54. How to Buy a President: Trump’s $500 Million Oligarchy

0:00The rest is politics US is powered by our friends at Fuse Energy. And there's still time to make your New Year's resolution saving money on your energy bills by switching to Fuse. If you go to getfuse.com slash USpolitics and sign up by January 30th using the referral code USpolitics, you're still in with a chance to win one of our merch bundles signed by me and Caddy. Fuse are a great green electricity supplier, generating power from their own solar and wind farms, and they invest 100 % of the profits into building more renewables. Their tariffs are cheaper than any of the big six competitors, and you'll still be saving money even though the price caps have gone up.

0:49And their customer service is second to none. And they offer 24-7 support, and they promise they'll answer any query within a minute on the Fuse app. To find out more, head to getfuse.com slash USpolitics and sign up with the referral code USpolitics to be in with a chance to win that merch. Visit getfuse.com slash USpolitics for the terms and conditions.

1:24Welcome to The Rest is Politics US. I'm Katty Kay. And I'm Anthony Scaramucci. How are you, Katty? I'm upstate New York here. I'll show you, give you a little window here. Oh my God. You're just doing this to make us feel jealous. You're actually in a ski resort, probably even skiing. No, no. I'm at my house. But I want to show you something else because I think this is important for you people in Europe. Hold on one second. That's a television. You see that? That's a television. I just want to point out that - Yeah, because you weren't impressed with my television the other day. Yeah, because people in Europe, they don't understand what a television is.

1:58I thought I would educate them. That's a television, Katty Kay. Okay, hold on a second, because I'm in London, fighting a London cold. Although I know that Alistair Campbell says you're never allowed to mention that you're feeling sick because that's a sign of weakness, which again, a little bit bonfire of the vanities for me. I am fighting a cold. I'm in London. Here's my view. That is what I'm looking at. That's nice. It's just great. I see that. I think of college. I think of my time in London in college. 40 years ago, I arrived in London for the first time. It wasn't quite like the Beatles going to New York, but it was sort of like that for me.

2:32You mean they were kind of waiting at Heathrow, crowds of people for you? They weren't actually. I was on like a dingy bus on my way to like a pensione or something like that. So what do you want to talk about today? So I thought it would be interesting. You and I were going back and forth on, obviously, there's all these cabinet nominations happening this week. But there's been quite a lot said and written about the ideological diversity within the Trump cabinet that may surprise people. And I thought it was kind of interesting to look at where that comes from and more importantly, what it might lead to.

3:02Are we looking at a really good team of rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin style, who's obviously the historian who's written a lot about that, and Abraham Lincoln? Or are we looking at potential for sort of middle school brawls? And I thought that's a good place to start. And then in the second half, we're going to look at the California fires, but from the point of view of politics and the kind of political rumblings that have emerged, political arguments that have emerged between the California Democrats and the incoming Trump administration and the Republicans and what that could mean for the future for Democrats.

3:34Let's start with the cabinet picks. All the hearings are happening this week. We are recording this on Wednesday. We've had a couple of them by the time we're recording this. It looks to me right now that Trump's team is expecting a pretty smooth process. One of the hardest ones was expected to be Pete Hegseth, but he, Democrats tried to land some punches. No Republicans did. And it looks like the Republicans are united. And so he looks likely to get confirmed. And I imagine that means that the other nominees are going to get confirmed too. I think we're thinking, I'm thinking a little bit differently about this.

4:11I don't know what you're thinking, Anthony, compared to where we were. I want to get into the diversity, but just quickly to bring us up to date on where we think we are on these picks, because I think you and I both thought in December, end of November, early December, that there would be more resistance to some of these picks because some of them are kind of out of the bounds of American history, normal political history, and several of them have never held positions that would normally qualify them for these kinds of responsibilities. But my sense at the moment is that he gets all of them. What do you think?

4:38I would say yes, but what about Tulsi Gabbard? I think she may have some issues because of her past and the background check. Maybe not. I mean, I think you're more likely to be right than not. But if there's one person that doesn't make it, it would be Tulsi Gabbard. But I just want to test something on you. I was just thinking about this all morning. We all talk about in our lives, the butterfly effect. You miss a train, you go to an interview, you decide not to go to an interview and all the different impacts it has on you. But I want to start with Democrat incompetence. And I want to talk about how that it's led us to where we are right now.

