52. Musk vs. MAGA: Civil War in Trumpworld

0:06Welcome to The Rest is Politics US. I'm Katty Kay with our first episode of 2025. Well, happy New Year, Caddy Kay. I'm Anthony Scaramucci. It's nice to be with you again. What are we talking about, Caddy Kay? Well, we're going to talk about, even though it's New Year and you'd think everybody was going quiet, they're clearly not down at Mar-a-Lago because there's been a little bit of a bust up in MAGA world. So we are going to talk about Elon Musk and his running battle. that's got kind of spicy with Steve Bannon over visas and why it's important and who we think is going to win that battle. And then in the second half of the program, we are going to talk about Jimmy Carter, who of course died earlier this week and we'll look back at his presidency.

0:54And I'm particularly interested, Anthony, in your thoughts on his post-presidency and what it tells us about presidencies today. So we're going to take a few minutes to pay tribute to Jimmy Carter. But first of all, I haven't asked you, have you had a good Christmas? Have you had a good New Year? Did you have fun with the family? Well, if you're watching on YouTube, my head is the size of a jack-o'-lantern from overeating. It can barely fit in the screen. But I'm doing my best, Caddy. I'm trying to sweat it off. It was the brutal amount of legendary eating. Let's just put it that way. When you live in an Italian family, it's heavy, heavy caloric intake.

1:28I don't think you look a gram, since we are talking European, a single gram heavier. Anthony, you did very well resisting all of those things. Lie to me. I want all the women in my life to lie to me. I'm at the age now in my life where I just want everybody to lie to me. Tell me I look good. Tell me I'm not fat. Exactly. Could that be our New Year's resolution? Just ask everyone around us to lie to us? I want the truth in politics, Caddy. I just don't want the truth as it relates to my personal vanity. My memory is perfect. Of course, now I have my bionic eyes, so they're good. I haven't put on a single pound ever.

2:07All of that. You know, I think that's a very good way to start. You're rubbing it in there with the ever. I'm Italian. We go up like a roller coaster. All right. What do you want to talk about, girl? You and I are at least being nicer to each other than Elon Musk and Steve Bannon. Not a bad segue there. Who have had a little bit. I don't think their language has been what you could call in the spirit of the season. Well, I mean, listen, I was on the 23rd of December. I was on CNN. Wolf Blitzer asked me a question about this. And I said that, listen, this is born from my life experience. Elon, back up off the politics.

2:45You don't need to be that aggressive with the politics. You've got an amazing life, made$400 billion back off the politics. I said, they're going to hurt you. I didn't mean they were going to physically hurt you. These are very malicious, very malevolent people, and they'll start doing things to you and your business and your personal life that are just not fun. I've had this experience, Caddy. They'll put him on the front page of tabloids and they'll light him up. Now, maybe he wants that and he doesn't care. But my thing about Steve Bannon, I have met a lot of bad people in my life. But I have never met anybody like Steve Bannon because Steve Bannon has got – And again, we've talked about this.

3:25Thank God he's so ugly, but he's the triple threat. Okay. And let me explain that. Okay. He's well-read. He's incredibly malevolent. And then he has that dark attention seeking madness. Okay. So we're now in the dark attention seeking madness phase. He's come out of jail. His podcast is doing okay, but he's nowhere in MAGA world. He's nowhere. And so now he's trying to make a flank move. He's trying to assess if he is the heartbeat of MAGA, if he's the core of MAGA. And he's going after Musk in a way that's not endearing him to Trump and is not endearing him to the people in the inner circle. And so this is a fascinating thing that's going on as a civil war taking place.

4:15Musk is winning that war right now. He's been located at Mar-a-Lago,$2 ,000 a night at a cottage right outside the mansion. Apparently asking for food out of hours. He's kind of demanding. Yeah. And he's got his son X on his shoulders and he's got his mom with him. And he's winning that war for now. But I've seen this thing play out. And I guess what I would say to you, because you've been around politics a long time, if 40 of us went into the administration, had very bad experiences with Donald Trump, so bad that we went out and publicly spoke about the danger of Donald Trump. I'm on Wall Street, and we say on Wall Street, past performance is not an indication of future results.

