87. How The Saudi Crown Prince Played Trump

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1:49Hello and welcome to The Rest is Politics US. I'm Katty Kay. And I'm Anthony Scaramucci. I'm wearing my 17th Superman shirt of the year purchased from Amazon. And by the way, just a little promotion. July 11th is a very big day for Superman fans, Katty Kay. Not that you're necessarily a Superman fan, but I just wanted to point that out. Do you wear the T-shirt because you think you are Superman? Because that's what I've always assumed, that men who go around wearing Superman T-shirts are trying to kind of tell us something. Please, I wish. I wish. I'm not on testosterone replacement. I'm just here doing my best at age 61.

2:25I don't think I'm Superman. I just happen to be a Superman fan, Caddy Kay. Okay. By the way, congratulations on Elon Musk, Caddy. Yes. I just want to point out to everybody, this was a Caddy Kay idea to do special programming, a four-part episode on Elon Musk. I think it's actually five parts it's going to be because the story is so gripping that we couldn't end. Yes, before we get started, we do want to remind you that the first episode of our Elon Musk miniseries is out now. So if you want to hear the whole series as it drops and get the whole full crazy story of Musk's journey from tech titan to political power breaker, just head to the rest is politics.

3:08US.com to become a founding member. And if that's not enough to convince you, you can listen to a little taster of episode one for free by going to the rest is politics. politicsus.com slash musk. So it's all there. We had great fun making it. It's a story you might think you know, but I promise you the details of Elon Musk's life and the way he thinks and the way he has operated astonished both of us. So go to the restispoliticsus.com and then you can get the series. But in this episode, we're going to do something slightly different. We're going to focus on all of the diplomacy that's been going on this week in both the first half and the second half, because there is so much of it.

3:51We're going to look at President Trump in Saudi Arabia, in Qatar, in the UAE, at the investment forum, his relationship with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the diplomacy behind all of this, because it's been a frenetic week in diplomacy and how much of this is actually producing results and how much isn't. And then after the break, we'll have a quick reality check on who is actually benefiting from all of this, where's the money coming from? And perhaps just as importantly, where is it going to? And yes, we will talk about the plane and what we think about that. But first of all, I had some very interesting conversations this week, Anthony, about the President's trip with Middle East watchers and with former members of the CIA who have been Middle East experts for a long time and people who have been actually pretty critical of President Trump, but who looked at some of the things that are happening in the Middle East this week and thought, actually, you know what?

4:49Some of this is exactly what Joe Biden would have done. It looks more like conventional American foreign policy. And here is Donald Trump getting back reengaged with the world on multiple fronts. And we can run through the list of this very busy week on the diplomatic front. And that what he has been doing in the Middle East is actually pretty good for America and pretty good for the region. We'll talk about the possible corruption side of it and the money side of it in the second half. But what's your read on what you've seen so far in these palaces that I know you have been to with the people, many of whom you've actually met in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states?

5:28Well, I mean, we were talking about Superman earlier, but there's actually a villain in Batman. For people that don't know the Batman lore, there's a villain called Two-Face. And so one side of his face is perfectly handsome, and the other side of his face was disfigured in a sulfuric acid accident, and he has split personality. And I think Donald Trump is actually our Two-Face president because there's a part of what he's doing - What star sign does that make him? I know you're being on star signs. Yeah, he's a Gemini. He's Gemini. He fits his star. He fits his star sign perfectly. He's born on the 14th of June, 1946.

6:05He's going to be 79 years old. And so I always try to be as objective as possible on this podcast. So let's state some obvious things. For a 79-year-old, he has tremendous energy. He flew to Rome, came back, wasn't wearing the right suit, probably helped the Pope get elected. But now he flew over to the Middle East. He's a vigorous 79-year-old, and you got to give him credit for that. He's got a lot of energy. But that star sign, you have two people inside one body, and he's manifesting that right now on the world stage. So what is he doing that I like? He's talking about a foreign policy renovation for the United States.

6:47And he's saying something that's actually true that we have to accept. The UK accepts this. I think we have to accept this in the United States that our interventionist policies born from the Gulf Wars, really the second Gulf War, have failed in the Middle East. The nation building was nation destruction, 20-year war in Afghanistan, the longest war in US history, not a winning war for the American people. And a lot of Americans are very dissatisfied with the money blown that could have been spent on education, infrastructure, deficit repayment, et cetera. So his speech to me, I thought was great.

7:26I'm just going to be very honest with people. He talked about re-engineering the way America thinks about the Middle East and trying to foment peace and prosperity. And he threw an olive branch out to the Iranians. And by the way, so much so that Leon Panetta, who's probably 87 now, former chief of staff for Clinton, former defense secretary, CIA director, praised the speech. And you can go to an interview on CNN where he praised the speech. So that's one side of him, Caddy. And then just briefly on the other side, while he's doing that, he's got one angel on his shoulder saying, you know, you could really be a great president if you just calm the F down.