5:13So Joe Biden's about to give his farewell address. In general, the administration was quite good. I know Republicans will disagree with that and people on X will disagree with that, But he tried to fight back on Vladimir Putin. No war in Taiwan, thank God. The economy is actually reasonably strong post-COVID. The inflation was inducted into the economy because of COVID. They've done a reasonable job of containing it. And the U.S. is the strongest economy in the world relative to the other economies. Are you trying to make friends in MAGA World? Because I don't think this is going to help you. No, I'm not trying.

5:45Well, I have no friends. I still have friends in MAGA World. Not many, but I still have friends in MAGA World. But so now they blow the presidential election. Let's just be honest with everybody. They blow. They don't give her enough time. She doesn't have a democratic process to get through a primary. And he narrowly wins. Donald Trump narrowly wins, but he's the master of exaggeration. And so he is bombastically telling people he has this wild Ronald Reagan-like landslide. And something is happening, Caddy, that I want you to react to. Which is not true, by the way. We should point that out to people.

6:18That's not true. It was a pretty narrow victory in the end. No, no, it's completely not true. But let me tell you something about projection and creating some self-fulfilling prophecy. So he's out there beating his chest. He's got something very powerful. We can't underestimate the power of X. You go on X, all it is is a right-wing propaganda, right-wing push. The fires are due to incompetence, not nature. Everything about Donald Trump is great. Everything about the woke left is bad. All of that, of course, isn't true, but that's what's going on. And then here's the number one thing for our viewers and listeners outside of the United States, Katty, money.

6:56How do you say money in French, Katty? You don't know how to speak French. How do you say money in French? beaucoup beaucoup beaucoup d 'argent lots and lots and lots of dollars now how to say the word money in england right they don't speak money in england but they do speak money word it doesn't exist but in the u.s let me tell you why you're probably going to be right about all the confirmations money katie k money because the waterfall is hitting donald trump right now he's played it like a fiddle. He's got oligarchs descending on Mar-a-Lago. They're going to dump about $500 million on him.

7:34Oh, by the way, give Donald Trump a million dollars. Poo-poo. Give him$5 million. It starts to get interesting. Give him$10 million and maybe$40 million for his wife to have a puffy documentary. Now we're talking, you have a seat at the table and the Democrats are watching. They'll say they're for the little guy and all that sort of stuff, but they need the big guy to get reelected. And this is something that's going to go down over the next 18 months. Just watch. Democrats are looking at the money that Donald Trump is getting and they're saying to themselves, okay, we need some of that. What do you call it?

8:10The buku buku? Yeah, they need some of that catty-kay. And that's what's going on right now. So that's why you're probably going to be right that you're going to get these confirmations through. Yeah. You've even got, Meta now having its own ball at the inauguration. Anyone who is anyone with any money, any of that stuff we don't talk about, is getting themselves an inauguration ball on Monday night. I hope you're going to be there, Anthony, in your tuxedo. No, you'll be in Davos with the global elite who are not popular at the moment. No, I'm going to be in Davos, Switzerland with the European elites, Caddy.

8:39Because I'm a bougie person. The funny thing about you is that you are actually a really bougie person, but you're in denial. I'm like a self-declared bougie person. And I'll be hosting a wine party in Davos, Switzerland the day after the inauguration. I was invited to the crypto ball. You can come anytime. You have an open invitation. I think Alistair and Rory are going to be there, by the way. Well, I will be up on Capitol Hill for the BBC from like seven in the morning reporting on this inauguration. I think Monday, by the way, before we get into the cabinet, is going to be news tsunami in Washington because Trump is going to want to come in and announce a whole load of executive orders.

9:17some of which may stick, some of which won't stick, but he's going to want to come in with a bang. So keep your schedule free on Monday. Look, what you said about the money, I think, brings us to this idea of this cabinet, which does have this interesting range of ideological perspectives. I mean, if you just kind of run through it briefly, you've got on the national security side, you've got sort of more traditional Republicans who see America as a global leader, like Marco Rubio, Waltz, who's coming in as the national security advisor. This is somebody who was very supportive of American aid to Ukraine, didn't actually vote for the last package, but was very supportive of all the previous packages.

