296. Could Donald Trump drop out?

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0:19Hello and welcome to the Restus Politics US with me, Katty Kaye. And me, Anthony Scaramucci. So, Anthony, how are you doing? I'm doing well, Katty. We've survived another week in political firestorms, right? Yeah, I mean, you know, I'm thinking back to three weeks ago. It was only three weeks ago that we saw that photograph you and I of Donald Trump after he had just been shot on that stage in Pennsylvania with the American flag behind him and the blue sky behind him. And we both texted each other, this is the winning shot of the campaign. That was three weeks ago. And I kind of think this has been a wonderfully humbling reminder of the fact that elections are not set in stone.

0:57I agree. And it's actually on my iPhone, that picture shows up as 1 ,024 AD. It looks like it's 1 ,000 years ago. Yeah. So, this is what happens now. The cycle is moving so quickly. I thought that that moment for him was a signature moment. And if you would, I asked, at the lecture, it was the whole day after. You would have won that election. But the chess pieces changed now, right? And it's a chess game. Some of it is game theory, some of it is selection. But they've now got a candidate and let's call it for what it is. They have a candidate that other than Fox News and some right wing leaning websites, the entire media establishment is behind the candidate.

1:41They are building for the candidate. They're building up the candidate. And they're building a persona and a profile of the candidate as a savior of not democracy alone, Cady. The new buzz word is freedom. And future. Yeah, we choose freedom. We choose future. We're not going back. Okay, so they've changed all of the messaging. And she is a great sales person. Okay, and you need a sales person at the top of the ticket. Now, she's in probable category because she got 1 % of the vote in the primaries. She was selected during the George Floyd crisis in the United States. But she's the accidental candidate, the accidental nominee.

2:21And as you and I both talk about, this is a surfing situation where there are candidates around their surfboards with their platforms and a wave is coming in. What wave is it? Is it a return to 1947? That's the Trump wave. Or are we going into 2025 with a imperfect union that's trying to make itself more perfect? That's the issue. We want to get into all of that. Anthony, you are a producers nightmare, by the way, because there is an order I meant to come in. We do a bit of chitchat. And then I do the show menu. It's called the menu is there. And it's highlighted poor Fiona, our producers at this point, having palpitations.

2:56So on this show, we are going to talk about the nightmare week that Trump has had. It's time that he spent with a room full of black journalists in Chicago at a conference that did not go. I think the way that he planned it to go. I think he deliberately went there for a fight. I want to get your take on that. But actually the fight was against him. He was not winning it. We're going to look at Kamala Harris's week and then a little bit on the VEEP stakes. We know that next Tuesday she is planning to have the big roll out in Pennsylvania of her vice presidential pick. We will talk about all of that.

3:29Then we're going to take a quick break. And we're going to answer some of your questions because you do have a lot of questions. We're going to look particularly at why evangelical Christians have become the bedrock of Trump support. So let's start with that national association of black journalists meeting conference up in Chicago where Donald Trump was invited on to the stage with three exceptional black women journalists. And I think he went there, said thinking to himself that he's going to get a fight that it's a fight he felt he was going to win. He was then going to replay all of the clips from that fight of him up on the stage talking about race to his supporters, to his mega supporters.

4:06But actually what happened during the course of that is that he came across as a bully, as kind of old fashioned. His views about America seemed to be exposed in a way that was also old fashioned. He kept calling the female journalist nasty and rude. At one point the room laughed at him, which I'm sure he didn't love. And I'm not sure that that black journalists conference went quite the way he hoped it was going to go. What do you think Andy? Was that a win for him or not a win for him? I'm not sure that it helped his campaign because I'm not sure it grew his base of support. Well, let me just start out for saying for sure it was not a win for him.

4:43He lost something there and he has very good to great, let's call it great political instincts. And he was extremely angry after that. And the reason I know that is the way the Pennsylvania event started. He went back to Pennsylvania as you know, David McCormick, who's a friend of mine. And I believe you know David McCormick and Dean of Powell. David is running for the Senate and he was so flustered and he had telepractors in front of him. He said, you're great, strong, great courageous leader who's running for governor. Do you want to come up on the stage? But David's running for the Senate and he made five or six major gaps like that.

