72. Trump’s Fight Club

0:28This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

0:34Hello and welcome to the Rest is Politics US live stream for our founding members to be released as a podcast tomorrow. I'm Katty Kay. Are you going skiing, Katty Kay? I am. I'm in Colorado and we're having a little bit of dissension. I'm going to let our founding members in on the secret that we've got a little bit of tension on team Rest is Politics US this morning because Anthony was not sleeping in. He was on a phone call. Legit. I wasn't. I wasn't moisturizing. I can see the comments here. Yeah. OK, Terry, I was not moisturizing. Unfortunately, I do have another job. I can't. He doesn't realize, but I do have like a job.

1:15I have. Anyway, my family's all there. I've gone through the stage, Anthony, where, you know, when kids are teenagers and you cannot drag them out of bed to get them to hit the ski slopes in the morning on your one week of skiing holiday. and now I've got to the stage where my kids are there trying to drag me out to get onto the ski slopes. There we go. If you are a founding member joining us live, do drop us a message in the chat. We love getting your comments and your questions. And today I wanted to do something a little bit different and frame this as the kind of a conversation, Anthony, about the fight culture in American politics.

1:48Because, you know, as we're trying to make sense of what Donald Trump is doing and this kind of radical overhaul that he's doing, how much of it is about the policies themselves and how much of it is about showing his supporters that he's fighting? And we can kind of run through the things that we think are about the fight. And then what's been interesting to me over the last few days is how now Democrats feel they have to kind of respond to that fight culture with a culture of their own, their frustration at the Senate majority, leaving Chuck Schumer for not fighting hard enough. But they're trying to figure out what that actually means and what that looks like, because no surprise, Democrats are not particularly good at this fight culture.

2:30It doesn't necessarily come easily to them. So that's what I. By the way, Republicans are not good at it, Katya. I mean, well, he's team is good at it. Trump is good at it. The Republicans, he slayed every single one of them. You know, Charles Kreidhammer said in 2016 that it was the most impressive Republican field in his lifetime. It's the famous conservative pundit. He's passed now. Brilliant guy. Trump's cut through every single one of them with a butter knife. You know, he he's the fight culture. He he is the fight club. And the question is, are we in a permanent fight, Katty? Or is it a personality cult of Donald Trump that's causing this fight anxiety?

3:12I don't think we know that at the moment. I mean, we don't know whether this is. I was wondering this the other day, Anthony, you know, whether we're all just becoming meaner. I mean, not to get kind of too meta about this or psychological about this, but has social media, the polarization of America, the world we live in, the anxiety people have post COVID? I don't know if it's just made everybody a little angrier and more anxious and meaner. But let's OK, let's run through the things that I think are a bit of a fight. Did you see the ad of Mike Myers going up to join Mark Carney up in Canada?

3:50I think Canada at the moment, the sole purpose for Canada in Donald Trump's world is to exist as a fighting, sparring partner. That he is loving the idea. It's never going to happen that America. Wow, she says with confidence, it's not going to happen, I believe, that America is going to take over Canada. But this is a great fight. I mean, it's a kind of it's a sort of useless argument because there isn't an outcome in which Canada becomes the 51st state of America. And anyway, what does that even look like? American tanks rolling across the border. But he's loving that fight. He keeps raising it because it's the fight.

4:27And I would say the same about Greenland. What do you think about that one? Is that right or is that? Let's go to Mark Corny and Mike Myers for a second. Funny. It's funny because he's testing him on his ethos of being Canadian. But what isn't funny, in my opinion, is the back of Mike Myers' jersey. Did you catch that? The top of the jersey said never. And the number was 51. And so now you've galvanized a very large group of Canadians. Now, he's also weakened. I mean, I don't know who's going to win. The polls are very tight, but he's also weakened the conservative. Who was about 20 points ahead.

