92. Trump vs. California: How Far Will He Go?

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1:44Hello and welcome to The Rest is Politics US with me, Katty Kay, still in London. And I'm Anthony Scaramucci. Good morning, Katty Kay. Actually, I feel like we have been apart and we need to have a little reconnection connection because I had a week off and somebody filled in for you. We won't mention his name. And then you had a week off with Stephanie, who was fantastic, I thought, and I was so glad that she did it. But it's nice to be back together. You can mention Michael. I mean, I have a very sensitive eggshell ego, as we both know, we've discovered this, but you can mention Michael Steele's name because he's a wonderful guy and he also did a great job.

2:22But I'm glad to be back. I'm glad you didn't fire me off the podcast. Let's just put it that way. I'm just happy to be here, okay? And likewise. I could feel the sort of Damocles dangling. No, no, no. Ready to hit me in the head. So what do you want to talk about today? So look, we're going to talk about the mass protests, obviously. And I think mass is an interesting word because we'll talk about that too. But anyway, the protests around immigration that have been happening in LA as a result of some of the more aggressive tactics that the White House is using to crack down on illegal immigrants.

2:56And then after the break, I want to talk about what the Secretary of Health has been doing, RFK Jr., who has retired, I think is the word he used, the entire US Vaccine Committee to replace them with people who he thinks are more truthful about vaccines and whether they're good for us or not, and what that means for American health. And actually, I think also what that means for American manufacturing industry of vaccines, because I had an interesting conversation with a doctor who does research on this, about this subject. But before we get to the day's news, everybody, the final episode of our Elon Musk miniseries is out now.

3:35You can sign up, of course, to get it all at the rest is politics us.com. In the latest episode, we had so much to talk about, we took a deep dive into one of the most surreal chapters in American governance. After the creation of Doge, the federal agencies that were gutted, the humanitarian programs that were axed, and Elon Musk moving through Washington, wielding even, yes, a chainsaw. But we really wanted to focus on what it all meant and what had Elon Musk done that had achieved something for American government and savings? What had he done that was potentially damaging for the United States?

4:12What was the lasting impact of this extraordinary kind of four-month period of Elon Musk in government, wielding his chainsaw with his toddler in tow in the Oval Office, and what did it all mean? So that's what we dived into. And then, of course, we looked at the very messy divorce between Elon Musk and Donald Trump that is still playing out, even as we are recording this on Wednesday morning. So that's the series. We do hope you'll join up. What was your favorite episode? Anthony? Well, I mean, I can't say it was necessarily my favorite episode, but my favorite part of the whole thing. And I just want to personally thank Elon Musk on behalf of TripUS for blowing things up before our last episode, because if you didn't blow things up before our last episode, we'd have to have another episode.

5:02But it was brilliantly timed when you said Trump was on the Epstein file list. Have a good day, DJT. Now, he's out this morning tweeting that he He regrets the overreach there with some of the things that he was saying. But I think my favorite was the last episode, by the way, because I think, you know, I want to applaud our producers and want to thank these guys, India, Fiona, Dom, et cetera, for laying out a really good background, doing a lot of research into Elon's life. Because if you listen to episode one and two, then you understand how episode five happened, And so for me, I feel bad about the situation.

5:44People say I have an overly soft spot for Elon. My friend Scott Galloway is a little bit more edged up as it relates to Elon. But I think Elon is coming back. And I think Elon is going to be a force. He may be back in the Trump administration. He may be back with the Democrats. Just two quick things, though, that I want to point out, Katty. Number one, Trump threatened him. Okay, that's fascism. You can't, from your governmental position, say, hey, if you support Democrats, you're going to have consequences. That's called fascism. Can't do that. You have a First Amendment right to support anybody that you want.

6:23And then number two, Trump said something that really made me laugh. So I have to share it with everybody. Trump goes on local radio here in New York. All these guys are my buds, like Len Berman, Sid Rosenberg. he's on the radio last week. He's like, I don't know what goes on here. These guys, they leave the White House and they go crazy on me. They go crazy. And he was about to say, like your friend. He goes, oh, nevermind. Because he knows I'm always on the show, right? But the point is, Caddy, sometimes you got to look in the mirror and say, maybe it's me. It could be me. 80 people have left the White House.

7:0180 people have said the guy's a nut job, including Elon Musk. Yeah. I mean, it's so interesting because the story is still playing out, obviously, with what does Elon Musk do next and why did he send out all of those tweets suggesting that Donald Trump may be in the Epstein files? We have had so many questions, by the way, about this series that next Tuesday, we're going to have a special Q &A to answer all of your Elon Musk's questions. So tune in and listen to that as well. Okay, let's get to this week's news, because there's been an awful lot happening. And some of it is around economic policy and immigration.

