Anthony Scaramucci Thinks Trump Has "Lost a Step"

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All that we do is put together people who are smart, people who are brave, people who are honest, and lots of times people who've never met each other to have a conversation that has never happened before, but on that day deepens everyone's understanding about the moment in which we gather.

Deadline White House with Nicole Wallace, weekdays from 4 to 6 p.m.

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There are always going to be people that believe believe an oligarchy or an aristocracy can run the country better, right?

Because they're the elitist.

They think they're smarter than everybody else.

But Lincoln, you know, Lincoln said to Douglas in the debates, he said, hey, you know, people think the American people are not smart, but let me tell you something.

They have a very good nose.

They can smell a rotting cadaver in their basement.

That was literally the quote.

And we have a rotting cadaver in the basement right now.

Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Best People podcast.

This week's guest is one of my favorite human beings, but he also happens to be a duration of time and someone so iconic at this moment that his name is preceded by a the.

So, without any further ado, welcome Anthony Scaramucci to the Best People.

That was a pretty auspicious introduction.

I mean,

well, look, you're one of my favorites too.

I mean, hopefully, there'll be a mutual love festier, but I'm actually very flattered to be on your incredibly high-profile podcast, Nicole.

So thank you.

You're a much bigger podcaster than me.

Oh, no, I don't know about that.

I watch all of your clips.

I watch everything that you got.

You're a triple threat, though.

You've got the podcast.

You've got the show.

You know how to write.

You're a sports fan.

I don't know.

You got everything.

I, like you today, have nothing without my Mets.

I don't know what to do with myself.

We didn't have any life planned this month because we thought we'd be busy.

The TVs are all black.

What happened to our Mets?

Well, i mean listen i mean they didn't have the pitching at the end of the day the pitching wins if you saw the red sock yankee game last night two to one red socks at the pitching three three to one red socks yeah you know why i loved that i loved watching a game where i didn't care who won i mean i i root for the yankees i'm a new yorker but i wasn't it wasn't like i felt like i needed something to get through it the way i did have the pitch-by-pitch anxiety is what you're talking about right what you experience you know but you know listen i mean that was a bad collapse but i remember the 1998 season where Bobby Valentine, a good friend of mine managing the Mets, they had to win one of the last five games, Nicole.

They lost all five games and missed the playoffs.

So

the movie's been run before, but I don't know.

I think City Field is a Native American burial ground that's been disturbed.

And I think to shake the curse, we got to get in there and figure out what we did wrong there because there's something wrong with that field.

They put great players players on the field, great stats, and it never gels for the Mets.

And that's been a big dilemma for them for the last 40 years.

But my understanding is it's not them, like that as a unit that there's not an asshole on the team, that they like each other.

Lindore has got all the emotional intelligence to rally them when they're down.

Like what is your what is wrong?

I think that's it though.

You see, I think Lindore, to me, I'm probably going to get in trouble for this because I love him as a player.

He's a great guy, but you're too lovey-dovey, okay?

When the Marlins are scoring and you're elbow bumping people, 3-0 Marlins, when you're trying to get it in the playoffs, what are you doing?

We got to win.

I get the family and the lovey-dovey stuff, but I want some ass kicking out there, actually, and I want to win games.

But the counterfactual, right, is Trey Turner, like once they fell in love with him and started cheering him on, he started performing for them.

I know you talk to everybody making the decisions.

What's your advice other than more tough love?

Well, I mean, I would have a three-pronged approach number one do not let me go was not his fault he's actually a very good strategist and a good coach and i think he's going to be a phenomenal long-term manager number two let's play to win guys and i think we've got to sharpen that attitude out there and i think it starts with landor enough lovey dovey let's play to win But the third thing, and this is probably going to get me in trouble with Steve, but I'll say it.

Enough of the analytics and enough of the brainiacs.

Let's get some baseball people involved in making the decisions and one thing that steve is doing a great job of he is delegating this to baseball people but we need more baseball people and less analytical people in the mix at this point less hedge fund people less number country yeah less hedge fund people less data analytics these are real people you know well look my son plays travel baseball and Proud Mama.

They are, I think, eight and two for the fall, but the two games they lost weren't better teams.

They just didn't believe.

I mean, the thing about too much science and data, and I'm not a sports reporter and I'm not a sports expert.

I'm just a, I watch an inordinate amount of baseball innings.

And

the team that believes and the team that is up at bat for each other, for the person ahead of them who's on base or the person behind them, who, you know, is almost always the team that wins, whether they're six or 16 or grown-ass men making millions of dollars a year.

Here's my segue or my attempt at it.

Without the Mets, I'm now paying more attention than I should to our fucked up politics.

And so I am feeling it more.

Yeah, that's brutal.

It's brutal.

And I love everything you say about it.

