259. Can Trump still run for president?

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1:34Hi there, it's Alastair here and as you can see, I am with Rory Stewart, but I'm absolutely thrilled to be with Katty Kay and Anthony Scaramucci. Our colleagues, partners and friends from the rest of this politics, US. And you won't get any prizes for guessing why we've decided to come together. The four of us, it's because of the counts against Donald J. Trump in New York court, guilty on all 34. Katty, how is it all playing out and what does it all mean? Well, it's great to see you guys. I think Anthony, I feel a bit like the JV team who are suddenly allowed to play with the big boys or in your language, we're sitting at high table.

2:13So you may have heard our emergency trip that I recorded from US, which I recorded from Ronald Reagan National Airport yesterday after we just got the news and I was landing from a flight. But Donald Trump has been found guilty on all of these charges and it has kind of thrown the, I'm back in Washington, DC and it's thrown the kind of Washington political world up on its, up on end with Democrats texting me incredibly confident from the Biden campaign suggesting that they always knew, they were always knew they were going to win at the ballot box in November, which is actually true. I've heard this kind of weird level of confidence from the Biden campaign all along, despite what the polls are telling us about it being very tight.

2:54And then from the Trump campaign, there's a kind of a loyalty test that is playing out in real time of one person in Trump world texted me last night saying, this is a civil war in the GOP. You're either with us or you're against us. And specifically what's playing out kind of on social media between all the Republicans is, are you with Donald Trump in the idea that this is an attack on him and a wish hunter against him and therefore believe that the whole system is rigged? Or are you a little squishy on that as some Republicans, not very many top Republicans have come out and said, I believe in the system, the system is fine, but the jury just got this verdict wrong.

3:43So you got the Biden people pretty confident and the Trump people insisting on loyalty from Republican. Can I come in with a question maybe to Anthony who's a lawyer? I guess there are a couple of possibilities out there. If you're a Republican and you don't like this result, you could like Trump say the whole system is corrupt and rigged and the judges corrupt. But I guess there's another more mild possibility where you could say, yeah, he may or may not have committed these crimes, but these are trivial crimes. Literally, what did he do? He falsified his private business records. He paid off some harsh money to a woman.

4:21I do the same thing. I wouldn't want some woman testifying against him and running against president. In other words, presumably there may be a chunk of Republican voters who will say, I'm not saying the system's corrupt. I'm just saying this is trivial. This is not something that I'm going to particularly morally judge, Trump for. Okay, so that's the reason why you're a rational politician or a former politician. And that is not inside the prism of the reality distortion of Trump world worry. So what goes on in Trump world, he is this impetuous, hangry sort of person, almost like a golem, a Frankenstein monster, he comes around and trashes everybody and everything.

5:04And that type of rationale is not going to play with it more over. He has a narrative that he's told his family. And if you listen very closely to the closing arguments, he infused that narrative into the closing arguments. Never had sex with a porn star. I didn't do this. I didn't do that. It's a narrative. And so he has to go with the rigged because it fits his conspiracy followers. It fits his base. But the danger, if you're a garden variety of Republican, is you're now taking a wrecking ball to everything that America stands for, which is this very flat system. It's very fair system. And I think this is very, very dangerous.

5:48And I'll take you guys back in history for just one second, the Wigs had this problem over slavery. And they smashed into each other in the mid 1850s and out of that came the Republican party. And I feel like the Republican party, it's not the beginning of the end, but it's definitely the end of the beginning of the Republican party there. They're going to be very different in the next five years in the art of day. And they won't be Trumpian, by the way. But today, what I think we find incredible. And the Katty mentioned Ronald Reagan Airport. And I was a journalist when Ronald Reagan was president.

6:23And I thought, you know, the whole him thing with him and thatcher was kind of pretty nauseating at times. But he was an amazing kind of political figure. And it's impossible to imagine that in that era, or kind of any era up until now, that you could have the sort of announcement that we had last night, the form of president guilty or all counts of these serious charges. And where I would push back on Roy's analysis earlier, I think the judge made clear that the the crime as it were that what turned this into a felon wasn't just the falsifying of business accounts. It was in order to interfere with the outcome of a presidential election.

7:01And that's the kind of real sort of crime against the state as it were, even though it was a New York state case. But what has happened to American people? Forget politics for a minute. What has happened to American people that this is not automatically the end of the road for Trump? Well, the American people are dissatisfied with the system. There's a good 25 % of them that don't like the system, Alistair, and a result of which they want to wreck the system. He represents that. And I'll just say this quickly, if you've ever played King of the Mountain before, there's one apex predator. There's one prime, throwing the other people off the mountain.

