302. It’s Trump’s Race to Lose

23:54I looked at that. I said, that's going to win her the election. If she stays on that message, she's going to win the election because you know, the American people down that's the Barack Obama message. We're not ready to go. We're purple states. Right. We're red, white and blue, right? Or something like that. He said, and that's the message. Okay. So she may be a little talkative. She may not get all the soundbites right on policy, but she's got the vibe right. She has got the vibe right. And she's a dancing machine. Okay. She's a dancing machine and she knows how to smile. And this guy doesn't smile.

24:28And let me tell you that is some weird ass. You know what? With the dance that this guy does. Okay. I don't even know what he's doing. It looks like one of those, you know, those blow up things. We're trying to get you to buy like an appliance somewhere and it's the hands are flapping. That's the Donald Trump dance. Okay. She's got the vibe right. She's got youth on her side. She got energy. The focus groups are all saying she's energetic. That helps. Take a chill. Get yourself the nomination. Give a beautiful speech. And then you go on 60 minutes or have Kadi K interview you. Everybody take a chill.

24:58Okay. But I wouldn't be doing anything between now and now. Yeah. We haven't had one for a while. Anthony. So it is time. We're going to do two things. We're going to have a little pop quiz. It's an easy one. Don't worry. No, don't look sad. Don't look sad. And then we're going to take steam when you do these pop quizzes. You know, it hurts me. And then we're going to take a question from Charles Cummings, who's one of my favorite spinos. Okay. So the question is what percentage of 18 to 29 year olds voted in 2020? Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, man. I got to jump. It's just like the prizes. Right. I'm just going to throw out a guess because I absolutely have no idea.

25:36I'll say 24 percent 50 percent. 50. A lot more than I thought. Young voters actually put Joe Biden across the line in the 2020 election. And that was up 11 points from 2016. So the question for Kamaharis is all those tick tockers. Are they actually going to turn into voters? Because if she can keep them at 50 percent, that's going to help her. Okay. Here is the question. It comes from Charles Cummings, who, as I said, is one of my very favorite UK spy novelists. And I think you've downloaded one of his books. I looked it up. I think it was box 88 or something like that. I got to look it up. Yep.

26:10I just downloaded that book. So the question that Charles DMed me on X as well was, if Harris wins, what chance is there of in the future of the electoral college being reformed so that it more fairly reflects the will of the people just to explain for international listeners, actually, for American listeners, too, because a lot of people don't understand what the electoral college is. It works by assigning a set number of electoral votes to each state, which is roughly in line with the size of that state's population. And then the candidate who wins the majority of the votes in that state. So it's a winner take all also wins all of that state's electoral college votes.

26:53You have to get 270 electoral college votes. There are a total of 538 to become president and the national popular vote doesn't really matter. So it's all about winning those 270 electoral college votes, which are got by winning the majority of votes in any individual state. California, for example, has 55 electoral college votes. If you win the majority of the votes in California, you get all of those 55 electoral college votes. It's a really good question. I mean, everyone seems to think that the electoral college is there and it's immutable. There have been at least 700 proposed amendments to modify or abolish the electoral college.

27:36The last attempt, serious attempt was in 2004, but really since the late 1960s, there hasn't been enough bipartisan support to try and get this done. LBJ wanted to reform it. Nixon actually agreed with proposals to reform it, but it's always been protected by southern senators because it was an inbuilt mechanism for giving white voters in the south more clout. And in the late 1960s, when it came up for vote in Congress, it was the Senate that killed it led by conservative white senators who wanted to keep their superiority in the voting blog. I mean, it is, I think it is a system that needs to be reformed because we keep having situations where one candidate, usually the Democrat, will win the popular vote and not win the electoral college vote.

28:30And it deprives millions of Americans in large states like California and Texas and New York of their voice. I think it does need to be reformed. What do you think, Anthony? Okay, so I'm going to take the other side of this and I'm going to explain why because these men, and frankly, it was mostly men, so I'm going to use that pronoun. When they sat down to construct this government, they looked over thousands of years of history and they said, okay, what would work? What would create the freest, flatter society? And what creates that is a decentralized government where there's so many checks and balances in the system, there's absolutely no power.

