6. DONALD TRUMP FOUND GUILTY

26:30Something is not working in American democracy at the moment. The organs of American democracy, the structures of American democracy, the Supreme Court, the Electoral College, Congress, gerrymandering districts, they're not working to further American democratic aims or even the will of the American people. So something has to change. I'm going to get a whole load of constitutional lawyers screaming at me because this is heresy. This is heresy. I realize it's heresy, but something's not working. I am in agreement with you. And I want to just back up for a second because I want to provide some context for people.

27:06We have 27 amendments to the US Constitution. And so just for viewers and listeners, the founders set up the Constitution. They said, okay, listen, this is a living document. We know it's going to have to change generationally. Your iPhone went from iPhone 1 to iPhone 15 in 15 years. And we're going to have a living document. We're going to make changes to the document. The first 10 amendments are going to be the Bill of Rights, and these are going to be your freedoms for freedom of religion, right to privacy, all of these sorts of things. And then we got into the Civil War. And even though Lincoln freed the slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation, we had to have an amendment to the Constitution because slavery was allowed in the original documents.

27:45And so we amended the Constitution. And here's my point. We have 27 amendments to that Constitution. The Constitution, the document's about 240 years old. You're getting an amendment roughly once every eight years. And yet in the United States, because of the great polarity, we have not amended that document since 1993. 27th Amendment was a procedural amendment, but the big amendment, Cady, was in 1965. Okay, that was the last one. That's 59 years ago. That's the Voting Rights Act, which gave more freedom to African Americans to vote in the United States. And so why am I bringing this up? This document is supposed to be a living document.

28:22The United States is no longer amending it. They could amend it and say no more gerrymandering. And so for UK listeners, What does that mean? I'm in my district. I don't like certain people. I don't think they're going to vote for me. I figure out a way to cut out their households for my district. Which, by the way, in the UK, this map of districts is drawn up by civil servants, not by politicians. In America, it's drawn up by politicians. It's drawn up by politicians. And this is not favoring democracy because what ends up happening, I submit to you, are we in a real democracy? If the politicians are picking the voters, I thought the voters were supposed to pick the politicians.

28:57And so when I was growing up, these districts looked like geometric shapes that you and I could recognize from ninth grade geometry. Today, they look like jigsaw puzzles. Okay. You know this, right? And so this is unfair, right? And so that's number one, we have to fix that. And then number two, the court has now become dangerous because of the sclerosis of change in our living documents. And so we got to fix one or the other, either reform the documents, make the situation flatter and fairer and less of an oligarchic duopoly, i.e. Bobby Kennedy can't get on. He's being blocked in certain states.

29:36He can't get on the ballot. Okay. So either fix that or add people to the court to liquidate the potential extremists on the court. Okay. So now I've got everybody upset, but anyway, I just wanted to point that out. No, I think it's a very good point. I think the founding fathers were more flexible and more humble and realized they'd written something that would need to change and that should change. And at the moment, it's not able to because of the partisan nature of American politics. But if we expanded the Supreme Court or did some kind of reform there, if it unblocked the system, I think that would be a good thing.

30:07Okay, we're going to move on to talk about domestic policy under Trump. But I have one question for you before we go on this. Do you think it's possible that a Republican Senate will ever approve a Democratic nominee for the Supreme Court or vice versa? By the way, for our viewers around the world and the states, Supreme Court justices used to be confirmed by about 90 % of the Senate and now is strictly on partisan lines. I wonder if the days of being able to confirm a justice from the other side are possible anymore. Well, so just very famously, Justice Antonin Scalia, the first Italian-American to be added to the Supreme Court, Teddy Kennedy, then Senator Kennedy, voted for him.

30:51People said, well, he's against everything you're for. He goes, hey, I got all these Italians in the North End. If I don't vote for this guy, they're going to go crazy on me. And of course, my mother was cooking sauce, meatballs, all kinds of stuff that we finally had an Italian American on the Supreme Court. Different time in America, 99 to 0 confirmed. Now it's heresy. If you support a justice nominated by the other party, it's heresy. You could get primaried by the radical parts of your party if that were to happen. And so I think the answer to the question is no, Caddy, but I will say this.