9:59Marco Rubio, who has called Vladimir Putin a thug and a gangster, up against somebody like Tulsi Gabbard, who a kind of Trump supporter and former advisor described to me as, you know, the peacenik in the group. He said, she's like the Jimmy Carter of this administration. So you've got quite different views of how America should operate, including, of course, people like Elon Musk, who does not support aid to Ukraine. So you've got that on the national security side. On the economic side, you've got Scott Besant coming in as Treasury Secretary. Again, more old school, traditional Republican views, although he supported George Soros in the past, worked for George Soros in the past, gave money to Al Gore's campaign, but more of the traditional kind of free market, pro-Wall Street.

10:45He's up against, again, people like J.D. Vance, not who has said that Wall Street has no more truck anymore in this administration. We're done catering to Wall Street, J.D. Vance said, much more populist. You've got people like the woman who's nominated to be the Labor Secretary, Congresswoman Lori Chavez-Dorema, who's much more pro-union, pro-worker safety regulations. Again, definitely not in the Scott Besant side of things. Then, of course, on the health side, you've got Kennedy, who is pro-choice in an administration that ran on restricting abortion rights, who's not even on the same page on vaccines as some of the other people who've been nominated to run the healthcare in America by Donald Trump.

11:29So, you have, I mean, it's interesting. One Trump kind of ally who speaks the president fairly regularly, said to me, Obama's administration was full of parrots. They were all people that had the same ideological and political positions. And this is an administration shaping up to be an administration with a whole load of different positions, but they have one thing in common, which is they have to stay loyal to Donald Trump. And that's this court idea. You've got all of these different people vying for the attention of one man. It's not so much ideological as a question of, as a kind of test of field team.

12:08And I think what's interesting is where does that take us? Does this, is this shaping up to be a kind of fantastically interesting team of rivals where you get different perspectives and that ultimately produces the best result and they hash it out and have arguments and they come to some kind of consensus based on great results? I'm asking that with kind of a smile in my face. Or is this a kind of middle school classroom where everyone's trying to be teacher's pet? And I think we don't know yet. We don't know what this diversity is going to lead to. What do you think of that, those two possibilities?

12:41You know, when I hear the word team of rivals, I always think of Doris Kearns Goodwin, the historian who wrote the book Team of Rivals, describing Abraham Lincoln, bringing in all of these people that thought they should have been president. and they thought he was a less than average Illinois lawyer that somehow got to the presidency and outskated them in the world of politics. And the reason why I'm bringing this up is that Lincoln had a way about him. He had a way about him of understanding and containing his ego. And he was a little bit like an orchestra conductor where he got the people in symphony with him to do the things that he wanted to do.

13:18Did he listen to the alternative points of view, Lincoln, was he keen to have those alternative points of view expressed? That was how it worked. That's what he was most famous for. And of course, there's a very famous situation where they're going to have this emancipation proclamation and nobody's really for it. And Lincoln goes around the cabinet table and he says, okay, where are the eyes? Where are the nays? He goes, okay, there are nine nays and there's one eye. And so the eyes have it. Okay. Meaning, you know, he's the one, right? And everyone laughs, of course, and finds it very funny, but he did listen.

13:50Kind of Trumpian, let's face it. That was Trumpian, but in general, he was not Trumpian. And now you've got this situation. And so I spent my whole career as a research analyst, analyzing companies and analyzing the trajectory of where things were going in the market. And we always say that past performance is not indicative of future results, but that's the stock market. In politics, if you study Donald Trump's personality. Is it really going to be that different this time? If it is, okay, that team of rivals, great, he's going to be Lincoln-esque and he's going to figure out a way to get them to sing in concert with each other, or are half of them going to be gone in the first year?

14:32And so I'm taking the latter bet on that. And so I was looking at Pete Hegseth yesterday and I said, you know, Pete's going to get in there. And I have nothing against Pete Hegseth. You know that People were accusing him of drunkenness in a restaurant that I own in New York. I went out on Twitter and said, that never happened. So let's not put fake news on the guy. Is he competent enough to be the Secretary of the Treasury? Does he have the experience enough to be Secretary of the Treasury? I don't think so. We don't know. But can I just push back there? We don't know that all of these are fake news, these allegations of drunkenness.