29:11And if you're a history buff on this stuff, go to the Jack Kennedy interview, Huntley and Brinkley are interviewing him one year after he is in office. He's sitting on the rocking chair. They say, Mr. President, how's it going? He said, I ran for the House of Representative. My father told me there'd be a lot of power. I got there. There was no power. The power must be in the Senate. So I went and ran for the Senate. I won. I'm in the Senate. There's no power. Oh my god, this guy, the power's got to be downpensive. Yeah, he's got to be in the presidency. Let me go run for the presidency. And he says, guys, I'm sitting here rocking in the chair.

29:43There's no power here either. Okay. I love that. So any any Senate in this level of genius observation of the system, he liked the fact that he didn't have the power because it meant that the people are freer when you don't have an autocrat or a tyrant at the top of the system. It's very, very important for the Americans. The second thing was very important is that they embedded a republic into the system. It wasn't just going to be a representative democracy. And there's writings on this. You can go to the the papers, the federalist papers. You can go to other writings. You can go to Franklin's writings.

30:17Franklin has a very famous line. It's a republic. If you can keep it, why did they want a republic? They did not want mob rule. They did not want the popular vote to rule. Why did they not want that? Because they wanted to protect minorities in the system. I'm not talking about black or brown people, Caddy. I'm talking about people that didn't win the election. They always wanted there to be a balance of representation. That's what a republic does. If you read the writings of Cicero or you read the writings of Cato, the republic was designed to protect people that were not in power. That's why the Senate, each of these states has two representatives, whether the state of California or a tiny state like Rhode Island or the Dakotas.

30:59And so the electoral college was part of that system. You would have the coastal cities and you would have the presidential candidates leaning into the coastal cities that just work off the popular vote. And I wouldn't want that. And I know it's a little messy right now. But what the electoral college provides is representation for these flyover states in a presidential election. And I think it's worked that I think it's been meaningful. And I personally don't want to change it. So what about the alternative point of you, which is the electoral college was basically set up in a way to give southern states which had large non -voting slave populations and would have had less clout under a popular vote system because they had a whole load of slaves who couldn't vote.

31:45So the electoral college was set up to give them more clout than they deserve. So historically it was sort of not representative of America today. But at some point you just get out of whack if you keep having Democrats as happened in 2016, as happened in 2000, winning the popular vote but not winning the electoral college. At some point it's a cause of enormous friction. And I get what you're saying about not wanting urban coastal elites to dominate the whole country. But take a state like California, 34 % of Californians voted for Donald Trump in 2020. But they got none of that states 55 electoral college votes.

32:25I mean in a way it's not even it doesn't represent Republicans votes. So if you are in California or in Texas or in New York, your vote is sort of worthless. That's not democratic either. And I think at some point if the pattern keeps being repeated that you get a candle that like Donald Trump as he did in 2016, managing to squeak through the electoral college but not win the popular vote. If that happens time and again every time a Republican is elected to the White House, it will undermine people's faith in the democratic system. So I think something I don't know that you need to do away with the electoral college.

32:59Maybe you need to have some form of PR within state, proportional representation within states or maybe you need to have some reassessment of the number of electoral college votes per state. I don't know what it is but I don't know that it's sustainable when the discrepancy is this broad. There was a Pew poll in 2023 that suggested two thirds of American adults would like the electoral college to be reformed and that they say the president should be elected to reflect the winner of the popular vote nationwide. It would take 66 votes in the Senate. By the way, the reason this is probably not going to happen is that to make an amendment of this sort would take 66 votes for one party in the Senate and the chances of either Democrats or Republicans having a 66 vote majority in the Senate is very, very slim in the times we're living in.