7:39Trump has done that in the Republican Party. And he put his daughter in law, in charge of the Republican National Committee. In a normal scenario, somebody would be an older statesman in that position. He would say, hey, we have to reconvene. We got to kick this guy out of the party. They don't have the capability of doing that with the courage. I mean, I think what you're getting to, Alistair, is kind of the, in a way, what's what's called here the sorting of America that America has sorted itself into two groups that have become themselves more extreme. And as they became more extreme, the parties became more extreme with them.

8:15As a client wrote a great book on this on the partisan ship in America. And it's there. You've got into a position where you are in a tribe. And therefore, everything somebody else does that's outside of your tribe is as we're seeing play out today, something that has to be fought. There's no room anymore. With Alistair and Anthony and I were talking about this on this week's podcast. 30 years ago, there were moderate Democrats who were more conservative than the most liberal Republicans serving in Congress. I mean, there were 150 of them. That, that, there are none today. Zero. So there's no crossover in the middle of the political parties.

8:55And as that has happened for various structural reasons, the parties have then followed suit by becoming more extreme. And so you don't get people standing up. And it's interesting, you know, you had one guy, Larry Hogan, who is one of the very few remaining kind of centrist Republicans who's running for the Senate in Maryland. And he tweeted out this in response to the verdict at this dangerously divided moment in our history. All leaders, regardless of party, must not poor fuel on the fire with more toxic partisanship. We must reaffirm what has made this nation great, the rule of law. Classic Reagan, right?

9:28Classic Reagan commentary from a moderate Republican within within minutes. The chairman of the Trump campaign had tweeted, had retweeted that with the work with a few words, your campaign has just died. So the mafia, Rory? Yeah. And so obviously, full disclosure that the four of us are on the Biden side of this and we're massively anti -Trump, but I'm just going to keep playing devil. Catchy works with a BBC Rory. I have, you know, I'm your resident analyst, Rory. Can I just step back there and do something which I can see from the comments is really winding people up through the ropes, Rory?

10:08I just want to make that clear. So if I look at the comments that they don't like me playing the Republican side on this, but I'm going to play the devil's advocate once more, okay? We're talking about this as though this is the most amazing catastrophic thing. Analyst is like he was conspiring to defraud an election. In the end, these 34 counts when you go through them are count number one, check, stub number five six three zero count number two, check, stub five six. It's basically one thing he's done. He's paid Michael Cohen money, which he's accounted for as a legal stipend so that Cohen can pay hush money to Stormy Daniels and he's done it because he doesn't want Stormy Daniels producing a story in the middle of his campaign, saying he's had sex with him.

10:57And it's not that unusual at the state level and the city level in the US for convicted felons to run. So we talk a lot about Rhode Island with Buddice, Yancey, the state where I spend a lot of time in Connecticut, Joe Gannem has just come back from being convicted for nine years for electoral fraud. He's just been reelected as a mayor. So are we not being a little bit pious about this whole thing and holding Trump to completely different standards so the way that a lot of US politics operates? No. Who wants to say that? Mooch, you go first. Well, I don't see it that way, Rory. I see this actually as a mild case and so I'll seed every point that you made on this case.

11:48But there is a legacy of crime with this guy in bad behavior. You've got three other cases coming and by every legal analyst, every legal standard, even his buddies say, wow, those cases are way more damning than this case. So let's give him this case. No problem. You know, Frank Lund's is saying this morning, 67 % of the people are going to vote exactly the way they were going to vote prior to this conviction. Hold on. Let me just let me just let me just let me just let me in 33 % on 33 % are now wavering. That's what according to Frank Lund's, I think that's a big deal. And I think that's the seam and I think that's that number whole stress.

12:30Yeah. And but that's also why Katty's expressing from the Biden camp their exuberance and their confidence. But let's just see Rory's point. Rory, you're right. This is a minor thing. But this guy has a legacy. He has a trail of crime behind him. And he's forcing people to break with the system. Alex, they're called at the mafia. I'll call it authoritarianism. He's he's pushing talking points to people like Lindsey Graham. And they're all parroting each other. We're talking about a litmus test. They all have to say the same thing on Twitter. Yeah. The system is rigged. They went for him and now they're going to come for you.

13:12And all of this stuff is being fed to them. And they're being told you want to be up for vice president. You better get it. You better get on CNN and read these talking points. And if you're talking about the party of Reagan, they never did that. These guy, you know, Reagan 40 years ago. He was here in France speaking to living veterans who assaulted those beaches. We're going to be here again this week on the 80th anniversary. The country I live in, the country that Cadi lives in, very, very different country now. We have to accept that. And we have to either force change from the top or not.

13:47But Donald Trump's toxicity has heard everybody. You know, if you want to use a mafia expression, the fish thinks from the head down. And his stink has permeated into that party. That's it. Rory, you're right, Rory. Of all of the cases against Donald Trump, the January the 6th case, the Mar -a -Lago documents case, taking secret documents and allegedly handing them over to people who could misuse them. This has always been seen as the least serious of those cases. It's just that it's the one that came first. And so it's because it's history making, it's the first time that a former president has ever been convicted of a felony.