5:12Who was 20 points ahead. Yeah. Now it's very tight. But here's the other thing. People up there are really just getting introduced to Mark Carney. I've known Mark for 30 plus years. We were at Goldman Sachs together and, you know, Alistair and I interviewed him. He is a very tough SOB. He's also got a wit about him. He's also very colorful. He sent me a text over the weekend. He said, I'm glad that someone told the music at your 20th anniversary party to turn the volume down. Okay. He was taking a shot at me because I'm a conflict avoider, but Mark's not a conflict avoider. So he'll go into this thing, shocking people with how successful he is.

5:52He's also doing something that Trump has never had happened to him. He's not engaging Donald Trump. He's now the new prime minister. He didn't ask for a meeting. He didn't call. You know, what would the typical... I mean, he's bought into the fight culture. He's bought into the fight culture. What prime minister of Canada, newly anointed, newly elected, didn't pick up the phone and have a conversation with the president of the United States? Tell me the one. I love this. Look at this. Zeus Vaucon has put in a question, one of our founding members. In keeping with fight culture theme, Canadian election now underway, two-parter, does Trump even care, have a preference about the next Canadian government?

6:32What's Trump's goal dissing Poitiers? I don't know that Trump really cares about American, I mean, about the Canadian election. He didn't like Justin Trudeau. I don't know what his feelings are on Mark Carney. I think this is a classic Trump flex, just showing his base that he can say stuff that is outrageous. He can move the political goalposts and that he has the strength and the ability to do that. I think that's what this is about. He did say to Laura Ingraham, Cady, that he wanted Carney to win, which to me felt like the way Vladimir Putin said that he wanted Harris to win. Do you remember that?

7:10Yeah. OK, so I mean, I mean, I don't think he wants Carney to win because Carney is tough. Carney is tougher than Trudeau. I don't I don't know Paul Vieira as well as I know Carney because I got a 30 year relationship with him. But I just I just think that think about what Carney's doing. I'm engaging the Europeans. Right. You've declared war on me verbally. If you're ready for a bigger war than just a verbal war, I'm actually ready for it. And he's well resourced. Now, I know they don't have tanks and ammo or they don't have planes. But they're talking about joining the European Union security negotiations.

7:49Yeah. But they're well resourced. You've got trillions of dollars they could take out of the ground in Canada to protect themselves. So the other thing I thought made me think about this was, and this feels like, you know, red rag to a bull, poking the tiger, however you want to describe it. The news that the second lady, J.D. Vance's wife, Usha Vance, is going to go on a tourism, cultural trip to guess where? Greenland. To look at Greenland's national dog sled race. they have dog sled races in Alaska. I don't know if she's aware of this, but she could just hop up to Alaska. But she has chosen, guess where, Greenland.

8:35And she's going to go along with the National Security Advisor, Mike Woltz. This has made the Prime Minister of Greenland very unhappy. He came out over the weekend and said this felt like a very highly aggressive move from the United States. Again, I don't know where Greenland ends up. There may even be an argument. And we've said this on the podcast before. Donald Trump is raising some valid points about Greenland as those northern passageways open up and the waterways get free. The Chinese and the Russians are kind of circling that area, paying much more attention. Russia describing itself as an Arctic state.

9:12They're clearly interested in those passageways. Is Greenland too strategically important to global security to be under the rule of Denmark? These are all interesting questions. But the way that Donald Trump approaches this, with Don Jr. flying in just after the election, Usher Vance going to Greenland now, this again, it feels like a fight move. It feels like the White House saying to the MAGA base, look, we are so powerful and ready to fight for America. We've got Canada. We're going to take Greenland. It feels unnecessarily aggressive. This is not the kind of diplomacy you'd engage in if you were serious about Greenland.

10:02OK, so let me ask you a question. If President Trump went to Denmark and said, listen, all those things you just said about the Arctic and the passageways, and we need to put the U.S. Navy up there to defend NATO, to defend Denmark and the U.S. national security interests, and we're recommending that we have at least one, possibly two more military installations in Greenland, what would the prime minister of Denmark say? Well, the Prime Minister of Denmark has made it pretty clear that they want to handle this in a way that de-escalates the conflict with the United States. She's been I know that the Danes are taking this seriously and they are preparing military options around to fortify Greenland.