5:21And they're not typical Trump gaps where he'll mispronounce a word. It's not a great reader. They were just gaps based on because I've seen them. Remember I did 71 campaign stops with him when he loses his temper. And I guarantee you on that flight, Depends of Anya, he was off the hook, upset about how that went down for him because it didn't go the way he expected. It did not go the way he expected. What he wanted to do was he wanted to blow up Kamala Harris's spot about being black. He thought that was going to go over well for some reason. I don't know who told them that was going to go over well.

5:53I'm going to give you what I learned from the campaign on that in a second. But the second thing that he did is he wanted to leave there, scaring the Democrats because he and his mind believes that the African American community loves him and that they're going to embrace him even though they're actually not going to embrace him. And he dug himself a very big hole, but just two quick things. When he uses the word nasty, it worked with Megan Kelly in 2016. He called her nasty, then he excused me for saying this. I apologize, but I want to say to our listeners who say crazy is he talked literally about her menstrual cycle that Don Lemon four days later, and it worked for him.

6:33Okay, but remember what I said earlier, right? 20 .2 million baby boomers have died. We have 33 million people in the country that are a voting age that identify as racially mixed. They have different parents of different places. Got blessed in the story of America. It's the fastest growing racial group in America is people who buy racial over. So three percent of the American electorate in 2010, 10 % of the American population today. So she went to a black historically black college and university Howard, right? She has identified her whole life as African American and South Asian. Her mother was of Indian origin.

7:08First of all, Caddy in 2024, how on God's earth could this possibly matter? Okay, but it does matter to a group of people that Trump is trying to galvanize. So he was out there. He has shed Lasavita and he has shed wilds for the moment. Those are the two people running his campaign who actually up until now have kept a pretty done a pretty good job of keeping him kind of on the straight and arrow. By the way, I think they've done an amazing job. I've said that. I got Harris. People mad at me for saying that. They're extremely disciplined. But they've done an amazing job while he was ahead in the polls.

7:41When he's behind in the polls, it's a different story. But let me tell you, and again, I'm sorry I'm hoggous, but I got this information from people that know what's going on. And I want to share it with everybody. So so here's what happened. Okay, they're doing great. Project 20, 25 is the thorn in their side. It's not polling well. People think it's a fascist racist movement. And this is classic Trump. He put 85 people. I have the list in front of me. 85 people into project 225. They're all his people. He's met with them many times. The person that wrote the forward to the book, Project 2025, is a gentleman by the name of JD Vance.

8:18Everybody know who that is? And so now he's trying to disavow it. This is what he does. When he fired me, he said he barely knew me. Okay, if you look at the tweets when he started attacking me, he said that he barely knew who I was and I claimed to know who he is. That's his MO. He goes to that MO. You could play golf with him, Caddy K, for 40 years. You could be at the ninth hole at the halfway house, dropped out of a heart attack. He'll turn around and say, who the hell was that? And who could play the last half of this round with me? That is Donald Trump, the most transactional person you ever meet.

8:51So he's now run over those 85 people. And he's got guys like Mike Cernovich, who are with him, saying, this is mutiny. This is blasphemy. You've blown out all the people that have been with you, all your loyalists, and you're listening to Las Avida, and you're listening to Susie Wiles, who are bush people, who are desantis people. They're from the original group of GOP, and you're leaving the people behind. So now he shed those guys for a moment, and he went back to the maggots. Make America great again. I add the tea because it sounds like maggots, like things that eat your flesh. And the maggots are telling him, below the racial dog whistle is hard as possible.

9:30Let's get every racist in the country. You identify with that when you want to. And as I said on Twitter, he's not a white racist cracker because he's orange. He's more like a Ritz racist cracker. And that's him. Okay, so he's out there blowing the dog whistle, and it's not working, Cady. And now he's got a struggle, tug of war between the maggots that are like, you blew up 2022 -25. Why did you do that to all of us? We're so loyal to you. And Las Avida and Wiles are saying, do you want to win this goddamn thing or not? What are you doing? I think you're right, and he is torn. Look, so here's what JD Vance actually wrote in that forward to Kevin Roberts' book, which is the leader of Project 2025.