8:07And then he's got the devil on the other side of his shoulder saying, hey, I want to make $200 billion from my family before I blow out of this presidency. $200 billion. Okay, let me put the Dr. Evil thing up. $200 billion. I don't even know how you'd write$200 billion, let alone what you'd do with$200 billion. But this is the problem with where we are right now, because what I saw there when they were all shaking hands in the royal court is the last vestiges of late stage capitalism. And the first thing that came to mind when I saw them all there, those billionaires cavorting with the crown prince, I said to myself, okay, where's Teddy Roosevelt when we need him?

8:47Because you're moving too far towards the capitalists and you have to make sure that capital and labor has a roughly equal distribution of the economic rent in a society. 50-50, We're happy campers, Caddy. If it even goes 52-53 capital to labor, you get great dissatisfaction and economic desperation from the working class. So to me, it's just a weird thing to watch Trump. It's like, dude, you want to be a better guy. I know you do, but you're overwhelmed by the attention and the greed. If you could just calm those elements down in your personality, we could probably get some things done here. The world wants peace, Katty.

9:29And so I want to be optimistic about that. The world wants peace. Yeah, I think the question is that we've seen a massive amount of diplomatic from somebody who has said that, you know, that this administration is more isolationist. And I do believe that J.D. Vance is genuinely on the kind of isolationist wing of this White House. We've actually seen a huge amount of intervention from the Trump administration. We've seen it in the UK-US trade deal. We've seen it in the China-US deal. We've seen it in Donald Trump going into a kind of war against the Houthis and then pulling out after a month when he realized the cost was going to be too high.

10:06We've seen it in the Iran negotiations that are happening at the moment. They are trying to do something on Ukraine and we can get to kind of what's working and what isn't for them. We've seen it in India and Pakistan directly intervening there to bring those two countries back from the possibility of a nuclear strike. We've seen it in them lifting sanctions on Syria, which then allows other countries to invest in Syria. So I think, you know, it doesn't quite fit with the narrative of J.D. Vance, who initially said, for example, on India and Pakistan, this has nothing to do with us or has told the Europeans, you know, you're kind of on your own, has told the Ukrainians.

10:45you're on your own, to see Donald Trump so interventionist on the world stage and so keen on making deals. Now, some of those deals, I'm not sure are going to work out. Certainly doesn't look like there's much of a deal on Gaza at the moment, which is something that he said he'd wanted to solve. But it doesn't kind of fit with the narrative that we've heard about this administration that they are totally pulling back from the world, because this actually looks to me more like America as we've always known it. Yeah, the goal of the Trump administration in terms of getting involved in other countries' human rights issues or promoting democracy, completely different from the Republican Party as we've known it, but it is still America involved on the world stage.

11:29I think it was The Economist has described it as the globalism of greed, which gets to your point, that is the overarching policy here all around making money. making money for the United States, as we're going to talk about in the second half, potentially making money for the Trump administration. And maybe that's the driving force that Trump really believes that wars cost money. If you can get people to trade with each other and ideally trade with the United States, they'll see that it's in their vested interest because actually there's money to be made for leaders individually and for companies and for countries.

12:02And maybe that's the overarching theory. This is different. This week is different. Donald Trump is behaving differently. There are some things that are the same. Some of the grift stuff is the same, and we'll get into that. But the level of engagement and diplomatic activity feels different. Do you think that it's going to be successful? Do you think this is a successful negotiating strategy that he's kind of taking to all these different places? I'm conscious that as we're talking on Thursday, the Ukrainians are in Turkey and trying to have some kind of talks with the Russians and the Russians have sent the dog catcher.

12:39I just want to give some context. Back in 2018, Jared Kushner called me and said, hey, we're doing a big economic event in Bahrain. We're presenting an economic plan related to the Palestinians. I don't know if you would remember this, but I flew to Bahrain in June. We went to the Four Seasons Hotel on that island off the coast. And we had guys like Steve Schwartzman and Professor Jeff Sonnenfeld and a whole coderate people very similar to what you saw in Saudi Arabia talk about an economic plan for the Palestinians and for the West Bank and for Gaza. Unfortunately, there were no representatives from Palestine there.

13:20And they said that they were rejecting the deal without a concomitant economic proposal. So the proposal basically was the Israelis are going to run everything. They're going to run your government, but you can have great economic bounty if you follow this plan. That's basically the Trump theory, isn't it? That's the Trump theory. Isn't that basically the Trump theory? That's why I'm bringing this up. The Trump theory is you have a political overlord. In this case, in the United States, I am your political overlord. And if you bow down to me, you can get favor curried upon you. The problem with this is that it doesn't really work because, again, I'm not a sociologist, but I'm just a good observer of things.