31:26What if it happens in the first year. What if I'm the Democratic president with a Republican-controlled Senate? I nominate somebody, what are they going to do? They're going to leave that position open for three years? Think about what they're doing to the system now. They've lost this common values. They've lost this common set of civic virtues where they were allowing each other to have their way, which is exactly what the founders wanted. The founders in the Federalist Papers, Hay and Hamilton write about the need for consensus and compromise, which is why they set the documents up the way they did.

32:01Yeah. And now we have a kind of a system that was built on and for compromise, living in a world where compromise is a dirty word. We have a presidential system acting like a parliamentary system. Democrats have tried in the past to use Supreme Court, though, as a voting issue. Hillary Clinton did it in 2016, warning that if Donald Trump was elected, then the Supreme Court would swing to the right, and it didn't seem to rally votes for her. So let's see if Joe Biden raises this on the campaign trail. He may do. He may say, look, if you elect Donald Trump and there are any more liberal justices, one of them is elderly and is reported to have some health problems.

32:38If we lose another liberal justice, we're going to get an even more conservative Supreme Court. He may try and raise that on the campaign trail. I'm not sure that it's going to be a massive vote decider either way. Expect to hear more about the Supreme Court during American elections because they are going to play this bigger role. The closer American elections are, the more court cases we're going to have, the more of those cases are going to end up in the Supreme Court. One final thought, it's worth remembering, this is a conservative court with conservative members appointed by Donald Trump.

33:05But in 2020, when presented with election challenges by lawyers on Trump's side, this Supreme Court repeatedly sided against Donald Trump. So the court is capable of looking at election cases and saying Donald Trump did not have a leg to stand on legally and the election was free and fair and they decided with Joe Biden on that. We're going to take a quick break. Afterwards, we'll be back to look at more of Trump's domestic policy. Ties in a little bit because we're going to look at the Department of Justice, but what Donald Trump's plans are if he gets elected to a second term.

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35:43Welcome back to The Rest is Politics US. It's me, Anthony Scaramucci. And me, Katty Kay. We are going to talk in this half of the show about a little bit more on domestic politics. I want to do this, Anthony, partly because in Washington, as you know, everybody's obsessed with the horse race, right? It's all about the polls and who's up and who's down and who's going to win and who's not going to win. And there's not actually, I think, ever enough talk about actual policies. So we hear Donald Trump, he's pretty open about what he wants to do. And one of the things that people on the Democratic side are most alarmed about when they talk about Donald Trump signaling the end of American democracy as we know it is not really that anyone thinks he's going to run for a third term or he's going to make this a full-blown dictatorship.

36:30It's that he is going to exert a change in the American civil service that will make it much more bound to the president. So Donald Trump will basically have much more control over organizations, agencies like the Department of Justice, the Federal Communications Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, the FBI. And that will make the American government, including the American Civil Service, more pro-MAGA and will bend to the will of Donald Trump. He will try to do in the United States a little bit what Viktor Orban has done in Hungary by putting his people into the courts and his people into the media.

37:17And he's pretty open about this. I mean, he has said at one rally after another, he says he wants to demolish the deep state. And his supporters say that it's going to be groundbreaking. They're going to clean out all of what they call the corrupt actors in the government apparatus and end all the kind of woke appointments and put in their own people. Do you think we're looking at a big change in the way American democracy will work if Donald Trump gets in for a second term? Okay, so my problem is obviously people think I'm biased against Mr. Trump and they think it's personal and all this other stuff.

37:53But it's really not personal. It's just an objective observation of what he's doing. and he is threatening the system. And so if you read the Heritage Foundation plan, the 1 ,000 pages of things that they want to do to liquidate what they call the deep state. This is the conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation, that's come up with this plan, Trump 2025. Yes. So let me give some context here. Trump announces he's running for president. The Republicans think it's a joke. They think he's not going to win. They make everybody sign a pledge that they have to support the nominee. They don't think it's going to be him.

38:29He signs the pledge. He becomes the nominee. Okay. He doesn't even know what the deep state is at this point. Trust me, I know because I worked on the campaign. But the narrative of what the deep state is, just for our listeners outside the United States, is the Steve Bannon right-wing Breitbart, this conservative newsletter that goes out and this blog, is that there's a very large group of people that work inside the United States government that are by and large liberals. They have permanent jobs and there's actually even a union associated with them. And the reason they have permanent jobs is that there's a lot of things that happen in the government that aren't political and are not partisan.