And I love, I mean, I talked to you on and off TV ahead of the election, and you had, you had a lot of confidence that Kamala Harris would prevail.

Why do you think she didn't?

Well, I got that wrong on a number of different reasons.

You know, I guess the ultimate reason was the smell test and the name recognition.

So the number one thing you need to be president of the United States circa 2024 and possibly 2028 and beyond is name recognition.

And she was running against the most famous person in the world.

When Hillary Clinton ran against Donald Trump in 2016, he was one of three, 400 famous people, but he had gone through the presidency, did all of the different things that he does for attention.

And by

November of last year, Nicole, he was the most famous person in the world.

And so you know this, and I know this, the most searchable term on Google the night of the election, did Joe Biden drop out?

That was the most searchable is you have a lot of uninformed voters, and they were like, well, who the hell is he running against?

And they didn't know her.

And so what we had in 20 is we had the mad, crazy uncle running against the stable grandfather.

And so that was fine.

And so we went with the stable grandfather, especially during COVID.

But then the stable grandfather was obviously sunsetting.

And we had this nostalgia for the mad, crazy uncle.

We said, well, mad, crazy uncle, the world didn't blow up.

The economy was okay prior to COVID.

And who's this other person?

Oh, this is our nice sister.

And the middle, the independents, it really matter, voted for the mad, crazy uncle.

The second thing was she took no risks.

And she exposed herself in the 107 days because she said in the 107 days that my first pick was Budijek.

Well, if your perfect pick was Jabutijek, then you pick Budijek.

So you just played into Trump.

Trump is telling you DEI, woke culture, litmus tests.

Who's your best athlete?

Well, my best athlete is Pete Budichiek, but I'm going with Tim Waltz because I can't pick a gay guy because I'm a black woman.

What are you doing?

Those are all the litmus tests in the culture war that Trump is beating your ass in.

Remember, Donald Trump, hate the guy or not, you have to observe his talent.

He's the Napoleon of the culture war.

And if you remember your biographies of Napoleon, he could see the entire battlefield, Nicole.

He anticipated the moves of the generals and he stymied them.

And Trump does that to the Democrats day and night in the culture war.

And Vice President Harris wasn't ready for that.

But, you know, you got to throw, hey, you got to go on Nicole's show, no problem, but you got to go on Sean Hannity's show 20 times.

You got 107 days.

You got to be on Fox News 108 of the 107 days.

You got to go on Rogan.

You got to go on all the tough places.

You got to show up in places where they don't expect you.

And you got to use your personal charm and your class and your dignity.

to win the election because Trump is not a well-liked guy.

Even the people that vote for Trump don't like him, but she didn't do that.

And she played it too safely.

You know, when I helped them prepare for the debate, I spent six hours with them on debate prep.

I think you may remember this.

I went to the spin room on her behalf with Gavin Newsom and others, and she did a great job of the debate.

I was expecting her to come out of the debate in a full sprint, and she didn't do that.

So, and she, she lost narrowly.

I mean, you know, Trump likes to tell you how big the win was and all of this stuff, but it wasn't that big of a win.

It was a couple hundred thousand votes, and it was a narrow election.

What are you surprised by having been inside his 1.0 White House and watching his 2.0

team?

Well, first of all, I don't like the policies, but you want to talk about a full-on sprint.

They went crazy in the first three months, took everybody off guard, which is surprising to me because they just went down the list of Project 2025, which is exactly what he was going to do.

And you and I remember his rhetoric.

I don't even know who these people are.

I'm not going to use it.

I have no idea what they're doing.

And boom, boom, boom.

He went right down the list.

But I think the spirit animal for Trump 2 from the family is Don Jr.

The spirit animal from Trump 1 from the family was Jared Kushner.

So whatever you think of Jared, Jared was a safer pair of hands.

He was a lot more rational.

We used to call him the goaltender, meaning he would block the insane shots on net from Donald Trump.

And a lot of the policies that we're seeing right now, Nicole, were blocked by Jarrett or Gary Cohen or Stephen Mnuchin or John Kelly in Trump 1.

But the litmus test that Don Jr.

wanted these guys to pass was, are you going to let Donald Trump be Donald Trump?

And these guys want power more than they believe in their own principles.

And so they said yes.

And so that, that to me is, should be surprising.

I guess it's not that surprising to me anymore because I've been around the game long enough to know that these guys, I mean, look at Rubio, this guy, right?

I mean, this guy's a real character.

This guy is literally, he's so far up the lower intestinal tract of Donald Trump, you can barely see the guy's ankles.

I mean, Marco, come out of there, Marco.

Somebody grab his ankles before he dies.

Literally,

poor guy, right?

Yeah.

But, you know, Trump looks tired.

He looks unwell.

He's obeying the courts, believe it or not.