7:36Some of it is around law and democracy issues. And some of it is around, obviously, politics and what all of this means, both for the White House and for democracy. So quick recap. We've had these protests in Los Angeles following a series of immigration raids that were targeting illegal migrants who were turning up to work. a kind of traditional thing that happens all over the country. You go to a big DIY store like Home Depot and you'll see a crowd of kind of migrants there. Many of them are not in the country legally and they are looking for day jobs, painting jobs, construction jobs. And the ICE enforcement officials started going to these Home Depots in Los Angeles and that resulted in protests in the city.

8:22And we saw over the weekend that the protests did get violent. There were cars set on fire, driverless taxis set on fire, but everything kind of died down pretty quickly. I spoke to people in California, both Republicans and Democrats ahead of this taping, who said by the standards actually of California and of Los Angeles, which has seen very big riots over the last couple of decades, including back in 2020 with the Black Lives Matter protests, these were pretty minor. I mean, it was very confined to downtown. It was not that Los Angeles suddenly felt unruly. But Donald Trump called out the National Guard or rather he federalized the California Guard.

9:03And that's a question of legal dispute. And he brought in Marines and he said that the whole of the city was going to blow up if he didn't act. And the White House, my understanding is, is delighted to have been given this opportunity on a subject they feel they have overwhelming support on. And it gives the president the chance to do what he didn't do in 2020, which is bring out the American military onto the streets in protection of federal buildings. So he hasn't actually used the military yet to go after American citizens because that would be illegal, but he's brought them out in protection of federal buildings and federal officers.

9:41And this has caused a legal issue, an immigration issue, and a political issue. So let's dive into some of that. What do you make of it, Anthony? Well, I'm going to say a few things that are perhaps controversial. The first thing I'm going to say is that the people are on the side of Donald Trump. And so I want you to look at the polling, Gaddy. Disagree if you find a poll against it, but I've looked at a cross section of polls. CNN had a great poll out yesterday. It would point people towards that, that the people are for ending illegal immigration. And when you ask people on the margin, they're for deportation.

10:21And I think what's happening here is this crudeness. If you had an American leader that got to the podium and said, listen, we have too many illegal aliens who are criminals in the country, and I'm going to work on with my team to get illegal aliens that have perpetrated criminal activity in the country out of the country, and we're going to do it in the most humane way possible, I don't think you get protests. Isn't that kind of what Donald Trump said during the campaign? You warned us of this. I remember you saying he's going to deport millions of people illegally. And the president, while he was on the campaign trail, was saying he was going to go after people, suggested very firmly he was going to go after people that had a violent criminal history.

11:12And there was widespread support for that. But this is going clearly now what ICE is doing is going beyond that, right? But this is what happens, right? Because he said that he didn't know who the people were on Project 2025 for four months in his administration. He's on page 400 of a 900-page document going through the document, doing exactly what's in the document. He said he was only going to deport the illegal criminals, the aliens that were perpetrating crimes, and they're going after everybody. And so this is the problem that Americans have, if you tell me something abstractly, okay, should people that are committing crimes in the country who got here illegally, should they be deported?

11:56Yes. Should illegal immigrants be deported? Americans are going to say yes. Should your neighbor who lives down the block that got here illegally, they're paying all their taxes, they are raising children in your school district, they're best friends with your children, and they work 24-7, and they're law-abiding people that love America. Should they be deported? And then all of a sudden, the Americans say, well, wait, what? Wait, what? So what's going on here is there's a cruelty to the approach. And I think this is going to get the president in a lot of trouble. And by the way, Gavin Newsom, to his credit, is showing some backbone here.

12:41And they're going to try to tar Gavin and they're going to say the stuff that gets said on right-wing media that Gavin is defending illegal aliens who are criminals. He's not. He's basically saying, we've got to take a humane approach to the thing. Listen to what he's saying. And he's basically saying that the National Guard is to be deployed in my state at my suggestion as the governor. And the fact that he is overriding the governor and inserting the National Guard into the state is an intrusion, hasn't happened, I think, in 40 or 50 years. And now he's talking about a Marine deployment. I just want to make this one point.

13:21I'd like you to react to it. Marines are deployed against our enemies. That's what they're deployed against. Police are deployed against civil unrest and citizens that are harming each other in your country. If you got to take it one step further, you use the National Guard if there is a riot breaking out. Understood. But you're crossing the line going with the Marines, and you're doing that because you're an asshole. Okay. And you just have to understand that's why you're doing that. I think your point about the Marines is really interesting. And Marines are not trained to fight American citizens or people on American soil.