4:59We have to say that as a disclaimer. But in politics, Caddy, is past performance an indication of future results, or is this the new and improved Donald Trump with a new and improved team, and they're just going to govern brilliantly with no skirmishes. I spent four years covering Donald Trump and was exhausted by the end of it because of the sheer chaos. It's government by chaos. That is his theory of government. And part of that is ideological, that you want to do that because you want to throw everything up in the air and you don't believe that the way things have been done were productive, whether that's ideologically productive or practically productive or economically productive.

5:37And so you want to destroy things. That's the whole point of sort of populism is to try and destroy things. And it doesn't look to me, and we haven't even got to the administration yet, but it doesn't look to me like the next four years are going to be any calmer. We should fill people in on what this kind of row is about within MAGA at the moment. And it's all over the issue of immigrants and visas and whether people who are high skilled workers from around the world should get what are called H-1B visas. And these are visas that particularly go to people with master's degrees. Many of them go to people who are very educated from India, from China, from Europe, but predominantly from countries with high numbers of engineers, of software coders, and they go and work in Silicon Valley and some in other areas too, but Silicon Valley has really exploded the number of H1B visas.

6:30Tesla alone is now number 16 in 2024 in amongst the companies that brought people in on these H1B visas. Tesla brought in 742 H1B visa recipients. The row has broken out between the Steve Bannon purist, more nativist, these jobs should go to Americans and Silicon Valley shouldn't be being given a free pass in allowing foreign workers to come in and take away American jobs. You've had people like Laura Loma, who is this right-wing influencer, Laura Ingraham, who is a Fox News personality host, even Nikki Haley, weighing in actually on the side of Steve Bannon saying, hold on a second, these tech bros shouldn't just be allowed to open America's doors to foreign workers, they should make more effort to train and employ and skill up American workers.

7:32You're seeing the pure sort of populist nativist element of MAGA up against the high tech, high earning, let's focus on economic results and profits world of Silicon Valley. and it's exploded into this ugly war with, this is a family show, so perhaps we shouldn't be using these words, but Elon Musk saying that you could go fuck yourself in the face to Steve Bannon and the MAGA crowd who don't want these foreign workers to come in. And Steve Bannon replying by saying, we're going to rip your face off and that you should sit back and study Elon Musk. You can't just arrive at the party and suddenly say, you know how to govern.

8:14What is it with faces? Why do they keep going after each other's faces like this? Well, I mean, it's a reference to Tropic Thunder. Tropic Thunder is a movie we're not allowed to see anymore because you've got Robert Downey Jr. in blackface and you've got in the movie, they use that expression, go blank yourself in the face. But there's something about this that I want to give some footnotes to, and that is Republican history. Republicans made a decision about 20 years ago that the H-1B visa was an important part of the American body politic. And this goes to what Lee Kuan Yew once said about America.

8:55So the founder of Singapore was interviewed in his late 80s by Graham Allison, the dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. And Graham Allison said to Lee Kuan Yew, he was probably one of the most brilliant leaders of his time. And he turned that little island off the coast of Malaysia into a, probably on a per capita basis, one of the most successful economic engines in world history. Henry Kissinger once said about Lee Kuan Yew, if he had only had a bigger nation, so many good things could have happened. But what he said about America is that America is an idea. It's a culture. It's not placed on a broad line and a result of which you can get to America and you can assimilate in America.

9:40You can be British American or Italian American or German American, and you can do it quite quickly. I think he used five years. Which Steve Bannon and co. don't like the idea of, by the way. They hate it. But this is something that's happened in America. And by the way, there's been Americans that have hated that from day one. I guess, you know, once they killed off all the Native Americans, they said, okay, we got here first. The actual Americans. Yeah, exactly. Well, you actually didn't get here first. And then when waves came over, they said, well, you don't belong here. That's called American nativism.

10:11It's a form of racism. They did that to my grandparents. They told them to go back to Italy, et cetera. They did it to the Irish. They did it to the Jews. They did it to the Germans, to the Mexicans. They do it to everybody. Exactly. I'm not saying they just did it to the Italians, do it to everybody, but it's very important. So what Lee Kuan Yew says to Graham Allison becomes the platform for the Republican Party for several decades, which is that this is a tractor beam, this country, for the great intellectual capital of the world. It can arrive here. It can assimilate. It becomes American, these people.