You know, he's, they've ruled with him a lot.

They've ruled against him, but he hasn't gone up against them.

I think he's going to lose the tariff case, by the way.

So that's me and not totally factored into the U.S.

stock market.

But when he loses the tariff case, what will happen?

Because, you know, we could have a constitutional crisis.

He could be the reverse of Marbury versus Madison, where he, you know, he gives the finger to the court and he locks up against them.

The Congress is very weak.

The Democrats are out of control.

They have no narrative, Nicole.

They have no oppositional narrative.

Why is that?

Why is that?

Because they have a civil war going on.

They're fighting with each other and they don't want to open their tent.

The way you win elections, the way you win over the country, you say, you know, Anthony Scaramucci was once a Trumper.

He's not a Trumper anymore.

Let's bring him into the tent.

They don't want that.

Let's let Elon Musk out of the tent.

Lyndon Johnson would have never done that, Nicole.

Lyndon Johnson had that great line that Robert Carroll always talks about.

I want all the elephants inside the tent.

In case case they have to take a piss, they'll piss outside the tent.

Don't let any elephant outside the tent that may pee into the tent.

But you let Elon Musk and you let Bobby Kennedy Jr.

out of the party.

LBJ would have never done that.

Even if he didn't like them, found them distasteful, he would have found roles for them.

And the Democrats, they want to shoot at each other.

You know, I helped them on debate prep.

They asked me to go on the plane.

I said, okay, I'll go on the plane.

And then they called me back.

I said, no, we can't have you come on the plane.

The hard left of our coalition, you were once a Trumper, a result of which you're canceled to this hard left coalition.

And we really can't have anything to do with you beyond talking to you.

I said, okay, no problem.

It's very honest.

I appreciate that.

But that's why they can't get it together because in a civil war inside your own party, nobody wins.

Ask Jimmy Carter if the civil war with Ted Kennedy helped him win the election.

Ask Jerry Ford if the Civil War in 1976 with Ronald Reagan helped him win that election.

So when you have this inter-party fight going on, right, and this is something I always praise Secretary Clinton for, she lost to Barack Obama and she worked to get the crossover vote over to Obama.

Bernie Sanders didn't do that.

We picked up, because I was working for Trump at that time, we picked up 20%

of the Bernie Sanders voters went to Donald Trump and said, you can't have inter-party warfare.

You have to have unity to win these elections.

And they're in complete disarray.

And they don't even, they fight with each other in the Congress.

They don't even have the narrative.

You know, one guy saying one thing, Schumer saying another thing, AOC saying a third thing.

So guys, no narrative, no coalition.

You're not going to beat Trump.

He's laughing at you.

He's putting Trump 2008 signs in front of you just to trigger you and your base more.

Well, what's the answer then?

Because Trump doesn't seem to be interested in sustaining a democracy.

I mean, there's an answer, but they don't want to listen.

The answer is there are more people that want the democracy than that don't.

Trump has a 37% approval rating.

Right.

And you have to unify, you have to galvanize around a leader.

Maybe you tell me who the leader is, but let's galvanize.

If you don't like everything about Gavin Newsom, okay, hold your nose and get in his coalition and build a broad-based, unified coalition.

You don't like Liz Cheney?

You don't like Chris Christie?

Well, you know what?

They're pro-democracy people.

Let's rebrand the party as an open-tent, pro-democracy, pro-America party in terms of the ideals of America.

We can argue about the minutiae later, but let's get the themes right.

Okay, we can fix the country later and we can debate the policies later, but we have to renew the system

and we have to explain to the American people how they are better off in a democracy.

Because, Nicole, there are always going to be people that believe an oligarchy or an aristocracy can run the country better, right?

Because they're the elitists.

They think they're smarter than everybody else.

But Lincoln, you know, Lincoln said to Douglas in the debates, he said, hey, you know, people think the American people are not smart, but let me tell you something.

They have a very good nose.

They can smell a rotting cadaver in their basement.

That was literally the quote.

And we have a rotting cadaver in the basement right now.

And there's a hardcore group of cultists that are in the MAGA personality cult.

Can't get those people right now, but we can win those people over later.

Moreover, when I talk to Democrats, They tell me, well, the 80 million people that voted for Donald Trump are racist and they want to cancel them.

Okay, well, you can't cancel them.

They're part of your country.

How about reaching out to them and understanding their grievance and why they're with Trump?

And how about figuring out a way to modify our policies to bring them back into the tent?

One last point.

The Fox News right-wing rhetoric about the inner cities and the state of California and stuff like that, fight back.

New York is doing just fine.

Last time I checked, the loop inside of Chicago is doing just fine.

The fourth largest economy in the world is California.

And I did Gavin's podcast three months ago.