14:05They are not trained to go into ice raid type situation in a family where there are, you know, where the dad is in the country illegally, but there could be kids in the house as well. That is not something that Marines are trained to handle. They are trained to shoot people and they carry weapons in many cases. And these are the most elite of them. And I don't think the Marines necessarily want to be in this position. This puts American Marines in an incredibly difficult position. Imagine that they get to a situation where they are actually helping with those ICE raids. At the moment, they're not.

14:40At the moment, they're there to protect the buildings. Donald Trump has decided not to invoke the Insurrection Act. He's gone with something slightly less than that, which gives these national law enforcement officers, these soldiers, their ability to protect buildings, but not actually to conduct raids. But if they were to get into a position, as is the case, and we know of stories where people are being picked up who are here illegally, and they've got their wife and their kids in the car, what do the Marines do who are just not trained to handle that? So the Marines have been brought from their base.

15:11They arrived in LA in armored vehicles looking like military force. That's what they are. But they're having to be trained in ICE tactics, which takes a certain amount of, you know, it takes a long time to train these ICE officers to know what they're doing. And Marines are having to get a kind of speed training for the prospect of being out on the streets of Los Angeles. And this is exactly what General Milley warned against from the first administration around the Black Lives Matter, when we know that Donald Trump wanted to bring out military personnel and shoot protesters in the knees. And Milley was saying, but this is a volatile situation that you're dealing with because this is not how Marines are trained.

15:52So you could end up with something far more explosive. Now, I think we don't know for Democrats yet how this turns out. And, you know, correct me if you think I'm wrong. I think we We don't know because we don't know what's going to happen on the ground. If these protests spread around the country and become more violent, I actually think the White House will be able to make a public case for bringing out the National Guard and even potentially bringing out the Marines. If the protests die down and they're small and they're not violent, then there is a risk that for the White House that this looks like overkill and Donald Trump has jumped the shark.

16:29He's kind of, you know, as he does in these situations, he has a good set of cards, but he's overplaying them. And I don't know. I don't think we know yet, Anthony, which way this goes. Democrats are clearly... I've interviewed several in the last couple of days. I interviewed Mikey Sherrill this morning, who's just won the Democratic primary for the race for governor of New Jersey. And she's walking this fine line between protecting American rights to protest, but also keeping law and order on the streets. And people still have the memory of 2020 and the near the surface. And I think people don't want to see that again in the country.

17:07I don't think they want those violent images. And that works for the White House at the moment. I mean, listen, I like Mikey Sherrill and congratulations to her. She's been to many of my conferences. She's also a US veteran helicopter pilot for the US Navy, God bless her. Super impressive. She's a very smart, very pragmatic person. And I think that's what we need. We need people who are pragmatic and we need people that are humane. And I guess the thing that troubles me is the misinformation that's out there. So there's, you know, again, one of my Italian buddies, very close to, he sent me something this morning because he listened to our podcast and he's, you know, he's right of center, right of center person.

17:51And he's saying to me that, you know, services from the government, net loss of$150 billion a year. And there was recent testimony in the Congress shading statistics like that. And that infuriates the American people. But if you go to Elon Musk's AI and you go to Grok and you ask Grok - Grok is your new best friend, Anthony. Yeah, but I like Grok. You're a loving Grok. I do. I think it's important because Grok can keep you honest. Okay. So if you go to Grok and you ask the question, it's more complicated than that. So what ends up happening is the right picks out certain stats, which are very accurate, and they say the stat.

18:35And then the left picks out certain stats, which are accurate, and they say the stat. And now we're arguing over the facts because they're not conjoining them. But when you put them in the mixer, it turns out on a net basis, the immigrants that have gotten here illegally have been a net positive to the social security taxation, to the American tax structure, to American consumption. They've added economic growth. I'll say this. It's a little crude. People, please forgive me. They have done the work that my fellow Americans don't want to do. Oh my God, that's so right. So a really smart politician would say, I understand there's xenophobia in the country.

19:22I understand there's elements of isolationism. I understand there's the tribalism, but we are a united country. We are an experiment for the rest of the world. We're based on an idea and the people are here. We should knit the place together, frankly, the way Marco Rubio wanted to do in 2008, nine and 10. Moreover, and I've said this before in our podcast, but it's worth repeating because it's directly related to this issue. If the Gang of Eight, you remember the Gang of Eight? I do. OK, so tell our viewers and listeners who were the Gang of Eight. What was their proposal? The Gang of Eight were four Republican and four Democratic senators who put together a proposal to give immigrants who are in the country illegally a pathway to being in America legally.

20:12So gave them a pathway to citizenship. And they got as close as any group has got in America in the last few decades to resolving America's immigration issue. But in the end, they failed. They couldn't quite get it across the line. Right. There were hard right senators that stopped it. Yeah. But Marco Rubio was one of that gang of eight. Yeah. And I think Cruz was actually involved with that, if I remember correctly. But here's what I would say. We then lost the 2012 election, right? Remember, I was a Republican back then, right? Mitt Romney. So we lost - I thought you were still a Republican.