10:09He wrote The Heritage Foundation, which is the group that came up with this, Project 2025. The Heritage Foundation isn't some random outpost on Capitol Hill. It is and has been the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump. This is the problem for Trump. He's put in place somebody who is a kind of conservative policy geek, and I think Trump is much more comfortable when things are personal. When he can go or not attack about personal things, he doesn't like things to be written down, he doesn't like to be pinned down on policy. And there is Vance, who he is now, by the way, given the most tepid endorsement of any presidential candidate I have ever heard of their Vice Presidential candidate, was Donald Trump this week suggesting that actually, at this same conference, well, the Vice Presidential pick doesn't matter very much.

10:58Anyway, people are really only voting for me. He's probably right about that. But it's not exactly, if you, by the way, Anthony, if you ever go on a show and somebody asks you, what do they think of your co -host? And you say about me that I don't matter, that Lamborghini of yours is going to end up wrapped around a lamppost. That is not the kind of thing that you say. Are you going to hire somebody to drive? Yeah, I'm going to take it. I'm going to take it and wrap around a lamppost. Oh, holy, like James Bond, like the British female James Bond. Like Jane Bond. You're going to roll it. You're going to roll the car and roll out of the car.

11:30Okay, I'm letting Tony Pastor know he owes me a Lamborghini. I'm going to go say some bad shit about you now. Does he? Do we do this? Yeah, this is my television. Fantastic. But I mean, who talks about their vice presidential candidate like that? I have never heard a presidential candidate talk about a vice presidential candidate in such dismissive ways. But who knows if he can get rid of him? I think he's found himself when he was riding high, you embrace things like Project 2025, you put the ticket on JD Vance, and then the problem for Donald Trump is he doesn't know how to run an effective campaign when he's behind in the polls.

12:04And what's happened in the last three seismic weeks in American politics is he's gone from being ahead in all of the polls to starting to slip in some of those swing state polls. And he can't figure out how to run a campaign like that. So I want to test something on you. Okay, and I want to get your reaction to it. So we have said, and you've agreed with me, or I have agreed with you, I can't remember who said it first, but we have cities able to take, say, two contradictory things at the same time, simultaneously, and get away with it. And I now believe that people are getting a little tired of that, and he was able to do that because he was running it up against an 81 -year -old that was in heavy decline.

12:41Joe Biden, great guy, he'll go down to history well, but he was not capable of running the campaign that Vice President Harris can run. And so now he's caught in a tongue twister. He can't do the things that he was doing to Joe Biden to Kamala Harris. Do I have that right? Or is he getting caught up? Yeah. Or am I missing that? I think he thinks he's still back in 2015, 2016, when this played well, and America is changing. My feeling, and it always has been about Donald Trump, is that the backdrop to a lot of Donald Trump's support, is that in 2044, America becomes a minority white country, and you have a whole load of white men, in particular men out there, who, by virtue of their race and the fact that they have a white chromosome, have been given historically for centuries a position of power in every society, but in the United States as well.

13:33And they can see that power slipping away, women are starting to earn more than them. They are better educated than them. They're more of them in Congress. God damn it, there might be one of them in the White House soon. And I think that's producing this real fear, which is what gave us Donald Trump elected in 2016. The problem is, the country has changed, as we discussed last week. The country has changed since 2016. Those numbers of people who are biracial in America are just one sign of that changing. And people are like, this isn't even interesting anymore. And I think when Kamala Harris dismissed all of his comments at the Black Journalist Conference as same old show, by the way, I think that word old was very pointed, very, it was not a mistake that she used the word old in reference to Donald Trump.

14:16I think that's the way Democrats handle this. It's sort of boring. And I don't think it has the traction that it had in 2016. Right, so you and I agree on all this. I think it's obviously very insightful. There's another Harris here. And I don't know if you picked it up, but I watched the tape four times. The woman's name is Harris Faulkner. And I think you know Harris. And I know Harris very well. I've been on the air with her at Fox. She's an amazingly gifted African American female journalist. She was the last woman on the panel. She was to the far right of the president. And by the way, she's a fan of the president since she works at Fox News.