14:02In autocracies and in systems that are built like that, Caddy, you get a big funnel at the top for lots of corruption. Lots of people get rich at the tippy top that are close to the leader and everyone else gets screwed. And then the power becomes so absolute that it becomes so corrupting that the leader himself or herself, but it's usually himself, they start to make the laws capricious. And then once the laws become capricious, the investment capitals rise up because people are like, I can't buy that because I may or may not own that. I don't have a legal backing. If they're not going to listen to the courts, how can I go out and buy that property in the United States or something like that?

14:40So the reason I'm bringing all this up is that there's great hope and there's great optimism and what could happen, but there's a design flaw in what they're doing. Now, listen, up against everything I just said in the Middle East is the piece of the puzzle that's related to Israel and Palestine. And I think Netanyahu, frankly, Prime Minister Netanyahu, probably roughed up some people in the Trump administration. They would like some of the tactics that the Israelis are using to stop. I think it's very clear. And Netanyahu has said that he's not going to stop. And now there's this big fervor about the Israeli lobby in the United States.

15:23Matt Gaetz said on a podcast this week, you can't win an election in the United States if you're against Israel. They've got a very strong lobby. They funnel a lot of money into these elections. And again, I'm not saying that's true or not. I've never run for elected office in the US. So I'm not saying that's true or not, but there's a lot going on here that has to be unpacked. And then it would require a transformative leader to go to the American public and say, okay, here's all the interests that are on the table. This is what the American president would recommend to everybody, understanding the interests.

15:58But remember, if you're promising somebody something economic, but they feel like they don't have freedom of choice, This goes right back to the ancient Greeks who made the decision to create a democracy. You have to have in an aspirational, economically flowing, economically growing society, that libertarian ideal that, hey, I am here. I have freedom. I can speak my mind. I can create an aura ring, an Apple watch, an Apple phone. They go together, Caddy. That's the thing. This is the reason why, even though I've been shit on by so many different journalists in my life. I mean, somebody yesterday in Canada said, can I call you Mooch?

16:43I said, dude, I've been called a lot worse than Mooch. I mean, you can call me anything you want. Okay. My point is I've been shit on by a lot of journalists in my life. I don't care. Journalists can shit on me all day. They have the right to their freedom of speech. Their freedom of speech transcends down to our economic opportunities. If you teach the second grader that he can speak freely or she can speak freely, she goes on to create great things. If you tell them they can't, they end up in re-education camps if you go after the leader. You see what I mean? And so this is all tied together.

17:15And the guys in the Middle East don't get what I'm saying. And by the way, if you sat down with Trump, he doesn't get what I'm saying. He yelled at me once. I wrote an article saying that the press was not the enemy of the people. He called me. He yelled at me. He said, no, no, no. the press is the enemy of the people. But it's not, Kat. You see, it's all tied together, is my point. I mean, for anyone who thinks, you know, that playing YMCA as his kind of anthem, which is known as a gay anthem in Saudi Arabia as he's leaving, was a kind of jab at the Saudis. I honestly don't think it was in a country where being gay is illegal and can get you severely punished.

17:54I don't think he's trying to direct the country in that direction. And I think what's interesting about this theory is that in some countries, the sort of mercantilist theory of foreign policy might work. I mean, it may work in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, if you ignore any attempt to kind of change human rights records or bring about democracy. But I think what Trump is hitting up against is that his theory doesn't take into account historical or cultural or ethnic forces that override those mercantilist impulses. So that's why he hasn't managed to have much success in Ukraine, because the Ukrainians are fighting an existential war.

18:38If they don't get a good deal, what they perceive as a good deal for their sovereignty, whatever deal is signed doesn't mean the Ukrainians are going to stop fighting. This is why he's having such problems bringing about the Riviera in Gaza, because there are very strong forces at work here. It's why it didn't work in North Korea. In some cases, he can have successes with this type of approach. And I get your point about America had a long period where it did think it could go in and remake the world in America's model. And he has just upended that. I wanted to just read you a couple of things because I thought this week, this felt very appropriate.

19:16This is what George W. Bush said in his second inaugural address in 2005. The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world. So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world. That was 20 years ago. This week, Donald Trump in Saudi Arabia. This great transformation has not come from Western interventionists giving you lectures on how to live or to govern your own affairs.

19:54Instead, the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought about by the people of the region themselves, developing your own sovereign countries, pursuing your own unique visions and charting your own destinies. In the end, the so-called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built. I mean, I think those I went back and looked at Bush's second inaugural, which is kind of peak neocon philosophy, peak interventionist, peak America can rebuild the world in its own image. And then you look at what Donald Trump has just said this week. And I agree with you that it is a repudiation that is valid because the nation builders, as Trump says, did wreck more than they built.