10:53But she's also said, look, we were open to the kinds of negotiations that America could be talking about. So I think she would be she would talk about it. But it's the it's the it's the going to DEFCON 5 that in a way hurts America's ambitions here because it puts Denmark in a position of having to say we don't want this is now we've gone into a kind of zero sum negotiation that a win for you is a loss for us. And there's no intermediary position. OK, so so what's the purpose of Donald Trump doing that? that of uh of sending us avance no no of going to defcon 5 with the danes and with the canadians and the defcon 5 i think again it's a little bit like the canada thing it's breaking the rules it's showing that he is an extraordinary politician who will do extraordinary things that other republicans are afraid have been afraid to do or other politicians have been afraid to do okay i i i i guess i mean i mean what do you think well i i think you're right but i i just don't understand the strategy like if let's let's talk moderation for one second if the outcome is he's upset with us mca a deal that he struck and he wants to go crazy with these tariffs to threaten everybody and then land a better USMCA deal for the United States and then declare victory, is Woody's doing a good strategy or are there just too many sore feelings?

12:31I mean, why not just pick up the phone and say, hey, how are you? Can we talk? You know, I don't like these five things in the deal. Before this gets ugly, could you and I sit down and renegotiate these things. Give me a win here and I'll take care of you on some other thing in Canada. Why not do that? You know, I mean, to what you're saying, look, I think a lot of people are trying to, you and I included, understand what's happening, right? So many of these things and the other things that are fights, I would put into that bracket, the law firms, very unusual. It's a fight tactic. Columbia University, it's a fight tactic.

13:09Penn University, it's a fight tactic. there are a bunch of things I think that he's doing to show that he can fight and that he has power. But I had a very interesting, I heard an interesting news from a reporter who's been out in China who was saying, look, the Chinese are just falling over themselves laughing at this, at the way that Donald Trump is weakening America. And one of the big things he's doing is weakening these relationships, this very powerful Western alliance that the United States had with Canada, that the United States had with Europe, including Greenland, he's weakening them.

13:46He's doing China's job for it, not to mention the stock market, questions about the value of the dollar. There's investment in health research, healthcare research. They can't believe that he's making it so easy for them. And I wonder when we're trying to kind of ascribe a strategy to this, Maybe it's just not very smart politics. I mean, maybe that's what this Canada stuff is. It's just not. OK, but let me be the 4D chess master that Donald Trump sees himself as. OK, we're going to channel the Bobby Fischer of Donald Trump. I think he's there saying to people that we've been abused and we've been mistreated.

14:31Right. Which he believes. I'm going to flex on you to show you that America is back. And I'm going to I were respected now. Yeah. And this is this is something that his base really likes caddy. Yeah. And so I think these things are all base moves. But I, you know, listen, there's been leakage from the White House that April 2nd, they're going to modify things. OK, the market is up today and was up yesterday because the Kevin Hassers inside the White House are winning out from the Peter Navarros. And Trump really doesn't like the stock market going down. He doesn't like those weekend calls from the CEOs when he's in that lonely 132 room mansion.

15:21We're going to take a quick break and we will come back and talk about how the Democrats are responding to this fight culture.

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16:41This is what has been interesting. This is why I wanted to talk about this today. If you look at what's happened over the weekend, Anthony, and these huge rallies that Bernie Sanders, and we spoke about them last week, but they've got much bigger. Bernie Sanders and AOC are getting out west. So they did a rally in Arizona where they got 15 ,000 people. That is slightly more than we got at the O2 Stadium. I hate to say that. But then they were in Denver, Colorado, and they doubled our numbers at the O2 Stadium. They got 30 ,000 people. And it's this talk called fight oligarchy. And people are queuing for a long time.

17:25Now, I don't know. Bernie Sanders has said he doesn't want to run for the presidency. I think AOC, it would be hard to imagine her running for the presidency. But what they're tapping into is, and both of them are talking about when they're up on stage, is this idea that working, it's about the working class. It's not even it's the economy stupid. It's about the working class stupid and that the working class is being left behind. I mean, Bernie Sanders is saying the same things at these rallies that he's been saying for decades. It's not that he's changed. It's that he seems to have met a moment.