10:44And they go on to do great things. And it's a font of innovation. The reason why Elon Musk is so hot about it is that he believed that. And so he showed up here. He was the recipient of an H-1B visa. Yeah. He naturalizes. He goes on to great success sphere. Sergey Brin, I can name hundreds of very successful people. There's a gentleman by the name of Shiram Krishnan, who is the one that they start this controversy over. And it's interesting because he's a brilliant guy. He worked at A16Z. He lives in London. He's a personal friend of mine. Every time I'm in London, I spend time with him. And he's just a brilliant, gentle person, a real gentle man.

11:23And he's going to go into the administration and he's going to work on the AI projects with David Sachs, and people are upset about it because he's not purely American, he's been naturalized into America from India. So that's a question for you, Anthony. Are they upset about Sri Ram Krishnan because he's not American? Or are they set because he is in favor of allowing more non-American high-skilled workers to come into America and drive economic progress in the country. Is it just because he's not American? If he was Danish and coming in to the administration, would there have been this backlash against him?

12:00I would say no, probably wouldn't be. I kind of agree. But this is the gist of the whole thing. They're going to fight over this and they're going to say that we're going to close the border. We don't need Albert Einstein anymore. We'll do without Albert Einstein. Americans need these jobs and Americans need to be propped up and we don't need to draw from the rest of the world. We're America, this sort of American egotism, this American centrism, if you will. And it's a very big danger. Mitt Romney, when I worked on that campaign in 2012, he was an H-1B visa guy. And he said, when you graduate from a school here, Stanford, Harvard, wherever it is, we want to staple a green card to your diploma.

12:45That was the actual words. And Trump actually used those words on the All In podcast a few months ago, the Mitt Romney words. And I worked with Donald Trump on Mitt Romney's campaign. We did two fundraisers in Trump's Trump Tower triplex apartment. And the reason why this is so interesting is that Trump has actually, the brilliance of Donald Trump, I've said this repeatedly, he talks out of both sides of his mouth. I hate H-1B visas, America, America, America. And then he's out with the tech bros. I love H-1B visas. Let's staple a green card to everybody. And he probably doesn't have an ideological position on this.

13:22No, he doesn't care. He'll go with whatever he thinks serves his own interests better. When he's with the tech bros, he needs their money. He wants them to help them get reelected. Fine with the H-1B visas. If he's in the MAGA crowd and he needs the MAGA voters, I hate the H-1B visas. I'm a little bit of an idealist. I've thought the American presidency you have to deal with the real world the way it is, but there's a little bit of a normative quality of the American presidency. Reagan understood that where you're searching for the ideals and you're trying to push the country towards those ideals.

13:54So let me ask you this question. If you were in the seat of this controversy, and forget about the politics of it, Cady, what's best for America? I think it's indisputable that America's success, not just historically, but even since COVID has been driven by its more open door policy towards immigration. The American Enterprise Institute, which is this conservative think tank, libertarian pro-business think tank in the US has done a study that showed that for every H1B visa holder who's allowed into the US, that creates 1.83 jobs for Americans, almost two jobs, right? So you bring in an H-1B visa holder from India, from China, from Ukraine, from Mexico, a high-skilled performer who helps grow American companies, that provides more jobs for American companies.

14:48But I can see, and I think we've all learned during the course of the 2024 election that however much economists produce the data showing that migrants into the US drive economic performance and drive growth and drive wealth and prosperity in this country, even if those migrants are not coming into America legally, and we're talking about the high-tech, high-skilled workers, even the non-high-tech, non-high-skilled workers are driving economic growth in America that is the envy of most European economies. You still have to deal with the fact that that produces a backlash. And I think that's what's fascinating about what we're seeing play out in MAGA world this week, where you've got the Steve Bannons now calling for 100 % moratorium on all immigration until we get this thing sorted.

15:38I mean, he's basically saying, no more migrants into the US. But is that just cutting off your nose to spite your face? I mean, his argument would be that by allowing in foreign workers, it's a kind of lazy route to economic success for these tech companies and what they really should do is invest in the American worker and that this gives them a cop-out in a sense. They can just bring in somebody who can't then go and leave Amazon or leave Tesla to go and work for another company. They're kind of tied to that company and you get an American worker who has more rights, more freedom to move around, but you've got to invest in those American workers and that these kind of high-tech, high-profit companies are doing the thing that is not good for America in the long run.

