of course, Bob Iger and Disney and the media that is watching their backs when it comes to Donald Trump, I've been watching the planes over Heathrow Airport.

40:41You know how when you land at Heathrow and then suddenly you think you're about to land and you're going to land on time and they suddenly say, whoops, we've got to circle around because we put into a holding pattern. At the moment, you've got business executives in a holding pattern over Mar-a-Lago waiting for their few minutes with Donald Trump. You had Jeff Bezos who owns the Washington Post and approved of the Washington Post's headline slogan, masthead slogan, whatever you call it, democracy dies in darkness when he bought the Post back in 2017. Very different tone now. There he is having dinner with Donald Trump and his kind of nemesis, Elon Musk, and they're both in a fight to get these space contracts.

41:20But the one that really took the biscuit for me was Mark Zuckerberg turning up in Mar-a-Lago and putting his hand over his heart as the January the 6th prisoner choir sang the national anthem. And this is the same Mark Zuckerberg who booted Donald Trump off Facebook after January the 6th. For me, that just said it so much about where American business is. It's not everybody, as Donald Trump in sales said in this press conference this week, in the first term, everyone was fighting with me. In this term, everyone wants to be my friend. I don't know. Maybe my personality has changed or something.

41:58Pop quiz, Anthony Scaramucci, has Donald Trump's personality changed? I'm going to say something weird that's going to surprise you a little. It has changed a little. I'm going to tell you how it's changed. Go on. He is way more confident. He is way more confident than he was in 2016, going 2017. When everyone was fighting with him. Yeah, but he's way more confident. He's also, he's way more understanding about how Washington works. One of the most memorable conversations I had with Donald Trump, I think it happened on a Tuesday, Caddy, because I was only there for one Tuesday. So I'm pretty sure it was a Tuesday.

42:34And we were in the study, in the Oval Office, off the Oval Office. And he said to me, this is a rough town, man. He goes, I thought I was a real estate mogul. I was operating with real estate billionaires in New York. I thought, these guys are a bunch of killers. He's like, the assistants down here would make these, these guys were a bunch of babies compared to these assistants. And the point being is that Washington was a place that Trump did not understand. It took him two years to get a grip on Washington. So the personality has changed a little, and these business executives are carrying favor with him because he is more confident and he is more intimidating to them.

43:17Is that because he's just captured the Republican Party so wholesale or is it him? No, it's him. Let me tell you something. I've got to remind people, they had this business executives council. Oh, I remember that. And what happened to that business executives council, Katty Kay? Not very much that I remember. No, he said that the nations around the world are shithole countries. And then he said all kinds of screeds. And then the business executives said, oh, we're copy associated with this. We're withdrawing our names from the business council. Now they're down in Mar-a-Lago. So yes. Where was that accent from?

43:55Something has changed. I don't know. It was just something derisive that was, you know, these fat cats, you know? What was it? After you and I have just done this series that we've taped on January the 6th, and I think it's worth everyone listening. It was a great series, but it was so worth remembering that because America has, and the business community, as we can see at the moment, have just decided to draw a veil over the whole thing, right? I mean, after Donald Trump contested the 2020 election and after January the 6th, you had dozens of major American corporations, American Express, Nike, Walgreens, Microsoft, all cutting ties to Donald Trump and other Republican leaders because of what happened around that election.

44:37And now guess what are they doing? Giving a million dollars. I mean, I know that they're giving a million dollars to his inauguration fund. I get it. Corporations always give money to presidents for their inauguration funds. What's just striking about this is that these were the same business executives who, when he was down and out after January the 6th and he'd lost the 2020 election, they wouldn't touch him with a barge pole. Well, we have to bring up in the context of January 6th of Liz Cheney. They now want to totally revise history. They're going to recolor the facts. And we explained in our series what actually happened, the facts of what happened.

45:12Liz Cheney exposed a lot of those facts, but now they're coming after her and they're saying that she was a witness tamperer and Trump is tweeting - Explain that a little bit. How are they going to try and go after Liz Cheney? What they're saying is that Liz Cheney met with Cassidy Hutchinson - Who was the aide to Mark Meadows, who was the chief of staff of Donald Trump at the time. And she was a kind of inside the White House West Wing witness. Yes. And she's a loyal patriot and she had lots of incriminating evidence about Donald Trump and his co-conspiracy in terms of fomenting that violence at the Capitol.

45:48And so Representative Cheney met with her and brought her in for testimony. And so the claim that they're making is that she witnessed tampered. She coached her to say these evil and nefarious and untrue things about Donald Trump. and they're trying to register a complaint and see if they can bring some sort of prosecution against Liz Cheney. And of course, Trump is screeding on Truth Social, Liz Cheney's in a lot of trouble. Okay. But let me tell you, I'm working on my different impersonations, Gatti. Is that like hints of the Godfather or what? I don't know. Or like the Terminator or - Yeah.