17:59America seems to have been has kind of come to him or not even I don't know if they're all Democrats that are turning out. But because he we know he has cross appeal with Trump voters. But Democrats, as the Democrats and we've spoken about this on other podcasts, are kind of totally floundering and in the wilderness. Here are these two people, not even in an election cycle. This is not this is these are kind of midterm numbers or general election number that people get for rallies. And rallies don't always signify change. We know that. But it's just interesting to see them out there and talking the way they are and taking the fight to the Republicans and to what Trump is doing and to what Elon Musk is doing in a way that is sort of coherent and consistent, whilst other Democrats are splintered and looking at what Chuck Schumer did in caving to the White House and keeping the government open.

18:56and how angry that has made a lot of Democrats. And Democrats seem to be saying, you know, there are the Republicans fighting. We need a fight of our own. And there's all this talk around about is it time for the Democrats to have their own Tea Party movement? I don't know that that would be a good idea because movements based on anger rather than ideology tend to become the monster that you can't control anymore. But it was just interesting to me to see those rallies this weekend. And I was wondering what you thought about that idea of whether the kind of Democratic base wants more fight than the leadership is giving it.

19:30Yeah, and I think you could add Chuck Schumer to that, right? They feel like Chuck Schumer capitulated. I thought he was a pragmatist, but they think he capitulated. But I guess, Katie, is that a winning strategy? Those are two very hard left people. They're going to give the fight. But is that where America is right now? You've looked at the crosstabs. You've looked at the exit polling. Is America going to go for the hard left candidate? No, I mean, there's interesting polling out just a week or two ago showing that actually the number of Democrats who want the party to adopt more moderate policies has increased something like 11 points from two years ago to 45 percent.

20:16and the number who want more liberal policies has declined. So the polling would suggest that the Democratic voters, and this is why this style thing is interesting, they want more moderation, but they want it delivered with a fight. It's almost like they're saying we want angry moderation and that what Trump is doing with the fighting and the anger has kind of set the tone for the general political discourse. And now Democrats are thinking, we want more moderate policies. Although I do think Bernie's onto something with the oligarchy idea, and the rich getting richer, and the corruption of billionaires like Elon Musk, and the working class, and we've spoken about this wage disparities and income inequality, and the fact that America has to do something about that.

21:11But they just want somebody to stand up and fight for them. And that's what they feel they're missing in people like Chuck Schumer. Okay. But to me, and I respect all of that, but I don't think that's the winning strategy. Maybe I'm wrong and maybe I'm out to lunch, but I'm looking at the data. One of the big things, remember, the Republicans, Donald Trump won 54 % of the white women and 46 % of the overall women. And in the exit polling, they were voting for more moderation. They were voting for more moderation in the culture. They were suggesting that they were voting for their husbands and the young sons that live with them.

21:59I don't know, Katya. I get the fight, but I'm wondering if the bark is up the wrong tree. But I don't think it's the tree. I don't know how far we can go with the analogy, but I'm not sure it's the tree that matters. It's the style of combat that is interesting. And I just don't know that Democrats do fight very well. Bernie does it pretty well, and has done it consistently because it's authentic to him, right? But for some Democrats to suddenly become and I've had, I was texting with a Democratic senator over the weekend saying, you know, what does this even mean that they want more fight? And he kind of texted back and said, yeah, I don't I don't know what that means for us.

22:42We're not in power. How do we fight? You know, what does that look like? And I think that in a sense, that's the sort of essence of it is that the voters who are feeling a bit lost and bruised and they see the level of energy on the Republican side and in MAGA world. And they're thinking, why don't we have maybe it's fight is the wrong word. Maybe it's just energy, energy and noise and action. And they don't feel they've got that. I'll just give you an axiomatic observation from the last 10 years based on my field observation, what my binoculars become more like Trump, lose to Trump. Right. That's Marco Rubio, you're orange and you have little hands, lose to Trump.