16:25I mean, I always worry about people being nativists. And I particularly in a country like America, which is so founded on the ideals and the benefits of immigration, it seems to me like a nativist streak is not going to help the country in the long run. Okay, well, you side with Elon Musk, sounds like. So not on everything. I am worried about how Elon Musk is weighing into lots of country's politics. And I do worry about having unelected billionaires with the amount of power he has. But on this issue, it seems to me that the data in favor of immigration for the American economy, and therefore actually for Americans, is pretty incontrovertible.

17:07Yeah. So I would just say to everybody listening, if you're American and your family is from an immigration story, which it would obviously have to be, unless you're a native - Unless you're a Native American, unless you're a Native American, I don't understand how you could side against this. Let me try you on the counter argument, which is, are these tech companies benefiting and not really giving back to America because they aren't investing in America? It's giving them a kind of loophole and they're avoiding the responsibility of investing. And we know that the American education system is not performing well compared to other education systems around the world on many metrics.

17:46Does this allow them to sort of duck their responsibility to the American education system and American workers? Yeah, you see, that would have been the better argument for Bannon. If Bannon had said, listen, I get the H-1B visas for the Einsteins of the world, but what these companies are actually doing is they're using a loophole and they're bringing in software engineers that are not the Albert Einsteins and they're bringing in other waves of people where in fact we do have people in the United States that could do those jobs and we would want these companies to be more focused on that and maybe we could snipe up the and make it sharper the H-1B visa thing.

18:26You mean as opposed to saying if you're going to do that we're going to rip your face off? That's not like the most sophisticated argument he could have come up with. But we're in the attention economy now, right? So those are how we get each other's attention. Such a good point. blank each other in the face and do this, that. Boys, grow up. Not this group of people, Katty. No, no. This is going to get worse before it gets better. But here are three things I would say about this. Number one, is there a civil war? Like I say, the answer is there is, but it looks like Bannon is losing that war. I think the big issue for the MAGA people are the tech bros MAGA.

19:01Well, let me give you a newsflash, Katty K. They are not MAGA. They are for their specific personal wealth and personal interests. Is Donald Trump MAGA, Katty Kay? Well, that's the good question. Is he? Well, he was certainly MAGA in 2016 because he needed MAGA. Now he doesn't have to run for office again. Who does he want to hang out with? I suspect he is more inclined to the tech bros and the billionaires. Okay, so Donald Trump, let me give you a newsflash, all you MAGA people, not saying that there's like even one MAGA person listening to us, But if there was one MAGA person listening to us, I would say, hey, my brother, Dalton's not MAGA.

19:39Calm down. He's not MAGA. He's a wet towel for your forehead. He's a transactionalist. He could care less about you if this is good for him. He wants to cut some deals for his family in the Middle East. He wants to do some transactions. He knows Musk is helpful to him with the social media business, and he's not MAGA. Okay, so let's just put that out there. And then the second question is, will these civil wars continue? And I think the answer is yes, but we're leaving out Susie Wiles because she made an announcement this week, which I thought was fascinating and very interesting. She said, listen, you're coming into this administration.

20:19Your social media account is going dark. Okay, now that means any cabinet person, anybody trying to get an appointment in the administration, go dark on your social media. But here's the beauty of this. Elon Musk's not going in that administration, catty catty. He's not even, this department is a non-department. It should be called N-N-DOGE. N standing for not Department of Government Efficiency because there's no department, right? It's going to be the sleepy doge. Right. So that point is there's going to be skirmishes, but there's going to be less than people think, less than people think, because there's going to be some muting going on inside there that people should recognize.

21:07And then quickly, my last point is that what will happen to Steve Bannon, and I believe Steve Bannon gets pushed harder to the fringe. Because I know from personal experience, Trump does not like Steve Bannon anymore. Stopped liking him in July of 2017. But he does like Laura Loma. I mean, there are people around Steve Bannon and he likes Laura Ingraham when she's on his side. I mean, there are people in that world that he still wants to curry favor with, it seems. Otherwise, she wouldn't have been flying around the country on the campaign plane with him. But that's Trump. He's classically, he's got two people inside one body.

21:46And so he wants that out there. He wants the controversy. What's the star sign that you always refer to? He's a Gemini. He's a perfect Gemini. But the problem with Trump, he's got, it's like they're like evil twins, Caddy Kay. I mean, usually there's like one good one in there, but he's got like two bad ones, right? No, but I just got to finish. So Laura Lomer, these people, he'll throw them chum. He'll throw them butane to light the fires. But he's not. He's not MAGA. And that is the weirdest thing about Donald Trump. He would much rather... By the way, Howard Stern, the shock jock DJ, Trump had been on his show, I don't know, hundreds of times, said something brilliant about Trump.