33:44But you don't think there has to be something you're not worried about this disconnect between the popular vote and the electoral college vote becoming sort of more and more pronounced with each election. What I am worried about is our short -sightedness. What I'm worried about is not taking a step back and looking at the 250 year history of the United States and why this is work. Everything that you said is legitimate and these are all legitimate arguments for reform. And so if they go with the reform it's completely understandable but this is a piece of time and it's a slice of time that is too short for somebody like me to want to make a reform like that.

34:21Right? We're going to talk about being a Republican and being a conservative with conservativeism is about actually is there certain things about the society that you want to conserve or preserve. So for me I don't think we have enough data. Everything you just said is valid. I get it. But I'm going to tell you what Florida was a purple state. It's become a red state. You could have a situation where New York, now a blue state. Who the hell knows? We could get a reform, Republican governor. He starts building this whole system. Next thing you know it's a red state. I just want to be careful. The biggest mistakes I've made as an investor is I look at my accounts caddy.

35:02Do you know that the dead people at Charl Schwab do better than the living people from an investment perspective because they don't look at their accounts. They can't manage the account from a Ouija board. And what I don't want to do is make a big change on something because we're looking at it. We're staring at it too closely. Warren Buffett tells people his best decisions are when he does nothing. Sometimes you need to do that in a society on certain things. The template is we have representation. You get the vote. You have a house of representatives. The Senate is a check on the majority rule.

35:39And the electoral college is one of those checks too. And I don't want mob rule in this country on either side. And I think Franklin understood that even Hamilton and Jefferson who used to go off on each other 250 years ago both agreed to that. I think that's that's very fair and that there is not enough data. And I'm certainly not suggesting this with a view to thinking this would help Democrats stay in power or help Republicans stay in power. I'm suggesting it with a view to shoreing up the strength and the health of the democratic process and giving people as much faith in the democratic process as possible from either side of the ledger.

36:16And it's quite possible that one day California goes red or New York goes red or Texas goes blue. These states can flip. You just have to ensure that people have so little faith in institutions and in democracy and at a time where I think there is a sort of bit of a power struggle going on between autocracies and democracies in the world. Whatever we can do to make democracy as healthy and strong and believable and trustable as possible. Let's start with Jerry Manning. Yes. Which we've spoken about. Yeah. So quickly there was a guy named Gary. He was a representative in the town of Swamskype Massachusetts.

36:49And so he redistricted. And when you step back and you looked at the map, it looked like a salamander. It looked like a salamander. So the people in the town said this looks like a Gary Mander. A Gary Mander because he redistricted in a way when you step back and you know that. Yeah. That's the origin of Jerry Manning because it looked like a salamander. Okay. That is something we should perform. That has ruined the proportionality that's gained the system. I submit to you rhetorically. I thought the voters were supposed to pick the politicians. Now the politicians pick the voters through Gary Mandarin.

37:26Let's start there. I'd like to reform that. I'd like to break that fever on the United States. Okay. We're going to take a quick break. And then after that in the second half of the program, we're going to talk about what it means to be a Republican in today's America. We'll be back in a minute.

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38:57Welcome back to the rest is politics US with me, Katty Kay. And I'm Anthony Scaramucci. In this half, we want to talk about what it means to be a Republican in America today, in a party where Donald Trump so dominates the Republican Party. Anthony, this is a discussion I've wanted to have a wife with you for a while, because I know you are a member of the Republican Party. You have been for many years. You voted for many Republican politicians. And I know that also clearly that you don't like Donald Trump, who is the head of the Republican Party and you don't want him to be elected. But what does it mean to you today to be a Republican in terms of ideology as opposed to being a Democrat?

39:40Because I don't think you're a Democrat either. No, I'm definitely not a Democrat. And I'm not a Republican in Donald Trump's Republican Party. So he shifted the party. It's almost as if you, Lee Long and Charles Lindbergh had a baby. And the baby was raised by Roy Cone and that baby was Donald Trump. And so if you understand our history, we've had America first movements. We've had isolationist movements. We've had ruthless people that have been on both sides of the political spectrum. But that's the Republican movement. It's isolationist. It's American activism. It's American nativism. It's us first.