15:02And again, there have been, and even one Trump supporter has said to me that they have concerns about these allegations of sexual abuse against him. And I'm not saying those aren't true. I'm saying the ones that were targeted at him. I don't know that he's lily white, this guy. 100%. But I'm saying the ones that were targeted at and related to things that I know factually were not true. Right. And that's Washington. I understand the ugliness of Washington and they want to tar and feather each other. But I'm looking at Pete Hexeth and I've got him lasting one year. Can we do a little sweepstakes?

15:32Okay. The labor secretary. I have no idea who she is. Okay. Former congresswoman from Oregon, lost her run. She'll last four years, Katty Gang. I don't know who you are. You probably don't listen to our podcast, but if you are listening to our podcast, lay low, be the Ben Carson of the administration. You'll last four years. Hegseth will be gone in a year. The reason why is he's a colorful, charismatic, good-looking guy, and Donald Trump's not going to like that. It's going to wear on Donald Trump. One year, bye-bye Pete Hegseth. How many defense secretaries did Donald Trump go through in four years?

16:07Do you know the answer to that? Because I couldn't believe the answer. I I had to check it four times. He had Mattis, Esper, Miller. Miller. And two others. He had two acting ones. He had a total of five, actually. He had a total of five. Wow. He had a total of five. He had three in the last six months. Mattis and Esper, and then he had three more after Esper blew up because they kept rotating out. He wanted them to do things that they weren't willing to do. And they said, bye bye. And he kept having these active ones in place. Even after the insurrection, I think he ended up with another active one.

16:38but he had five defense secretaries in four years. Listen, I could be wrong about all this. I'm not saying I'm omniscient or even prescient, but I'm just going off of his behavior, Caddy. So yes, ideological differences, but there's one guy and there's one ideology, and that is Donald Trump. Get in his way, do something that he doesn't like. He'll start tweeting at you. He'll Star Truth, socialing you. There's somebody that disappeared. Remember I talked about JD Vance had disappeared. Vivek Ramaswamy has disappeared. Vivek Ramaswamy went into the Starship Enterprise teleporter and they beamed him somewhere.

17:21We can't find out where he landed. He didn't materialize anywhere. He's been absent for the last 15 days. He's not there in your ski resort under your desk? No, he's not. I'm not even looking for him under my desk. There was a chance that JD was there. That's why I looked for him. But I know he has disappeared. And he disappeared after Susie Wiles said, no more tweeting. You see, he was chanting this H1B or whatever the exact thing is about our immigration stuff. And they didn't like it. And they told him, you don't speak for the president. Stop tweeting. And then to cover him, they issued a blanket statement.

18:02Okay. So now I'm going to make a prediction here on our podcast. He is lobbying right now to be the Senator from the great state of Ohio. So he knows that he's been neutered. He's been decapitated by the Trump people. He stopped tweeting and he's like, okay, maybe I can back into being the Senator from Ohio where I'm a MAGA supporter. I'm pro MAGA, pro MAGA legislation. and then I can build my political career from the former J.D. Vance seat. Why am I bringing all this up? I'm bringing all this up because I'm hearing this from the MAGA people. And I'm also hearing that they're uber confident. And I can tell you one thing about the MAGA people, when they're uber confident, very bad stuff happens.

18:45Very bad stuff happens because they always overplay their hand, Katty. I'm hearing exactly the same uber confidence. It's interesting you bring that up. I heard it on a call yesterday with somebody in MAGA world. It's combined with a real kind of questioning of the media, the media's future, the need to get back at Trump's political enemies. And I think that's when it kind of starts getting into its most destructive elements. But I am definitely hearing confidence. And if you think about, if you look at somebody like talking of these, you said people's character doesn't change very much. But actually, I went back and I listened to Donald Trump talking about his first nominee for Secretary of Defense, Jim Mattis, and how proud he was to have nominated him.