I read out all these stats to Gavin about the state of California, number one in aerospace, number one in tech, number one in entertainment.

So many great things going on in California.

And thank God he's starting to rebut now, finally, the right-wing narrative.

He's also explaining we're putting $83 billion more into the federal government from California than California is taking from the federal government.

That's not true in Texas or other states.

Moreover, we have crime, but in certain red states, the per capita crime rates are way higher.

And by the way, I don't want to make it an us versus them because that's always bad for a country whose first name is United.

I don't want to split everybody.

But isn't it already split?

I mean, Trump just said at Charlie Kirk's funeral, quote, I hate my opponent.

It's split.

You're right.

And we have a leader that wants to split and divide the country.

But I don't accept that.

And you honestly don't accept that.

And that is not where we want America to go.

You know, there's different types of leaders.

There's the thermostat and there's the thermometer.

Trump is the thermometer.

He feels the heat in the country.

He's expressing back the heat to a certain base in the country.

You don't think he creates it?

He creates it.

Yeah.

Well, he senses it and then he says, okay, this is good.

Let me throw another Duraflame log on and raise the temperature.

Franklin Roosevelt was more of a thermostat.

He said, okay, we got some heat in the country.

I'm going to set the corners to 72 degrees.

Let's bring the temperature down.

You see,

we don't have that right now.

And we don't have a person who can articulate to the American people who they actually have been.

who they actually are and who they actually could be.

Trump is articulating, it's us versus them.

We're We're in a great culture war.

The browning and darkening of the country from a color perspective demographically is hurting you as a white person.

And so you need, I'm ringing the cowbell, you need to lock arms with me as we beat them back and we deport them and we crush them in the culture war.

I don't want that.

The message is we are a beautiful, colorful mosaic of people, and we are exactly what Lincoln said, the last best hope for mankind.

We are exactly what our founders wanted.

We are an experiment.

We are an international experiment of decentralized self-government where no one person can galvanize too much power to hurt the other people, right?

Because we know in tyrannies, there's a funnel at the top, and the cronies around the tyrant make the money.

And then there's arbitrary, capricious deliverance of the law, and everyone else hurts.

And our founders knew that.

They wrote about it in the federal papers.

They said, okay, we don't want that.

And so a guy like me with no money, coming from a blue-collar family, can aspirationally rise in a country like this because

they created this decentralized system.

And by the way, Marbury versus Madison, Jefferson said, no problem.

I set it up.

No tyranny.

I'm not going to flex on the Supreme Court.

I'm going to obey the court.

And it was a landmark case.

And

listen, look at what Washington did.

Imagine Donald Trump in 1789.

Mr.

Trump, we just ratified the Constitution.

Would you like to be the king?

And Trump says, no, no, I'm going to go back to my farm.

I'm going to go back to my farm.

I'm going to go back to my golf club.

Oh, my God.

Could you imagine?

Could you imagine the tweeting?

Could you imagine the tweeting?

No.

So, you know, we lost our way, but we didn't lose our way entirely.

He's not a well-liked guy.

You just don't have a galvanizing oppositional leader that can express

in the right rhetoric with the right level of popularity.

And remember this, one last point.

You need somebody that's a reality showman, a social media influencer, contemporaneous to those two things, a policy wonk and a historian.

And you need that person to come into the mix and help the Americans get to where they need to go, not in the mired funk that we're in right now.

Let's pause for a moment right here.

When we're back, we'll have much more of my conversation with entrepreneur and podcaster Anthony Scaramucci.

Stay right here.

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Well, it's hard to hear some of that.

I mean, I think you're absolutely right, but I think Harris did a lot of that.

I feel like she took two of the four steps in that direction.

You got to take five of the four steps.

You got to take 10 of the four steps.

I take all your points.

But what I would say is, I agree that that's what the Democrats need.

But why can the Republicans achieve everything they can achieve with a guy convicted of 34 felonies who can't string together a sentence with a noun and a verb?

Well, we both used to be Republicans.

So you actually internally, intuitively, know the answer to that.

For whatever reasons, the Republicans, they lock step with each other once the nomination process is over.

The George Herbert Walker Bush Republicans team up with Ronald Reagan.

The John McCain Republicans, they teamed up with George Walker Bush.

And so you know

culturally, the Republicans have a fabric about them where, okay, I disagree with Nicole, but she's going to be running the thing.

And I'm going to team up with her because she's better than the alternative.

The Democrats are very righteous and they're morally convicted.

It's about winning, though.

It's like they're more committed to winning and beating the other party

than to working it all out.

I mean, Ezra Klein, I feel like, is nibbling at this.

He was talking on his podcast about

trans rights, and he said, we can't do anything.

Is that pedultery, Nicole?

Are you like, listening in on his podcast?

I think

a little bit of pedultery.