20:48Yeah, I'm still a Republican, but I'm not a Trump Republican. You're actually in the party. Yeah, I'm in exile. I'm like fucking De Gaulle somewhere. I'm like hiding somewhere, trying to get the party back. Come and join me in London. It's fun. Yeah, exactly. I'm trying to figure out what the hell to do here. But my point is, after the 2012 election, we said we got to soften our stance on immigration. We're going to lose the next election if we don't soften our stance. And then we got Trump and Trump hardened our stance on immigration. And it plays to our weaknesses, right? Lincoln said that there are better angels in our nature that we have to appeal to, but Trump is appealing to the weaker instincts in our nature.

21:32And this is an unhealable situation unless you get a transformative political leader into the mix to tell the American people the truth. The people that are here, and they're working, and they're adding to the economy, we got to take care of. And we got to make them citizens or give them a path to citizenship. Even if you think it's unfair, that's what we got to do. That's what the pardon process is about. That's the real politic of it. Can I pick up on the immigration bit of this? Because I think you're right. I don't think any of this is about immigration. I think it's really about, it's a culture war thing.

22:12And it's Donald Trump kind of tapping into a very powerful culture war with us with a sense of isolationism, a sense of security, a sense of fear, a sense of nativism. But what it's not about is immigration for the very reason that you just pointed out, which is that it's not that Americans are lining up to do the jobs that these illegal migrants are doing. And if he was to go ahead and really deport the whatever it is, 14 million people who are in the country, America, there would be a total crisis in the American economy because these people make up their 5 % of the workforce, their 25 % of the agricultural workforce, their 15 % of the construction workforce, their 10 % of the leisure workforce, they contribute$100 billion in taxes every year.

23:02I mean, I think if I were being Democratic strategist, which you sometimes ask me to play, I would say really try to tone down the protests, certainly tone down any of the violence that people are committing out in the protests and wait for the crisis that would happen in the American labor force. I was told by a Republican strategist in Northern California that there were not enough workers to pick this winter's citrus harvest in California, not because people have been deported, but because they were too afraid to turn up to work in case there were raids at the citrus farms. Well, that pretty quickly starts having an impact on labor prices and on people's ability to do their businesses.

23:47So wait for that to happen. And then you're also going to get alongside that the stories of, you know, the grandmother, the abuela who works in the dress shop, getting deported and separated from her crying grandchildren. And that's where I think Americans will start to change. That's where this could flip against the White House, because people don't want, like you say, they don't want the heartbreaking stories of families being separated. But we saw that from the first Trump administration. And they need to be able to carry on doing their businesses. I mean, combine this with tariffs, how much harder is it going to get for American small businesses if both of those economic programs were to go through?

24:24I think it's so well said. I guess what I would say to you, living in the United States my entire life, I mean, do a lot of travel, but I live here in the 70s. When I was an early teenager in the 70s, my family used to go, my dad used to go to the Knights of Columbus or the Sons of Italy. And I'd have to go in there and they'd have a skeeting ball thing and stuff. And you'd sit there. And these old Italians who were all war veterans, they would say pridefully, they would say pridefully, ready? We went to Europe. We defended Europe against the Nazis. We pushed the Nazis back. And then we went in and rebuilt Europe.

25:10the Marshall Plan, the trade agreements, the NATO alliance. And they said it pridefully. I can remember this like it was yesterday. And I was thinking, okay, we're a good country. We must be a good country. We're trying to do the right thing on the world stage. And we're going to fast forward 50 years. And now we're sitting here. We have people in the country that are working, that are contributing to the society. They may have not gotten here correctly. And so my grandparents got here correctly. I have all the evidence because I applied for Italian citizenship for my daughter. And so I have all the evidence that got here correctly.

25:52But some people didn't get here correctly. What do you want to do, Caddy? What should we do? We want to throw them out of the country at this moment. And by the way, it would be a Marshall Plan for the country itself if you had a very smart, transformative, futuristic leader that would say to the American people, look, I'm doing this. You can hate me for doing this. You can be xenophobic. You could be tribalistic, but this is what we're doing. And when we have illegal people who are committing crimes, I'm going to work with the police forces and the different places around the country, the FBI, to get those people deported as quickly as possible.

26:38But to deport people and to scare the daylights out of people that actually love the country, that are sitting here in the country working, doing the best that they can, I think it is a really big mistake for the country. And it's the opposite. It's antipodal to where we were 50 years ago in the way we thought about ourselves. Yeah. And I mean, you've got reports of kids not being able to turn up for their high school graduation because they're afraid of immigration raids in their high schools. And you do have already families being separated. And I think the more of those stories that come out, the more concerned people will be.