39:06And so they want these people to have some security to their jobs, depending on the political whims. And when I got to the White House and I had my first intelligence briefing caddy, the analyst said to me that there are workhorses in the government and there are show horses in the government. And you're going to learn very quickly who the workhorses are in the government. And so right now we have at the civil servant level, to equate it to the UK, we have 2.9 million people that work in the United States government as civil servants. We have over 12 million people that are in the government if you take it out to the military, the Pentagon, armed services, everything.

39:42It's literally the largest, most powerful entity in the world. And so the question is, do you want somebody that's elected for four years to totally dismantle and disrupt that. The right wing wants that. But if you are a traditionalist and you are a believer in the American system, you actually don't want that. And there were reasons why it was set up this way. It was to prevent partisans from meddling in the day-to-day affairs that have to happen in the government. And I'll say one last thing, those people in the government who are permanent in the government, they view the politicians, the elected leaders as the Christmas help.

40:20Okay. You know how you get the Christmas help to come into the department store for two weeks? Okay. These are temporary people that are showboating around Washington. They're the holiday surge. They call them the Christmas help. So I'm showing my biases here because I am a traditionalist. I love my country and I love the system of government. I love the flatness. Okay. What's different from Europe in this country is there's really no power structure at the top, it's totally diffused, a result of which people like me that grow up in a middle-class environment or low middle-class environment can rise.

40:55Or to quote Abraham Lincoln, two weeks after the Emancipation Proclamation, he rendered it, he wrote in his diary, there is no permanent labor class in the United States. And in order to keep that going, you got to get nonsense like Donald Trump out of the mix. And he can do a lot of damage to this infrastructure through executive order. And I would encourage people, we don't have time on this podcast, but go read the things from the Heritage Foundation. They're a very organized group of people. Trump is running a very organized campaign. These people believe this nonsense and they want to execute it on the American government.

41:30Yeah, I think, I mean, that is worth pointing out. And you mentioned the 2016 campaign, casting no aspersions on your good self, Antonis Garamucci, but it was a little bit chaotic, right? They were not ready for prime time. I said this to the Senate Intelligence Committee when I had to spend all this money to go down there and I got subpoenaed. I said, guys, we weren't even colluding with ourselves. How the hell are we going to collude with the Russians? Steve Bannon and I were in a food fight almost every day on that campaign. And I know because I was speaking to people on the other side in the Biden campaign and they were saying, we don't understand it.

42:04We're drawing up all of these documents and we're drawing up all of these transition papers to help them understand how stuff works in all the different branches of government and nobody's reading any of them. They felt a little bit like their nose was put at a joint because they'd done their homework and the teacher wasn't reading the homework. But they were pretty surprised at how unprepared the Trump people were when they came in. If you think that is the replica for what's happening this time around, you're very wrong. This is a much more disciplined, much more focused campaign. They are drawing up policy papers on everything from abortion to trade to communications regulation.

42:38And there is this plan known as Schedule F, if you want to sound kind of, you know, super geeky about American politics at the moment, you flash around the word Schedule F a lot, which is the way you would make civil servants, you would take them out of the category of being lifelong civil servants who had permanent jobs, and you would make them at-will jobs. And if you do that to hundreds of thousands of civil servants, this is the rationale of the Trump campaign, you can get rid of all of these people who are permanent employees and who are blocking the kind of MAGA agenda. And you can put in their place effectively hundreds of thousands of political appointees who are allies of Donald Trump's, loyalists to his cause, and who will allow them to move much faster to make, for example, the Department of Justice more beholden to Donald Trump.

43:35So he could, as he has said he wants to do, launch investigations against Joe Biden, for example, or launch investigations against his political enemies, or get rid of the lawsuits that are pending against him. He has talked about wanting to put more Trump allies, for example, into the Federal Communications Commission, which is the organization that controls the media. Some Trump allies have said that there are left-wing television outlets here, like MSNBC, that he would like to effectively get rid of so that they don't have hosts talking about Trump in a negative way on television. So, there are things that you can see that he wants to do with this Schedule F.

44:17My question is, even though I keep hearing that this is a much more organized, disciplined campaign, this would be a massive change to the way that American democracy has worked. And it wouldn't just last for this four years. It would potentially work. I mean, then a Democratic president could come in and do exactly the same thing. Do you think they could actually pull it off? Do you think they can make the American professional civil service a political body? They can do a lot of damage, Cady. They have a lot of things they can do through executive power. He's a norm pusher. Okay. So he will push the norms.