That's okay.

You're allowed.

You're allowed.

good one.

You're allowed.

I am getting.

I want you to listen to my podcast, too.

So I want some pedultery.

Okay.

You're allowed.

I'm getting more and more of my information from podcasts because I think people are a lot more candid.

I like Ezra.

And by the way, I, at full confession, I listen to your podcast.

I listen to Ezra's podcast.

And I listen to Kara and Scott.

Yeah, I listen to Kara, and I've been a guest on their show.

And Scott's not around.

Yeah.

And I do listen, but you were making a point about Ezra.

I'm sorry.

Well, no, but he was.

He was just teaching you about the pedultery.

No, no, no.

He was making a similar, in his sort of cerebral analytic way that

name the issue that matters in a democracy and you can't do anything about it if you can't win.

And folks close to Obama have made the same point.

Whatever progressive value you hold, it'll be trampled if you lose.

And so I wonder why that isn't more galvanizing or focusing for Democrats.

I can't explain that because I'm actually not a Democrat, but I want to give you three things to think about.

Okay.

I want to give you three things.

Number one,

after Ross Perot got 19.9% of the vote, they strengthened the duopoly.

They made it much harder for third parties to enter the system.

Yeah.

Number two,

they both decided that we're going to gerrymander a lot.

They accuse each other of it, and they're hypocritical about it because they both do it.

And so I submit to you, are you in a real democracy where the politician is now picking the voter?

The voter is no longer picking the politician.

And this allows them to pass the big beautiful spending bill where 35% of the country wants it, but they're okay because even though they have a low approval rating as a Congress, they have a 95%

reelection rate.

And then the third thing that we did is Citizens United.

So we flooded the system with money after that Supreme Court decision.

And now all the legislative agendas are skewed towards big business, the wealthy, big pharma, big food.

And so until you

that and you expose that to the American people, and you tell the American people, by the way, we need systemic reform.

The Constitution, as Jill Lapore is recently writing about, needs amendments.

We've had 27 amendments in 1789.

That's 236 years.

We were clipping an amendment once every seven or eight years.

We stopped amending the Constitution in 1993.

Moreover, that was a procedural amendment.

The biggest amendment that we did was 59 years ago, the civil rights legislation.

And I'm telling you, without amendments like fixing gerrymandering,

campaign finance reform, allowing for some slackage or opening of other ideas in these parties, or at least cutting off the extremes.

we're going to continue to have these problems.

But I can't answer the question about the civil war.

I think they think that they would rather be puritanical than pragmatic.

And I think a lot of them feel that way.

And I get it.

I understand the issues related to, and they probably just did something masterful here.

They went after Obamacare in 2017.

McCain blocked them with the no vote.

And they never brought up that they wanted to end Obamacare again, but they're ending Obamacare.

Okay?

It's like they're doing it, right?

They're pulling one string at a time in these different bills, and they're going to take 20 plus million people off of the insurance rolls, which I guess helps the big insurance lobby, but actually hurts the American people and actually fractures the morale for lower and middle income people.

And the Democrats,

are they explaining this to anybody?

I would be out there.

If I was a Democrat, I'd say, hey, big, beautiful spending, making over a million dollars a year.

You got a $7,000 benefit, $50,000 or less.

We took $700 away from you.

And I would be out there explaining to the people, hey, listen, you know,

we got to change.

And here's another thing Democrats could be doing.

The most powerful voting bloc in the country, Nicole, 100-plus million people, they vote the exact same way in every single election.

Those are the non-voters, Nicole.

Every single election, they vote the exact same way.

How about thinking like an entrepreneur and going into that marketplace and saying, hey, the country screwed up.

You didn't vote.

Well, let me win you over with some really decent common sense policies and register to vote.

And we don't have entrepreneurial politicians.

You got to go to the non-voters that lean Republicans and you got to get them to register to vote.

That's what Barack Obama did in 08.

He went to the non-voters that were leaning Democrats.

Clinton had all the establishment Democrats locked up, all the governors, you know, she thought he was going to be the HUD secretary.

And he went to all of the non-voters, and he built this whole new coalition of voters as an entrepreneur, and he brought him into the game, and it carried him to the presidency.

And so, guys, why have you lost that mojo?

Yeah.

You're going back to the well with the same people every year.

You're going to get the definition of insanity is to repeat the same thing over and over again and think you're going to get a different outcome.

Well, and it's a mindset from outside of politics, right?

I mean, you can solve most problems by making it bigger.

It's sort of a, you know, it's a parenting thesis.

It's a business thesis.

It's not really.

I believe they think like that.

Yeah, but it's like not really a political thesis.

And it's not really where the political class economics lie, right?

It's a lot more profitable to sell yourself as someone who can persuade people who are active participants than to be out there saying, I'm going to find gold in the West.