23:30You're a sniveling liar. That's what Ted Cruz called him in the final gas of the 2016 primary season. Donald Trump, you're a sniveling liar. OK, fight like Trump, become like Trump, lose to Trump. And the only person that beat Donald Trump was Joe Biden. And that's when he had more wits about him. And it was a little it was a calmer, more moderate message. And so, yes, I hear you. Trump is a fighter. People may want fighters, but I don't really think they want fighters. I think they want winners. I think they want to win. I'm just wondering if putting the fight in the way they're doing it is a winning strategy.

24:09I think they'd be better served. Directionally, again, my opinion, directionally, here's what we stand for. This is how we differentiate from Donald Trump. We do like certain things that he's doing, frankly, but this is how we would do them. Bernie Sanders said that in an interview this weekend. He said he thought, but he recognized that Trump had done some good things. He said, stopping the flow of fentanyl. You can't have this kind of illegal immigration coming across the border. He actually gave. He likes tariffs. I thought, yeah, he's a populist, really. I mean, if they had a, and he's not, as we've said before, Bernie Sanders is not woke.

24:46He's not on the cultural left of the party, and it's worth remembering he's an independent. Here's a question on this from Debnik. Should the Democrats call themselves something else? It's a good question at this moment, Debnik, because there are some independents who are saying, actually, you know what should happen is that this is the time for more people to run as independents and side with the Democrats when it suits them. I don't know if that helps the Democrats get, I don't know if it helps get MAGA out of power. I don't know if it helps Republicans get out of power, but it's something I'm starting to hear more of, that actually the call should be for more people like Bernie Sanders, Angus King, who's also an independent senator, who can run as independents, aren't beholden to any party, and get away from this idea of kind of people being who are disillusioned with establishment parties that don't do anything for them, but then side with Democrats, you know, when they want to.

25:50I think that's a it's a it's something we might hear more of. Another question. This is a great one. This goes back to our first half. This is from John Cannon. OK, this is for you. Former director of communications to the White House, Mr. Scaramucci. Okay. My question to you from John Cannon. Trump is now the Danish prime minister. What does he do? I see. This is a central question. I'm in the Carney camp. I'm in the Carney camp. I would disengage. I think Carney has disengaged from Trump. I would go to my allies, other people in Europe. I would go to my constituents and I would fortify. Unless you think he's coming with the military.

26:42If he's coming with the military, I'll just tell you as a market participant, he'll crash the U.S. stock market if he does that. Because it's one thing to flex verbally and to sound rhetorically like a moron. But it's another thing if you're going to take the step to destroy the post-World War II order. But if I'm the Danish prime minister, I'm ignoring him. And I think you are the best served. If the Irish prime minister tried to do this in the Oval Office, I think was done successfully, you ignore him. You take a step back and you just ignore him and go about your day. And I think if Carney wins the election, he's called this quick election, must see some positives in the polling data for April 28th.

27:28He's calling the election. And I think if Carney does the technocratic thing, which is to ignore him, get more interprovincial trading going among the provinces of Canada, unify the provinces, I think he's going to have a good term. I think, you know, weirdly, Trump will have strengthened and unified Canada. He will have weirdly strengthened and unified Europe. And I think he will have on the margin heard the U.S. Yeah, I think, you know, there was an interesting, I don't know if you saw this over the weekend, the interview with Steve Witkoff, who is the kind of chief Russia-Ukraine negotiator.

28:10Terrible. Who was so rude. I mean, first of all, I mean, the guy knows better, but was reciting all of the Putin talking points about Ukraine not being a real country. Can I pop quiz you? Can I pop quiz you? Do you know who Charlie McCarthy is? No. OK, so Charlie McCarthy, for the Americans listening in, was a ventriloquist dummy. Right. And it sat on the lap of the ventriloquist. I see where you're going. Okay. Wyckoff, I mean, what is the guy doing? And then I got my buddies on Wall Street telling me, oh, no, he's got to be balanced and measured because he's a diplomat. Do you balance and measure by reciting?