44:51If you're, as he's doing with the immunity case, the founders are like, okay, there'll be gentle men and maybe possibly a hundred, 200 years from now, gentle women that are heads of state. They're not going to be sociopathic, crazy people that are heads of state. So they didn't get that right because we got one and he will push the norms. And by the way, if he gets elected, we'll be doing this podcast, okay? And I'll probably have a voice modulator and I'll be like in an undisclosed location. We're going to be in Oslo. We've already had offers to go and host the show in Oslo. I might be in Oslo.

45:24I'll likely be in Antarctica. Maybe Trump will make me the ambassador to Antarctica. I have good rapport with the penguins down there. But he's coming for people like me because I am a person that speaks out against him. And Bannon has already said he's got his list. They're ready to go. That is un-American, by the way, as you know. That is un-American. I realize that. And it's kind of super weird that we're even having this conversation because I've now covered six American elections and I have never heard Republicans, when a Democrat gets elected, say to me, oh my God, this Democratic president's going to come after me or vice versa.

45:55I did not hear the John Kerry people in 2004 when George Bush was elected, re-elected, saying, oh my God, now the Bush people are going to come after me because I opposed him. This conversation isn't a normal American political conversation to be having. When you say, and I hear other people who have opposed Trump say the same thing to me, that he's going to come after me, what do you actually mean? How would he come after? And would it be Trump and the organs of government coming after you? Or kind of separately, would it be like Trump supporters going rogue? So if he's capable of fully corrupting the Justice Department, as he's saying, and he's told some of his defense attorneys he wants to use the FBI as a Gestapo, they will do certain things.

46:42I'll be under IRS audit. They'll view all documents. Yeah, tax audits. They'll accuse me of fraud. Trump is very upset that he's been accused of business fraud. And so he'll go out and accuse people of business fraud, whether it's specious or otherwise. It'll tie you up in the court system. It'll hurt your reputation, hurt your business. If he's capable of weaponizing the Department of Justice, and it's an interesting thing because the executive branch controls the Department of Justice, but there was a gentleman or gentlewoman's agreement that even though it's controlled by a Republican or a Democrat, it's justice.

47:21There are two scales. We're going to make sure that this is nonpartisan. It's an infliction of justice that's nonpartisan. It's the immortal words of Cicero from 2 ,200 years ago. We are slaves to the law in order to be free. So no one is above the law and we'll treat it with objectivity and impartiality. Trump is saying, no, I don't want to do that. I'm going to slant this to favor me. Okay. But these are all problems. No big deal. Of course, I'll be living here in America, part of the healthy vocal opposition. But if I have to move to Oslo, you can find me in Oslo. The other thing is, we have to put this out there, if he is convicted in this current case, and he is a felon, they will be running advertising from now until election day that he's a convicted felon and you have a convicted felon on the ballot.

48:12And I am telling you, Caddy, I know the country reasonably well. I traveled all over this country with Donald Trump and I travel for business. This would be a nightmare for the Trump campaign because they got to get some of these independents and they're already under the gun with the women's rights issues. They've ceded the women's rights issues to the Democrats. Now they're telling you that we're going to remove Hispanics that we think are illegal and they may or may not be legal. Maybe there's someone speaking out against Trump and they decide, well, you know what? We're going to put him in the illegal bucket.

48:43Let's get him deported. This is so dangerous. He has created a Trump vaccine for all of us, where our immune systems are now down from all the outrageous stuff. If you were in 2004 and John Kerry was talking like this, there are World War II veterans that were still alive. They'd be hitting every alarm bell in the system. But it's now 2024, and we have 10 years of him talking like this, and we're used to it, and we don't even overreact to it. But he's got a group of very serious people that want to work with him to affect this. And that's the danger, Katty. Yeah. And people who felt they were thwarted back in 2016, that they came in with this agenda that they had that was particularly around immigration, right?

49:33And then they kept finding that they were hitting up against a civil service that, as you said earlier, they said was left-leaning, deliberately trying to stop Donald Trump, didn't like Donald Trump. And this time around, they're not going to, they say they've identified the roadblocks to their agenda and they're going to get rid of them. And I actually think another thing that will be a problem for him electorally is that actually as you go around, these civil servants, of course, even though they always describe it as draining the Washington swamp, they're all around the country. I mean, people work for the federal government in every state of the United States.