19:31And he kept talking about his character and how he was the best general there was. And everybody in the Department of Defense loved him. And that seemed at that stage in 2017 to matter to Donald Trump. And maybe Donald Trump was more insecure about his role as president. He'd never been president. But there was a kind of respect for the office of the Secretary of Defense, a respect in a way for the kind of institutions, a desire to please people with this very impressive general who he had picked. And I think if you look at just that Secretary of Defense position from 2017, when you had Trump nominating somebody like Jim Mattis, who, by the way, ended up getting broad Democratic support, he was confirmed 98 to one votes in the Senate.

20:16To Pete Hegseth, who has zero Democratic support, I think it shows you the journey that Trump has come on and the confidence that Trump now has about his role, the confidence he has about the MAGA agenda, about his agenda compared to 2017. This is not somebody who he's trying to say, this is the best general there is. This is somebody who's good on television, doesn't have particularly the experience, certainly has split the Armed Services Committee and the Senate along political lines. And the Armed Services Committee was one of the very few committees, even in times of divided American politics, that really did stick together on votes.

20:58I mean, they really voted on the issues, Democrats voting for Republican proposals and vice versa. And I do think the way that this has split the Armed Services Committee and the defense community is not very good for American national securities. But what's interesting in it is it shows me Trump's own journey. And you can see it in that one nomination. You mentioned Rubio, and you mentioned Hegseth not lasting a year, I wonder whether Marco Rubio is another one that doesn't survive. I mean, the stark differences between Marco Rubio and Tulsi Gabbard. How does Marco Rubio, between Marco Rubio and Elon Musk, who I'm here in Britain, Elon Musk has been playing havoc with British politics.

21:41If you're trying to run American foreign policy as Marco Rubio is hoping that he'll have some tiny, tiny, tiny role in doing so. How do you stick around when you've got both Musk, Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth running Department of Defense? What's his role going to be there? I don't give him much more than a year. Do you? It's a different thing. Again, I don't want to push back on you because you have great insights and instincts, but it's a different thing because of Susie Wiles. Push away. If you tell me Susie Wiles is leaving, I'll tell you that he's leaving, Marco Rubio. But But if Susie Wiles is staying in that position and she's been able to work with Trump for three years now, she'll guide him.

22:21She'll guide Rubio. She likes Rubio. She wants Rubio on the team. She thinks Rubio is a sane person. He's part of the Florida. I mean, that's the other thing that's interesting about this cabinet is how many people there are from Florida. And he's a Florida ally of hers. Yes, exactly. And that's something that I think that you should look at from a perspective. It's who's with Susie and who's not with Susie. And the people that are not with Susie, bye-bye. Matt Gaetz was not with Susie, and he didn't even get to the starting block. Pam Bondi is with Susie. And so I think there's that, but I want to go back to something you said about the splits.

22:58So Obama caused that and Harry Reid caused that. And so for the historians listening to our podcast, Harry Reid is the one that Mitch McConnell said, don't change these rules in the Senate. We've got to have a two-thirds vote. If you change it to a 51-49, I promise to use that against you. And he did, of course, with the Supreme Court nominations. And Obama did it because Obama wanted Obamacare in place and the Republicans didn't want it. And he went very hard down party lines. And he set the tempo and Trump just injected himself with like anabolic steroids and went steroidal on this divide. Pete Hegseth is a, I'm shoving this up your you know what sort of a nomination.

23:46None of you are going to vote for the guy. I don't care. I want to own you because part of my platform, MAGA, is own the libs. I've got to get Joe and Mika's hair on fire. I've got to set the hair on fire of other MSNBC hosts. Alistair Campbell, I know you listen to our podcast, you still have some hair on the top of your head. Unlike Dominic Sandbrook, your hair goes on fire every time Trump does this. And he wants that. And you have to understand that. And when you do that, it's very, very hard to govern, Caddy. Very hard to govern. So this may all work out beautifully. And there's this beautiful symphony of mixtures of ideologies and stuff like that.

24:27But I predict this will be like a billiard table with Trump being the white cue ball smashing into these people. I mean, it's not just about owning the libs. The Hegseth nomination and the journey we've gone through over the last six weeks is about owning the Republicans too, is about making this too risky for them to vote for somebody that they either have ethical or ideological differences with in the case of Joni Ernst, the senator from Iowa, or they think is incompetent. But he has shown over the, this has been his test. Again, it's this court idea that we've gone back to, I don't know, the pre-French revolution, that it's the sun king.