And I wonder, I mean, that is sort of more suited to an entrepreneurial mindset.

Why wouldn't would you run for office?

I'm running for re-election re-election in my marriage.

Okay,

you met my wife.

I'm trying to stay married.

I mean, you know, my wife has like a, on her conventional platform is like castration.

You know, I, I, Nicole, I mean, this was such a bad thing for me.

I mean, you know, you know, I mean, I just want you to, I want to set the scene because people sometimes forget.

I went to work for Trump.

I was with Bush.

And then I went to work for Trump.

And then I did buy into it because I thought he was going to help the poor and middle class, which I came from.

And then when he started acting crazy, I made the most colossal mistake in my life.

And I'm happy to admit it to you.

And it doesn't reflect well on me.

I did what everybody else did in that party, cognitive dissidence.

I accepted him moving the goalposts on me.

And then when I got into the White House and I took an oath, you know, people think I got fired for the New Yorker thing.

I was fighting with Trump.

Trump loved a New Yorker interview.

If you know anything about Trump's personality, I thought it was funny.

I was fighting with him about stuff.

He told me on Friday, and I remember this, Nicole, because I was only there for two Fridays.

So I do remember it was my second Friday.

He told me that I was a deep stater.

And I laughed.

I said, I'm a deep stater.

I haven't even been.

I've been to Washington one time prior to this on like a field trip.

I'm definitely not a deep stater.

But what I am is a constitutionalist, I believe in the Constitution and the institution of the presidency, not the man.

And then Friday, I got fired.

I mean, Monday, I got fired after that conversation.

And I'm cool with it.

But now think about it.

I'm lit up by all the late night comedians.

I'm excoriated by all the cable news bundons.

I'm like rolled in margarita salt by

Saturday Night Live.

I mean, it's brutal.

Okay.

And then my wife and I are fighting.

I mean, she hates Trump almost as much as Melania hates him.

So we're talking about like, and you know, we're talking about, that's like that Eastern European hatred.

So you know how bad it is, right?

And she really hates him.

And she told me not to do it.

And then, I mean, this is terrible for me to admit it, but then I missed the birth of my son.

And you've met my son because you've come to the Met Games with me.

He's a beautiful eight-year-old boy now.

He was born on Monday, the 24th of July, 2017.

I was at the Boy Scout Soiree in West Virginia.

Deirdre gave birth early.

I couldn't get back to New York even if I chartered a plane because it was a 60-mile no-fly restriction.

So politics have been very bad for me and my family.

Having said that, I love my country.

So I am out there talking about about what's going on because I want people I grew up with, especially, to know how dangerous Donald Trump is and know how dangerous this is for the society.

But I can't see myself running for office because of all the things that I just described to you.

But if you said to me somebody was running that I could help who I thought believed in American renewal.

and the renewal of the democracy and getting a few amendments on the table that was going to help the country come together and dial down some of the tribalism, I'm up for that.

And I'm a good check writer and I'm a good spokesman for somebody like that.

I mean, there's so much I want to ask you about there.

I guess the first thing is, what were you fighting with him about?

Well, specifically on that day, he wanted to veto the Russian sanctions bill.

They passed like 98 to

1.

And I said to him that if you go to do that,

they're going to go to Schumer and they're going to get the 17 or 18 votes necessary to override the veto.

And he didn't like that.

And what was happening, if I'm being brutally honest, when I was with him on the campaign, Jared once said to me, you know, the reason he calls you at 10 o'clock at night or 11 o'clock at night is you're giving him the straight scoop.

And he told me that you remind him of Fred, meaning Fred Trump.

You made your own money.

You don't care.

You're talking to him.

You know, Reince Prievers would never talk to him the way I was talking to him.

You know, Mice would press my woof.

Woof.

You know, like, woof.

He would never do it, you know.

But I'm a New Yorker.

So I was talking to him in a real way.

And I made the mistake when I got into the White House, I brought that with me into the White House.

And so I did it once or twice.

And on that third time, we were discussing the Russian bill.

He ultimately, on the 3rd of August, signed the bill.

But he didn't like the pushback.

And when he told me I was a deep stater, I knew I was in trouble.

There were three things that Trump could do.

And Pompeo and I once talked about this.

If he said, hey, hey, President Pompeo, I mean, it was time for Mike to like book a trip to like Antarctica to talk to the penguins, right?

Or if he said, You're getting more famous than me.

So if Trump said, You're President Kelly, you're getting more famous than me, or you're a deep stater, you were getting in his crosshairs.

Those are one of the things.

And I think I got said all three of those things in 11 days.

I want to tell you my story about you.

You came on my show once because Jeb said you were one of his favorite humans.

And I respect Jeb's judgment a whole lot.