14:52She gasped, Cadi -Kadi. When he called Rachel Scott a nasty, nasty woman in that bullying way that he's done successfully for eight years, she gasped. I don't remember exactly what she said. I think even said something like, you serious? Seriously? You serious? Something like that. That's when he deflated. That's when the anger started because he's not a dummy. When he lost Harris Faulkner, who's an African American that he sees as part of his African American base. When he lost her on the stage, that's when he started losing his way in the conversation. That's when the conversation went completely haywire on him.

15:31And that's when he got back on the plane and he blew a gasket on the plane. I've seen that gasket blow, by the way. And that's not a fun thing for staff when his gasket blows. So now she went on -handity last night. Okay, so Sean had it. Obviously, but famous talk show host on Fox last 20 years. I read a show and she tried to dig herself out of her body language by praising Donald Trump on -handity show last night. But if you watch that tape, which I did, it was quite active last night, Cadi K in preparation for this. It was when I was getting the 3 a .m. text. I was a little worried. You were getting through it.

16:05Yeah, it was time for sleeping. I know, I was still up. But anyway, she was so blah. Like the wind was out of her and she was so, oh my God, this guy's losing it. Okay, now if he is losing it, it could be very, very bad for him. But you know that three weeks ago, we thought he was winning the election. So in three weeks time, we'll have to see what happens. If I were on the Kamala Harris staff, stay disciplined, stay on message, do things that work with your crowd, go into unexpected territory. But that's safe for you. You know, do things that will keep you in the spotlight and on message that we're not going back.

16:44If I was Donald Trump, I would say, hey man, go into the bathroom, the gold plated toilet bathroom with the gold plated faucets, splash some water on your face and go back to Lasavita and Susie and say, what the hell is going on here? And how do I change myself? Yeah, chances of that Donald Trump changing himself, I mean, one of the things we've learned about Donald Trump is that he doesn't change himself and he's immutable. He's the same guy he was in 2016. He tried for a very little while to be nice. But he was on message discipline for a while, Gatti. Okay, so listen, you tweeted something that I want to bring up, which is that you think, and it's making headlines in the States, you think there is a possibility that Donald Trump drops out of the race.

17:27Talk to me about that, where that cutting king comes from, and how that would happen. Yeah, remember, I still have friends with Trump. I still talk to a lot of US Republican senators. I'm on many of their donor lists. You'll find me there. They're tolerating Trump. They're putting up with Trump because they want to stand power. But he's not their cup of tea because of the way he handles himself. And some of these people have suggested to me, particularly people, political insiders, he does not want to go to jail. And his number one thing, I'm running because it looks like the Supreme Court is going to give me broad immunity.

18:00It looks like I can part of myself from every bad thing that I've done. And I can play golf, let other people run the country. It sounds like I could bring in all these projects to 25ers. Eventually, they'll run in dismantled the democracy while I'm playing golf. And I'll be free. And I'll probably make a couple billion dollars off the presidency. So I want to do this. Okay, fine. So he's doing it. But if he drops in the polls, number one, he's lost the popular vote twice. He's the worst presidential candidate for Republicans since Herbert Hoover. Herbert Hoover lost the House, the Senate, and the presidency.

18:33Only two Republicans have done that in 125 years. That's him and Herbert Hoover, Donald Trump and Herbert Hoover. So he does not want to lose the Kamala Harris. Trust me on that. Okay. And if he could figure out a way to cut a deal, and I don't think they pardon him, but could he go to Holkall, governor of New York, Biden, and Brian Kemp, the governor of Georgia, and could he say, hey, I want to be commuted, I have a sentence commutation, I'll plead to something, no jail time for me, he steps out, he could do that. The other thing he could do, is he could say, you know what, XYZ is going on. He's always hints at health issues.

19:08He could designate, he could kick Vance off the ticket, because that's not going to work, he's got negative ratings. We'll talk about Vance in a second, and he could go with Haley, and he could go with the Santas, they would be formidable against Vice President Harris, and whoever her pick is, we'll go into those in a second. But my point is there's a pass for him if he drops in the polls and the predictive market is shoot up, and he starts to panic. There's a pass for him to get out of the race, blame it on a health issue, cut a deal, and avoid jail. So there are three things in Trump's brain, money, attention, it's not running the country or serving people.