14:27Of course, it's a big deal. It's a rubicon that America is crossing. And I think what the reason people focus on Trump is that he keeps smashing through America norms. And one thing that Donald Trump has taught all of us is that this country's democracy is founded partly on rules and laws. But it's also partly founded on customs and norms. And Trump has smashed those customs and norms. So he smashed this one. What else is he going to smash? What else is he prepared to bulldoze his way through? And what else is the Republican Party prepared to follow him on? And we don't know. I don't think we're going to have a result in any of the other cases before the election.

15:09So this, in a way, this lets the Supreme Court off the hook on having to rule quickly on whether he has total immunity or not. But this is the test. This case will be the test of whether the American public is perturbed or not particularly perturbed by voting for a convicted felon, which they have never done before. But they can't be sorry. Sorry, we're going to ask a very quickly question from the live stream. There's a lot of questions coming in. But one for Anthony, because it's come up, I think in five questions, people keep saying that that the offense he committed was that he used campaign money.

15:47And that if he had used his own money, it wouldn't have been a crime. My understanding is that's a misunderstanding of what the case is. Could you clarify just just for people once again? It's not about whether he uses his own money. Yeah, well, he used corporate money. And so what they would say to you is if he donated the money from himself personally paid the taxes on it, put it into his campaign, he would be allowed to do that. But he didn't do that. He was trying to use corporate money to pay for this, because he was really trying to hide the payment. And so in other words, if he had done it with his personal money into the campaign, there would have been a check from the campaign to stormy Daniels.

16:28All of the journalists on earth would say, what was that? So he was trying to avoid it. So he put the check through Michael Cohen's account. And then he paid Michael through the Trump organization. So that there's a lot of malfeasance there, right? There's business fraud. He's not allowed to do that from a business fraud and a tax perspective. And then there's election fraud, because he's not allowed to put money in from his corporation. He could only put it in from himself personally. And then the big kahunas, the one that everyone's most upset about, he, you know, boondoggled his way into the electoral win by keeping this out of the news.

17:09And he then went on to pick three Supreme Court justices. Again, I'm just giving you that view of why people are so upset. Yeah, Kathy, that's the case. You use corporate money. It's that personal. And we have to remember, go back in time. The stormy Daniels story was coming to a head, and she was asking for this money in order to keep quiet just about a week after that access Hollywood tape. And that's why there was so much urgency around it. Now, Americans are let, I remember, I still remember where I was when the access Hollywood tape came out. And we all assumed that was it. That's it. Absolutely.

17:49You can't grab a woman by the pussy and say that you like doing it because you're a celebrity and then get elected. Actually, he got elected. So I don't know that he was worried about the stormy Daniels story. I don't know that it would have meant that he didn't win the electoral college. He could still have done it because if you want it with access Hollywood, why not stormy? There's just sorry, just that's what the people that don't like them are saying, yeah, I do see that point to you. Okay. Now, we're getting lots and lots and lots and lots of questions. One of the most common question coming through is a yes or no answer from both of you.

18:26Will we have the mooch and catey on the podcast beyond the elections, please? I think this is going to give you five seconds to think about that. I think it's probably a yes. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. But the other great time. You don't want me, Alex. Okay. Now listen, but the other thing, this one, this one, I probably don't have many doors and gone into places where I'm not wanted. So I'll listen. I'll also, somebody who is listening to your podcast earlier who lives in West Wales is offering you refuge there if Donald Trump does win. So look at the map. It's a nice I will need that. I said, you tell him that the Welsh are Italians in the rain.

19:04And I expect to be living in his basement. Okay. Now, I've got a question which may be for for both of you from different perspectives. There's a question from Charlie who wants to who says that Trump is about to do a press conference. I think he's waiting until we've finished our live podcast and then he's going to do his press conference. So basically, if if you were suddenly filling in on the BBC for a couple of minutes, Cassie, to say, this is what we expect from Trump today, what would you say? And Anthony, given your perspective of having worked with him in these, not nothing like this, but in this kind of moment, what's his style going to be when he comes out swinging at four o 'clock?

19:44Cassie. We had a preview of what he what he's going to say because he said it last night. The system is rigged against him. The country is going to hell. There are millions of people coming into the country illegally. You have to vote for Donald Trump. He may even throw in a bid to donate to his campaign, which everybody on his campaign is doing this to raise funds at the moment. But the overriding messages, I can't get a fair shake in a woke system of justice that is run by the Biden White House. And it's not, though, either way, that you're trying to fact check Trump. That's the waste of time.