50:06And I can't believe that if they get to hear about these plans and start focusing on these plans, that they're going to love those plans very much because it could put their jobs at risk. Do you think there is any justification in the idea that the Trump having, you know, from what you saw in government that the Trump campaign puts out that the American civil service is left leaning and opposed to a conservative agenda? Do you think that's, is there validity in that? Yeah, I think there is validity in that. Yes, I do think that the civil service is left leaning. And I'll just put this to you this way.

50:41If you make a decision, if your career ambition is to go work for the government, you generally believe that the government is there to help people and solve problems. That's a left leaning proposition. You know, Ronald Reagan said in his first inaugural address that the most dangerous words in life is, I am from the government and I'm here to help, right? That's a right-leaning position. And so generally, if you're going to go work for the government, you're probably center left, but you're probably a moderate at the end of the day. And so, you know, whether you like it or not, right or left in the country, you need these people and you need these people to have stability and security in their jobs while the elites are circulating at the top.

51:24Yeah, and they bring with them technical expertise. They're not beholden to any one president. It minimizes, I think, the risk of political corruption that, you know, if your boss comes along and tells you to do something that is stupid or illegal or impractical, you can turn around and say, no, that doesn't make sense. Whereas if you're kind of political appointee, you're going to suck up to your boss, right? As somebody has said, a conservative actually said, it's going to create a government of suck ups. But the plans are there and it's a much more organized campaign. Okay, before we go, I have a question that came in to me from the young British actor Lewis Landau, who has asked, what is the history of non-partisanship in American politics and why does it now appear dead?

52:09It's a great question. I'll be brief. And I would ask Lewis to look at three different cases. The first case I think is most inspiring to me is Wendell Wilkie. Wendell Wilkie in 1940 ran against Franklin Roosevelt. Of course, Roosevelt was breaking George Washington's tradition and running for a third term. Wilkie lost the election. He went to the Oval Office to visit with President Roosevelt. And he said, I'm here to help you. You're my president. So Roosevelt said, I need three things. I need you to support the war, even though your fellow Republicans are isolationists. And I need you to help me put down the first America First movement, which was started by Huey Long and Charles Lindbergh.

52:48And imagine if Kevin McCarthy had done that for Joe Biden. Okay. Number two is Arthur Vandenberg was against the New Deal. But when the war ended, he went to Harry Truman and said, I'm here to help you build the architecture for peace in the post-World War II era, which is the Truman Doctrine. And lastly, when things got miserable in our country, Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, they didn't like each other and they were adversaries and mudslingers, but they did get together in the 1994, 1995 time period to reframe the budget. And the budget was actually working, Caddy, back then. And we ran a budget surplus at the end of 2000 as a result of that bipartisan work.

53:30It's not working today because of what we talked about earlier. They have an oligarchic system now where in order to stay in power, they have to play to the extremes. And we have to figure out through a constitutional amendment or bringing in apathetic voters to liquidate the current oligarchy. We have a duopoly in the country, have an oligarchic duopoly in the country that we have to figure out a way to bust to make it fairer and more democratic again. Yeah, I think that's exactly what has happened. A very quick pop quiz for you. I'm so sorry to do this to you, Anthony. I know how much you love them.

54:05And it's triggered by Lewis's question. In the mid-1980s, there were 144 House Republicans who were less conservative than the most conservative Democrat. How many House Democrats were less liberal than the most liberal Republicans? First of all, that's like even a tongue twister. Okay. So you've - Do you even know what I'm talking about? Yeah, I do. And you've exposed my low IQ as I'm going to try to fumble my way through answering this question. But I'm going to say that it was roughly symmetrical. I'm going to say it was more or less equal. Am I right? There were only 52 House Democrats who were less liberal than the most liberal Republicans.

54:47I think what this shows you is how much actually it's the Republican Party that's really changed. If you look at all of those, all of the graphs, yes, the Democratic Party has become more liberal, but it is the Republican Party that's really become more conservative. Lewis, thank you for sending in the question. Keep them coming, everybody. That is it for today. We will be back next Friday with more American politics and elections and what's going on in this extraordinary country. Thank you guys so much for joining us and we hope to see you again next week.