I believed him and I see why now he felt that way, but you were

so glib about parroting talking points that the person that I knew that knew you assured me you didn't believe.

And I just want to understand what makes people say things they don't believe because now it extends to the entire party.

I was, I helped put some of the Senate Republicans in office in the midterm elections of 2002.

I know some of these people, and I know they don't believe tariffs are good.

I know they aren't neutral in a war between Ukraine and Russia.

And I do not understand the human trade that makes people say and do things I know they don't believe.

All right.

So

this is a great question.

And I'm actually going to answer the question.

And it doesn't reflect well on me, but I'm going to answer it honestly.

Number one, Jeb told me not to work for Donald Trump.

Okay, so I made that mistake.

And then Jeb told me not to go into the administration, and I made that mistake.

And I'm going to tell you something about pride and ego that gets people in trouble.

I grew up in a blue-collar family, Nicole.

I went to Tufts and Harvard.

I didn't really fit into either of those two places.

Then I went to Goldman.

Then I built two successful businesses by being a lot and also being a lifelong Republican donor.

When Trump won, I had the opportunity to work for the American president, go from a blue-collar family to work in the White House.

And my ego and my pride was talking to me.

If I took my pride and my ego out of the decision-making, I would have done something very different.

You know, one of my mentors, and I won't mention his name out of fairness to him, got offered a very big job.

I helped him get the job.

He spent some time with Trump and he withdrew his nomination.

And he called me in December of 2016 and said, after spending five or six hours with President-elect Trump, I've decided it's not going to be good for me and my family if I go war for him.

We don't see the world the same.

I thought he was crazy because I was equivocating and I was doing the cognitive dissonance of talking myself into those talking points.

And so I have to own that for the rest of my life.

But I will say this to you, that I talk about it openly.

I've already apologized for that.

And I talk about it openly with younger people.

And I'm sharing it with you on this podcast so that maybe somebody could learn from the mistake I made and not make that mistake themselves.

Now, we all like to think of ourselves as moral.

We all like to think of ourselves as righteous.

But if you read any of Robert Green's books about human nature, we do have proclivities in our personality that we need to restrain.

But mine was, I'm going to go work for the American president.

I'm going to go help the people I grew up with.

And yeah, he's a little crazy, but so what?

I've got it under control.

So the narrative from those senators are, yeah, yeah, he's crazy.

I don't believe in this, but I got to stay in power because somebody further to the right to me could primary me and not, you know, you know, all of the equivocating language.

But I think after 10 years, and Nicole, listen, in August of 2019, I went on the public airways and said, I'm sorry, I have to denounce Donald Trump.

He's not the right guy to be president.

He should not be president in 2021.

And nobody was willing to do that at that time.

And I took a major amount of incoming and a major amount of flack, but at least I had the guts and self-awareness to admit a mistake and to admit that I was wrong.

But now, if the Democrats want to cancel me for making that mistake, they're entitled to do that, but they're going to continue to lose elections.

They've got to look at somebody like me and the other 80 million people and say, okay, wait a minute, these people actually love the country.

Maybe they made a mistake or they did something misguided.

And we got to bring these people together again and to go forward.

And so if you haven't, if you haven't ever sinned, throw a rock at me, hit me square in the head.

But if you've done something wrong in your life or you made a mistake in a relationship or business or politics, have some empathy for what I did and at least recognize that I was brave enough and self-aware enough to admit that I got something wrong.

Yeah, but you're, you're the exception, right?

I mean,

the 99% of Trump voters aren't going to have that humility.

They're not evolved enough to just articulate what you did.

And so bringing them back, if getting part of them back is part of a winning coalition, at least the ones that don't like the Medicaid cuts, don't like the tariffs, thought it was a good idea when smart people worked inside the FBI instead of being purged from it.

I mean, there are a lot of people for whom Trump has.

betrayed things he promised less than 12 months ago.

He stood in front of melting food and promised, quote, everything in the grocery will be cheaper.

It is all more expensive.

How do you, you, without finding the like needle in the haystack, man, with your humility and ability to admit you made a mistake, how do you bring men back around to the pro-democracy coalition?

I'm going to channel a little of Scott Galloway's wisdom and his common sense.

I think

by talking about it, I think by having more communicators, I think, I think Newsom's doing a very good job.

I do too.

The right is catching their hair on fire and he keeps sweeting at them.

You obviously still don't get it.

I'm mocking the insanity of what you're allowing.

Right.

I'm mocking the insanity.

I'm not replicating Trump.

I'm not trying to beat Donald Trump on the left.

I'm trying to force a mirror, like you just said, to the mockery of it.

Right.

And so I think when I talk to young people and I go to the colleges or I talk to young people, I think you can get them.

I think that there's a vacuum that Andrew Tate is filling and there's a vacuum that some of this toxic masculinity, these toxic masculinity figures are filling.