40:19Everyone else lasts. Don't let anybody else into the country. I don't like newcomers. I only like the people that are here already. And that's Donald Trump's party today. And it upsets me because I grew up in a union family. My dad was a member of a union. He was a crane operator out here on Long Island. And it was an obscure thing in Nassau County. But the Republican Party controlled the union. And so my father was adamant about all of us registering as Republicans and voting in those town councilmen that were helping him with his wages. So I became a Republican by accident. Then I went to school.

40:55And I was at school. Ronald Reagan was president of the United States. And so I'm going to just tick off a few things about for me what it means to be Republican. Reagan, optimistic, Reagan, aspirational, Reagan. We're going to make sure that the government has fair regulation for business. We're going to lower your taxes so that you too can be a part of the American dream aspirational and aspirational laboratory for America muscular. We're going to have a good sound national defense policy. Ronald Reagan said peace through strength. I'm going to keep us out of wars by strengthening our military and oh, by the way, we're a benevolent country.

41:36And so therefore we're going to peacekeeping operations around the world. I'm not interested in wars. Remember he pulled us out of Lebanon after the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks. Reagan I'm going to be tough on the Soviet Union. But if they want peace, I'll have a rapprochement with them. And he went in his last year of the presidency to meet Gorbachev in Moscow. Reagan, by the way, on the way to that summit, he stopped and met with all the Jewish refuse nicks in Moscow before he got to the Kremlin. That's Reagan. I'm for peace. I'm for liberty. I've heard this aspirational opportunity.

42:10So that's how I grew up in the Republican Party. When George Herbert Walker Bush took the leadership, it was no bleatial blight. He was more of an aristocrat than Ronald Reagan. But he believed in the rules based society and the post -war war to economy and the post -war war to structure. That's the party that I grew up in. That's the party of Eisenhower. That's the party of Reagan. This party dates back to Abraham Lincoln, who was the first Republican presidential candidate. The Wig Party dissolved over the fight over slavery. Lincoln said that we had to get rid of it. They formed a new party called the Republicans.

42:45He won the presidency with only 43 % of the vote. So that's the party I'm part of. That's the party of Mitt Romney. That's the party of John McCain. In 2012, we sat down as a party and I've discussed this on our podcast and said, okay, we've got a lot of things wrong here. What the Republicans did in the 1960s and 70s after the Civil Rights Act, they went with something called the Southern strategy. So they were blowing racist dog whistles to try to secure the Southern Sunbelt states. We got a little off -kilter. What we said in 2012, we probably need to be more embracing of this beautiful colorful mosaic of the American people.

43:20By the way, George W. Bush had been compassionate conservatism. We were trying to do that. He was trying to do that. We were trying to fix all of this. When Romney lost in 2012, we said, okay, we got to have a new message. Then in came Donald Trump with his 15 million celebrity apprentice viewers, in came Donald Trump with his 100 % name ID. Remember, the number one thing you need to be president in the United States is name recognition. That's the number one thing. Money is second. People know who you are when they look at the, oh, I know that guy. I'm going to vote for him. A lot of low information voters.

43:55They voted the last minute. They're not as tied into politics as you and me. So it just finished up this thought. Mr. Trump came in. He big footed the establishment and then he did something that no politician does. He said controversial things. Politicians get to a microphone like this and they say blah, blah, blah. And they try to get out of the room without offending anybody. Trump came in as like an orange wrecking ball, smashing into things. And he saw something that I'm embarrassed to tell you, Caddy K. I did not see. Okay, and this is my mistake. And I have to own this or the rest of my life.