46:21Very, very nasty Trump accent. But the point I'm making is that Liz is in trouble, according to Trump, but according to the norms of our society and according to what actually happened. She's not in trouble. And so the question is - According to the law. According to the law. So the question is, does the judicial process hold, or are we going to have some kind of show trial that works for Donald Trump? And I'm going to predict that the judicial process holds, but I'm just saying to you, this is the stuff that the Republicans and these business executives are looking the other way on, looking the other way.

46:53So just before we go, there's one thing also that caught my eye this week that's kind of in the same bracket. And that was Brett Stevens, who's a conservative commentator, used to be on the Wall Street Journal, joined the New York Times, has been a kind of opponent of Donald Trump's, but is definitely a conservative writer. And this week he wrote a piece titled Done With Never Trump. And he argues that although he had denounced Donald Trump nine years ago as a loud mouth, Bulgarian appealing to quieter Bulgarians. I like his writing. He's now decided that actually it's time to move on from never Trump, partly to kind of understand, you know, the legitimacy of the people who voted for Donald Trump.

47:35And I think you and I have spoken about that, but also to realize that some of the things that they complain about, you know, the fact that the media drew a kind of curtain over some of Bill Clinton's dealings with women, that the press did not investigate Hunter Biden and kind of dismissed allegations about Hunter Biden in the 2020 election. And also just the kind of practicality that being a never Trumper doesn't necessarily get you anywhere. We actually have to try to get things done now, not get on board with Donald Trump. He's not saying that, but understand where the country comes from, understand where the anger is at the Democratic Party and at the kind of cultural left in America.

48:16And, you know, be more constructive than just being opposed to Donald Trump. And there's a whole load of kind of people in that never Trump bracket, who I think are sort of thinking, well, actually, you know what, kind of shouting at the wind didn't get us anywhere. And criticizing Donald Trump in the way that we did didn't get us anywhere. But how does the kind of opposition to Donald Trump, whether it's Democrats, or whether it's Republicans who don't like some of the societal stuff that we've spoken about, how do they sort of mobilize themselves to be a coherent, as you would have in any democracy, right?

48:46You'd have a voice of opposition. And at the moment, it just feels like they're sort of floundering a little bit in America. Well, I mean, they've given up. He won the majority of the vote. The articulate never Trumpers are gone from the stage. Mitt Romney, gone from the stage. He gave a exit interview to Jake Tapper this past week. Paul Ryan said, you know what? I didn't sign up for this. I'm leaving. I'm going to go to the private sector. He gave up the speakership. Okay. He was a popular man in Washington, very, very smart guy. And so I guess what I would say to you is that they're in retreat right now.

49:19They're in retreat. And Winston Churchill, self-described, had 40 years in the wilderness before he made his triumphant return to leadership. And they're in the wilderness right now. I don't know who's going to lead them out of the wilderness yet, but I just want to say to people that the co-conspirators now, which include the members of the media, and now include the CEOs, the people running down to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring. Are they going to avoid the plague, Caddy Kay? I don't know if they will. I will remind people that if they have a moment, they should read The Mask of the Red Death, which was written by Edgar Allan Poe in 1842.

50:00Just quickly, all of the elites are trying to avoid the plague. They lock themselves in their beautiful houses and they hang out with each other. And of course, one of them, Prince Prospero, has a masquerade party. And who comes into the masquerade party dressed in costume is someone that has the plague. And of course, he goes around in there, no one knows who he is, and he shakes hands with everybody, drinks from their cups and so on and so forth. And he kills every one of them or most of them. And it's a metaphor for you're trying to avoid something that cannot be avoided. If there's something going wrong in your society and that is right in your midst, if you're not willing to call it out, it could end up impacting you just like it has in every civilization.

50:45All these industrialists who think they're getting close to the politicians. Look at what happened to the oligarchs with Putin. And so I'm just wondering if these people think that they can avoid the plague. But on the never Trumpers, they're in the wilderness caddy. I don't know who's going to lead them out of the wilderness, who's got the vision or the personality or can put the society in a position to go out and get those non-voters. We'll see over the course of the next couple of years. We're going to leave it there and wish you all a very Merry Christmas. We hope you have a holiday, a little bit of a break next week over the Christmas holiday.

51:21We will be back on Saturday with our bonus edition for founding members, our question and answer edition. We're going to look at the US economy and how it's really doing after the big stock market sell-off this week. And then next week, we will also have episodes out, but we won't have a chance to speak to you in person before Christmas. So all of you have a great Christmas. I'm excited because I've got my bionic eyes. That is my present for Christmas is that I can now see again, thanks to my fantastic lens surgery and my fantastic lens surgeon, who is my Santa Claus of this Christmas. So I'm excited about Christmas.

51:54Well, I'm glad that that worked out. Merry Christmas to you and your family and Merry Christmas to all of our listeners. and founding members. Thank you guys. It's been a great year.