22:29He says, guys, you're supporting him. He doesn't like you. You're not going to be at his table for New Year's Eve. Okay. He doesn't like you. Okay. Also, he doesn't want to shake your hand because he's a germaphobe. You like him and you think he's your savior, but he does not like you. Just give me the newsflash on that because we know him from New York and we know who he likes. Okay. You know, I love the fact that you curse on this, but I'm going to use a curse word here because it's very appropriate. I really don't like cursing very much, but I was repeating what they were saying. You fired in another curse, you know, Sandra Dee, you fired in another curse.

23:05We're not counting. But he is a star effer. Okay. And for those of you outside the United States, what is that? I want to be around stars and I want to name drop that I was. Oh, did you know I just did a podcast with Caddy Kay? Because I am a little bit of a star name dropper. I drop your name all the time, Caddy, in case you didn't know. I drop it all the time. That's very sweet of you. And Trump wants to do that. He gets on the phone with people. This is why he left the documents in the bathroom. He gets on the phone with people. Can you believe I just talked to so-and-so and I had this guy at my wedding and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

23:39MAGA people, you're not on Trump's list. Okay. Just got to give you the newsflash. This infighting is going to be different this time. There's no real election. There's a clock ticking. It's four years and done. Trump's going from 78 to 82. Going to be infighting because he can't help it. It's just going to be very different. One other thing I would say though, I think that's been interesting about this week, and being out of the country, you hear a lot about it, is the degree to which people are watching Elon Musk with trepidation. Because I think you're right, there's going to be infighting and it'll be different from the first time around.

24:12But a lot of people, and I know this from conversations I've had with European diplomats in the last week or two, are watching how is Elon Musk going to use his power and his proximity to Trump to meddle in other countries' politics. We've already seen him describing reform, Nigel Farage's party in the UK, as the only hope for British politics. We've seen him really weigh in on German politics. He wrote an op-ed in the Welt newspaper, and he said that the far-right party, the Alternative für Deutschland, which is compared to having fascist roots in Germany and fascist ideology in Germany, that that is the only hope again for saving Germany.

24:56This has caused an enormous amount. We saw him weigh in. You and I spoke about this on Canadian politics, but the way he's done it in Germany this week. I mean, the AFD is really seen as on the far right wing of European politics. And this causes consternation and his relationship with Donald Trump. So how this all pans out. I mean, if Elon Musk were to be cut off by Donald Trump and Trump were to disown him and have a major falling out with him, that would be less worrying to European leaders. But I know that European diplomats are thinking, okay, we might have to deal with tariffs under Donald Trump, but what do we do about Elon Musk?

25:35How do we manage Elon Musk, who at the moment has this good relationship with Donald Trump, but how do we manage his interfering in our domestic politics in a way that they see as super unhelpful? and potentially worrying. And the fact that he is going for these parties that are on the kind of extremes of European politics is something that they're watching closely. And honestly, I've been told it's one of the things that is preoccupying them the most about Trump 2.0. These are great questions. We'll have to see what happens, but we do know something about Elon. He's not this free speech absolutist because when they were coming for him on his own feed, no bueno, know, he didn't like it.

26:15And he was pulling people. He was suspending people's accounts. And so if you're a politician in Europe, and this is a microphone, it seems to be like a little bit of an alt-right microphone right now, more so than anything else. It'll be interesting to see what Linda does there. Linda, of course, being the CEO of, I know Linda from NBC and not well, but it'll be interesting to see what she does because she was trying to bring in people like Don Lemon from the left. Of course, Elon fired him after the first interview. And so it's an all right platform. And so you don't want to get in the gnashing with Elon Musk.

26:50That would be my recommendation to a European politician. Beat him on the battlefield. Don't beat him in social media. And when he walks around on the halls of Congress with X on his shoulders, they're going to be extraordinarily nice to him because the Doge thing polls well with the American people. Now, nothing will happen and it'll be this ineffectual program. But his relationship with Trump certainly at the moment gives him power at home and abroad. So you're stuck there. Don't go after Elon Musk. It'd be my recommendation. It's not going to help you. Okay. We're going to take a quick break and be back to talk about the legacy of President Jimmy Carter.