44:29But I grew up in a blue collar neighborhood. But I ended up going to Tufts and Harvard. And then I started hanging out with hedge fund people and going to Davos, Switzerland. And I got to confirmed biases of the elites. So what I didn't see is that the people I grew up with who were blue collar aspirational, they became blue collar economically desparational over a 35 year period of time due to various bipartisan policies. Trump sought, he went into those areas, I was there with him, 71 campaign stops with him. And he was talking directly to those people and they looked at him and said, okay, this guy gets it.

45:07I'm suffering here. My children are going to do worse than I did. That's very un -American from our American idealism. But Trump represents a demolition of the current status quo of the political environment. So yes, he can shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue. I don't care. I'm voting for him come Heller Highwater. And so what he did, Caddy, is he perverted the Republican party. And he turned it into Joe McCarthy's party, Charles Lindbergh's party, you, we longs party, Father Kaplan. These are all the ancient nativists in the country. And by the way, classically Lincoln would be rolling in his grave because Lincoln wanted inclusion and Lincoln wanted a fairer society for people.

45:51I went through the list of kind of things that you talked about. Optimistic, that's not really where the Republican party under Trump is aspirational, no, muscular, no, tough on Soviet Union, no, not at the moment. But there are a couple of things that maybe you still have in common with a Republican party under Donald Trump. And that's, you described as a fair regulation. A lot of people would describe it as deregulation and low taxes. And Donald Trump in his economics speech this week also suggested that there are going to be lower taxes for Americans. So are there policy issues take out the nativism and the appeal to people's desire to blame somebody else for their economic circumstances?

46:33Are there things that still in policy terms you feel more affinity with the Republican party, even today's Republican party than you do with the Democratic party? Yes and no. So yes, I want there to be fairer regulation. I want us to have a comprehensive energy strategy. You have to go from coal to oil to natural gas. You can't just cut everything and pretend you're going to have wind supply the energy for this industrial economy. It's not going to work. Okay. And all of that optics and all of that virtue signaling is a bunch of malarkey to use the Joe Biden expression. And so yes, I'm for a practical business and practical energy policies, practical tax policies.

47:15However, what I don't like is the profit of spending. You know, Donald Trump spent $7 .9 trillion in four years. We went from George Washington to George W. Bush $7 trillion, four years of Donald Trump spending like John Kinsaleurs. And so we can't do that to our grandchildren or a great care and children. But in a sense, Anthony, isn't that? Isn't the rejection of fiscal conservatism that you heard? I mean, at its peak, you heard it in 2012 at the Republican National Convention. I was there, Mitt Romney's Convention. And it wasn't just an economic policy. It was a badge of patriotism to talk about deficit reduction.

47:54It was almost an act of faith to talk about deficit reduction. He would have been a great president. And he had some great ideas to reduce that deficit, which maybe someday we'll talk about. But what happened here, Trump saw something that other policies didn't see. Trump went to those blue collar workers, which is partly why I imagine you were attracted to Trump in the beginning. He went to America's working class and said, you know what? This deficit reduction stuff, that's for the coastal elites in the party. What we actually need to do is forget the idea of cutting social services, cutting your pensions, cutting your health care, because that doesn't help the working class.

48:34And he gave the working classes in America in a way by expanding deficits. He gave them something that they wanted and needed. I mean, is that too? He flipped the Democrats. He took the Democrats tent. And he said, you know, he flipped it up and put it up in the Republican garden and said, okay, we are no longer the party of deficit reduction. We're the party of spending. You see, you are so eloquent and you're like a posh Brit. So I'm going to say it differently than you. Okay. Ready? I'm walking up the plane steps with Trump. And I'm like, wow, that wasn't really a Republican speech that you just gave me.

49:06We were in like a youngstown Ohio. He looks at me as we're wrapping up the plane. He says, hey, I'm basalt. I said, yes, sir. He says, you're fiscally conservative and you're socially liberal, right? You're a New Yorker. Aren't you fiscally conservative and socially liberal? You're a New Yorker from Wall Street. I said, yes, sir, Mr. Trump. That's exactly what I am. Well, you're an imbecile. Let me tell you where these Republicans are. They're socially conservative pro life. They are fiscally liberal. You've got the whole thing wrong, Scaramucci. And this is where they are. And that's why I'm talking to him this do not underestimate the SOB's political instincts.