20:36I'm just not sure that it is a model that works for every country and every situation. And if Donald Trump has the kind of grandiose view of himself that he can make deals based on money effectively that will supersede policies and culture and other countries' desires, I'm not sure it's always going to work, which is why we don't have peace in Ukraine yet and why we don't have peace in Gaza yet. In fact, we may be on the brink of even more atrocities. in the Gaza Strip. Does that sound fair? Yeah, I think it's brilliantly insightful. I just want to add two sentences, and then I want to talk about MBS, if that's okay.

21:14So two sentences I would add is that Cheney was really the architect of this interventionist strategy. Cheney basically said - Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, that crowd of neocons. Yes, we control the world. We are the massive military might. Let's go into the Middle East, rough these people up, take 9-11 as the crisis that we need to rough everybody up and get them in line and get them to live the American way, which was highly arrogant. George Soros, by the way, in a November op-ed, 2001 New York Times, George Soros, the legendary investor, considered to be a pariah by conservatives, but George Soros wrote, please do not overreact.

21:58Osama bin Laden wants you to overreact. You've lost 3 ,000 lives. It's a horrific tragedy. But if you go to war in the Middle East, you're going to end up in an endless war. You're going to spill a lot of treasure. You're going to actually weaken the country if you do that. And bin Laden actually said this on the dark web in the late 90s after he bombed the embassy sites in Africa. He said, I'm going to spill your blood like we did the Soviets. We're going to come hit you on your land. You're going to overreact and you're going to spill all your treasure. And of course, with the Patriot Act, you're going to take away your own civil liberties.

22:35And Osama bin Laden was right about that. We've blown through$20 trillion doing stuff that we shouldn't have done. Soros became a pariah when he wrote that. Cheney targeted him and they've spent 20 years chanting that he's a bad dude, even though what he said was actually insightful. If you don't mind, I'm just going to go to MBS because I know the crown prince. I've met the crown prince in the palace. Did you get the lavender carpet? I didn't get the lavender carpet, no. I did get a really good meal, actually. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, Anthony, looking at all the pictures from Saudi Arabia.

23:09This is a very different country than the one I moved to when I was just 10 years old in the mid-70s. And we arrived there, and one of the first things we did was go and have lunch with the royal family. They had invited all of us. My mother and I went with the women, and my dad went with the men. And it was barbecued camel on the floor in a tent. And my mom, who spoke fluent Arabic and was fascinated by the Middle East, always reminded me that this was a culture that had changed just massively since the 1960s. Really in two generations, as many Arab leaders have said to me in the past, you know, we went from being Bedouin who were living in tents in the desert and having a nomadic lifestyle to what you saw this week in Saudi Arabia.

23:53Just the difference struck me. I mean, that's the politics and the diplomacy and America's relationship aside. How much these cultures have changed, how much these countries have changed. The reason I got invited to the palace is sort of funny. So I was there for FII, which is the financial investment initiative. I got the opportunity to speak on that stage where Trump was speaking from. And then I got invited to the palace. It was on CNBC. MBS was fighting with the Biden administration and they asked me a question. And I said, they said, what do you think about the U.S.-Saudi relationship? I said, listen, it's like a Catholic marriage.

24:29Now, Katty, I know you're not Catholic, but there are Catholics listening. When you're married and you're Catholic, you don't get unmarried. It's just the way it is. Your mother beats up on you. You know, the Catholics are really tough on each other. You can't even take communion if you're divorced in the Catholic Church. So I said on TV, I said the Saudi-U.S. relationship is like a Catholic marriage. They can get pissed off at each other and they can yell at each other, but they're staying married. That must have been an analogy that went down very well in the home of Mecca and Medina, right?

24:57It did. It did, actually. So MBS loved it. Next thing you know, I'm getting a call from one of the staff royal secretaries. He would like to have you come to this dinner. And I said, oh, great. So I came to the dinner. and I had a nice conversation with him. And I'm going to say three things and then I want you to react. So thing number one is he was consolidating power. He's the younger of the sons of the king. And there were other potential rivals that were going to be the crown prince, his relatives, half brothers, et cetera. And he was consolidating power. And there's a little bit of a rift.

25:32I think U.S. intelligence, potentially Trump and Jared Kushner, helped him consolidate that power. You may remember after the first FII, they rounded up some of the Saudis. They left them in the Ritz-Carlton. They were quasi-imprisoned. And the message was out, hey, you guys are rabble-rousing related to MBS. Stop doing that. Otherwise, you're going to see Mecca and Medina more quickly, potentially, okay? Or paradise. Okay, so number one. So he's very grateful to the Trump administration. Trump won for that. Number two, during the Biden tension, because obviously the relationship fell off with Biden, I think a lot of Trump people stayed in touch with MBS.