19:41It's money, attention, and the third thing is avoid jail. And if he starts losing, he's going to see the bar. Do you ever play him in Opley, Cady? Look at him. Yeah, of course. I was always the car, your Lamborghini, ideally. He was the car, oh my god, if you smash my Lamborghini, I mean, because you know, I'm like a social media worker. Could you imagine how good that would be on social media? Your kids would be upset with you though. I know a few of your kids like Lambrose. It would be an expensive social media hit for you. But anyway, yeah. So basically Trump is trying to get that $50, get out of jail free code.

20:13100%. So I know people say, okay, where are you getting this all from? I know how this man thinks. This is not sourced. I just want to make sure that people know that this is an analysis based on his personality and talking to a few insiders. So first source was Camel Harris is replacing Joe Biden before the end of July. Here's how it's going to go down. That was sourced. But this is just analysis based on knowing him and knowing what he's now up against. Okay, he's up against an Obama -like movement. Okay, there are women in this country that are saying to some, hmm, I like my reproductive freedom.

20:48I would like my daughter and granddaughter to have reproductive freedom. Is Camel Harris going to take that from me? I don't think so. And oh, by the way, I want to see a woman president in my lifetime. Hmm, you see what's going on? Yeah. He's trying to rationalize his way through that and he's having a hard time. Well, look, this has been a campaign of weird and wonderful events happening that neither of us a month ago would have predicted. Or even before that debate would have predicted. I didn't predict how badly that debate was going to go. And I didn't predict the speed with which everything was going to unfold, although I was hearing the same stuff as you were hearing about Joe Biden stepping down.

21:22So let's see what happens. I mean, I'm so reluctant at the moment to call this election for November because so much has happened that has changed it and how old McMillan was right. Events are the thing that every politician worries about. And let's see what more events there are going to be between now and November the 5th. Do you think JD Vance is going to stay in the race? I think if Donald Trump stays in the race, we're doing so many permutations here. If Donald Trump stays in the race, I think he keeps JD Vance because it's very hard for him to admit he's made a mistake. Okay, so I think he comes out of the race.

21:56I think Trump has already realized that he's made a mistake. He fires people. And I think it's remember he loves attention more than anything else. And I think he's trying to figure out a way. How do I fire this guy after the Democratic National Convention? Because I'm going to fire him. I'm going to reach out to Nikki Haley. I'm going to reach out to some of these other people because, you know, I got to make a calculation here. I'm now running against the woman. Haley is very politically ambitious. Can I get her on the ticket and swap out JD Vance and go the last 70 days with Nikki Haley. And so if I'm Donald Trump and I want to win, he's gone.

22:29He's already talking about him like he's yesterday's news and we wrapped fish in yesterday's news. And so remember, he just blew up Project 225. And so he's like Tony soprano. He'll run over you in the gas station. He'll squash it head like a melon. That was the last season of sopranos. In case you have soprano fans out there. And that's Donald Trump. He'll run these people over. So I think he's out of the race. I know it's a long shot call. But I'm going to say that. I understand why you think he's in the race. Who do you think is going to be Camel Harris's VP? So I interviewed Mark Kelly, the guy you like, who is the senator from Arizona this week.

23:04The former astronaut 25 years in the US Navy. It was the first interview I interviewed him on Morning Joe. It was the first interview that he had done since Joe Biden stepped down from being the nominee. I thought he was he was good. He's solid. He has a great resume. He's not a world on fire communicator. And I didn't see him as easily as I see some of the others up on a stage with JD Vance if that's who the VP pick is. I asked him if he was going to be the VP pick. He demured as they all do in Vepesteaks weeks. Although of course they're actually there auditioning and hoping that she's watching.

23:40He said it's not about him. She's got a lot of great choices out there. He made the point of saying that he'd served 25 years in the US Navy. He praised Joe Biden. So he said all of the things that you need to say if you're auditioning to be vice presidential pick. He just didn't say them in an amazingly punchy succinct charismatic way. I have to say if I was going for pure political athlete, the person to take on JD Vance is clearly people to judge. He is the one who does it super -articulately. He relishes the role. He's been very good on Fox News. I still don't think that you're going to have a woman, a woman of color, and a gay guy as the VP pick.