49:44Okay. And so the current crop of voters that sit in the Republican party are they have an orthodoxy or around Christianity, S. Tim Alberta. And they have a view. There's a great sign from the Tea Party. And there's a guy out there he's holding a sign up. It says, get your government hands off my Medicare. And then there's a journalist who looks up to the guy, excuse me, that's a government program. And the guy goes, oh, oh, okay. And then he slinks away. The point is they don't I mean, come on, Cady, this is Trump's America. And if the Harris people don't understand what I'm saying, they're going to lose the election.

50:20They have to calibrate themselves to Perry with Trump. No, you don't have to like them. But this guy went from reality star and real estate executive 18 months later to the American presidency. So you can't deny his political acumen. But I think he's a nut job. And I want to return to some level of normal Republicanism. And the last president of balance budget was actually Bill Clinton, a Democrat. And the last president since then to reduce deficit spending was Barack Obama, also a Democrat. I'm actually the Republican party has spoken about fiscal conservatism, but they have it's George W. Bush and Donald Trump who have boosted deficit spending.

50:59So this is the fascinating thing that you're saying. And I just want to add something to it. And people can google this. If you go back to 1990 George Bush and Richard Darwin, his budget director said we had too much deficit spending under Reagan. Let's put up some guard rails and you can google this. It's called page you go legislation. We're going to have a tax cut. We have to find something in the budget to cut. If we're going to increase social services, we have to increase taxes. Bush put this in place. And then when the Gulf War happened, we went into a recession. He raised social services because of the recession.

51:34And therefore he raised taxes. Read my lips. No new taxes. He lost the election. But Bill Clinton got bless him. It heared to the page you go legislation. There was a very famous battle. Bob Rubin, my old boss and Robert Reich, the Secretary of Labor, my old professor from Harvard Law School. They were fighting in the Roosevelt room. One wanted to raise taxes to pay for all the services that Clinton wanted. The other one said just spend deficits. And Bob Rubin won that. He said, beware of the bond vigilantes. And they set up an eight year plan to reduce the deficit. And it worked, Caddy. We had a 240 billion dollar surplus at the end of Bill Clinton's fiscal year 2000.

52:18So anyway, just the point I'm making is it was started by Republicans. Clinton adhered to it and it worked. And then George W Bush unraveled it when he went to war with the Afghanistan and Iraq. I just have one quick question. Could you see the Republican Party once Donald Trump has left the stage and somebody else is the leader of the Republican Party. Could you see the party returning to the classic American Republican principles of free trade deficit reduction and global leadership or has that party left the station? So I believe that I think like an entrepreneur, I think that party has left the station.

52:56And I think a new center right coalition has to be rebuilt. I think you have to take elements of the 2012 playbook. I think you have to take elements of what Trump is actually saying. And you have to convince the 20 % of the people that feel left out in the system that they too can be aspirational in the system. And so the party that will win as a center right coalition is a healing unifying party. And so we need a leader of that party is very different from Donald Trump, but does take elements of what he is saying and weaves it into a new narrative. And we'll have to see who or what happens. But Trump is because his personality based when Donald Trump eventually leaves the stage unless he does some type of performative coup, Allah project 2025.

53:45But if he when he leaves to stage, Trumpism is over, but the Republicans that I grew up with also over, you need a new center right coalition that has elements of what he's talking about and elements of the old world. That's it for this week. Join us next week when we're going to be at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. And we will be doing extra editions of the rest of politics US on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday night after the Vice President Kamala Harris accepts her nomination as the candidate for the Democratic Party for the presidency. But for now for the rest of politics US, thanks for listening.

54:21Tune in next week. I'm Kadi Keh. And I'm Anthony Scaramucci. Hope to see you next week.