20:23And by the way, nor can you. That'll be the closer it is. And nor can you so vote for me. Anthony, well, you know, I'll just say that when you're hearing him speak, because I have the Trump decoder ring, I got out of that on my cereal box. And I'll turn it on for you. When you hear him speak, it's all about projection. So anything he is saying he wants to do, when he says a system is rigged, he's saying, when I'm president, I'm going to rig the system. When he says, they're coming after me unfairly. Oh, by the way, when I'm president, I'm going to go after my adversaries unfairly. So everything that he's saying, he's trying to project it onto the other side of exactly what he's going to do.

21:07And one thing that he's saying, which I think is true, he has raised some money from this. The totals as of this morning from the Trump War Room was $34 .8 million dollars. And so he would be remiss because he's greedy and he loves money. He'll have to bring that up as well. One of the questions that's come up quite a lot in the stream is people saying, will he go to prison? And I'd like to dig into this a little bit. When sentencing comes into life, there's let's say a 50 -50 chance that the judge will decide to send him to prison. And that's something that we haven't really lent into or factored because it will mean a possibility that an elected president of the United States next year could be sent to a New York state court.

21:51And he would then probably appeal to the Supreme Court saying, this is going to cause a constitutional crisis. How on earth do I do my job as president if I'm in prison in a New York state court? And I think when votes has begin to think through what it's going to mean for a president to be at risk of being locked up in a New York state court while trying to do his job as president, that may put people off or am I wrong? Anthony Cassie? I would be surprised that it's 50 -50. I mean my understanding is that it's more like 1910 that he won't go to prison. It's a first criminal felony and it's a nonviolent crime.

22:30So whilst there is a maximum prison sentence possible of four years, the overwhelming majority of people in Donald Trump's position don't go to prison. More likely is some sort of fine or probation or possible probation. Now the probation could have an impact on his ability to campaign. If he has to check in with his probation officer, seems unlikely that he'd have to wear an ankle bracelet. That's not what I've heard from lawyers this morning, but he may be on probation. He might have to say to his probation officer, by the way, I've got to go and campaign in Georgia and they'd have to get signed off on that.

23:01Anthony, where do you put the odds of him going to prison? I don't think he goes to prison, but I will say this. If he thought he was going to prison and he thought there was no stopping that, he would be desperate to cut a deal. He does not want to go to prison. This guy's never been, he's a big baby. He's born with a silver spoon. He's never been at a bar fight. He has all of that overcompensating overmasculinity because of the baby nature of his personality. I'll just throw out a screenplay idea. Is it impossible for Joe Biden to call the governor of New York and the governor of Georgia, Brian Camp is a friend of mine and he's a Republican.

23:44Kathy Holk was a friend of Joe Biden to say, hey, let's cut this guy deal. You pardon him at the state level. I'll pardon him at the federal level, but he's got to go away. I know people will think that's probably crazy, but I'm telling you that has got to be in the potential matrix of outcomes. If this thing gets up somewhere, if the Supreme Court comes out and says, you don't have any immunity beyond professional immunity and they get Jack Smith to rev up one of those cases. Trump is going to panic because one thing I know about Trump, guys, he is a gun waiver. Okay, at the shootout at the okay canal, he's going to miss the tour because he'll wave the gun in a situation like that.

24:26He doesn't like being pressured like that. Right into the mix of this, we've got a TV debate in our election next week between Kierst, Darman, and Rishi Soonat, but there's going to be a TV debate between Trump and Biden. Let's just flip it around and think about from Joe Biden's perspective. He's standing there, sitting there, constantly being accused of rigging this, being in charge of this, politically motivated. How does he deal with Trump on that basis? Does he go kind of fists all flying? Does he try and sort of stand above it? Does he look down on Trump? How does he handle this? So people I spoke to on the Biden campaign just in the last few hours have pointed to a couple of things.

25:06They don't want Joe Biden to suddenly act like Donald Trump. They don't think that helps him go out fist flying or waving his gun even if he pointed it more directly. What they'd like to do is get sort of former respected department of justice people to come out and say very clearly the system is honest. This was not Joe Biden that was taking Donald Trump to court. The 12 members of the jury did their job. It was free and fair. So they want that and they want they would like to get Republicans like Larry Hogan, who we mentioned earlier, to do something similar to come out and kind of in a fair minded way speak to what the Biden campaign refers to as the 6 % of the six.

25:50The 6 % of voters in the six states that matter and try to re the people have not yet decided and try and reassure them that this was a fair process. And they think that comes better from ideally from sort of respected moderate Republicans and Department of Justice officials. They'll be doing the same thing. They've already started saying that. This was the system working. This was the American system of justice working and invite and is sort of in sight, I think some sense of patriotism. That's the other thing I'm hearing from Biden people. This shows that the American system of justice is not as Marco Rubio, the Senator from Florida, is saying a communist courtroom comparing it kind of Castro's Cuba, but this is the American system of justice and you can believe in it and you can be proud of it.