But I think you can talk to them.

And I'm saying to you, the reason why you're successful with your podcast or Scott's successful with his podcast is that it's raw and it's real.

You know, we can't do this on MSNBC because we don't have 45 minutes on MSNBC on film.

No, we do.

Well, you know what I mean.

You know what I mean?

This is not a sound bite conversation.

Correct.

This is not a six-minute A-block or a 12-minute A-block.

This is a 45-minute conversation.

My conversation with Anthony Scaramucci continues on the other side of the break.

We'll be right back.

The connection between the guests on the show is the show.

All that we do is put together people who are smart, people who are brave, people who are honest, and lots of times people who've never met each other to have a conversation that has never happened before, but on that day deepens everyone's understanding about the moment in which we gather.

Deadline White House with Nicole Wallace, weekdays from 4 to 6 p.m.

Eastern on MSNBC.

You know, if you take your thesis, right, that we shouldn't be fighting over the same people that vote in every election, we should go find the ones that don't, understand why, and bring them into the enterprise.

Those people especially are not watching any television.

You know, they're getting all their news from their phones.

They're getting all their news from the podcasts they self-select.

And it's sort of back to your other point about having to be everywhere.

I started listening to Joe Rogan and Flagrant and some of the Manosphere podcasts because I felt like it was as important to cover them as it used to be to cover, I don't know, the evangelical church when I was working in Republican politics because of their import.

They now all seem lamer.

Like their association with the state seems to have taken away that which was, you know, sort of seductive and subversive about them.

And they all seem to sort of be parroting like what government officials are saying.

I wonder if you think there's an opening there to sort of either build something or replicate something or learn from something they did to great effect in 24.

I guess what I would say, my initial reaction is that they see Trump rightly or wrongly

as an avatar of anger against the establishment.

So parodying him, being a Dana White or a Joe Rogan, still in their minds fits that narrative.

But he is the establishment now.

I understand that.

That's the irony.

So I think it does come across lamer, but they still draw the people.

And Rogan said said something the other day about the immigration thing, which I was like, all right, good for Joe.

I mean, Joe was like, well, dudes, what are you guys doing?

You're raiding assembly.

You just said you were going to go after the criminals.

Now you got students cowering in their mom and dad's apartment, afraid to go to school because you have ICE agents waiting for them to deport them, you know?

And so I think the menacing nature of what's going on, in my opinion, will change the Rogans and will change those rebellious podcasters away from Trump.

I will say something very optimistic to you that I've noticed, okay, and it's three quick things.

Number one, people are getting over Trump.

They've got Trump fatigue, a very large portion of them, and certainly the people that love immigrants.

The second thing is the Trump movement is a personality cult.

Trump said something after he bunker-busted the Iranians.

They said, okay, well, what's your policies?

You know, you know, forever wars, and you keep flip-flopping on the policies.

And he said, well, the MAGA policies are whatever I want them to be.

That's a very good sign for the opposition because when he leaves the stage, there'll be a personality void in a personality cult.

And you don't know what can happen to the Republican Party after that.

So that's the second thing I would say.

And then the third thing that I would say,

and this is about something that James Corville would say to you, okay?

It's the economy stupid.

And the economy is not doing well, Nicole.

Okay.

And the numbers are showing you that we're heading for a soft recession and that people don't feel good about those prices that you just referenced and they don't feel good about their day-to-day life.

Even if the Democrats have a faulty narrative, it'll get pinned on the Republicans to the benefit of the Democrats.

So there's a lot to me, there's a lot of green shoots of optimism happening right now where other people say, oh, I'm despairing.

Here are the 20 reasons why I'm despairing.

I'm like, yeah, but in six months from now, it's going to be a very big different song being sung from this sheet music.

And so we got to stay, you got to stay in touch for that.

I see all of that.

I also think

the sadistic nature of how they're targeting people who are asylum seekers and people in mixed status families and people who are here illegally, but who are in process is so disproportionate.

Of course, we should have a border.

Of course, we should have immigration laws.

Ronald Reagan believed in amnesty.

I think in his heart, George W.

Bush did, too.

It's actually Barack Obama who deported more people than any American president in history.

I wonder if you think that he's in danger of overplaying his hand.

I think that.

That always happens.

That always happens.

And the question is, how much destruction is he going to do prior to overplaying his hand?

And the question is,

are there going to be any guys, you know, some of these Republican senators that you're talking about, believe it or not, I'll embarrass myself further on your program, I've donated money to.

And some of them have said to me privately that there are red lines for them.

And they tell me what the red lines are.

Trump hasn't crossed over any of them yet.

But let's say he crosses over and disavows a Supreme Court decision.

Can he lose two or three of these guys?

I think he might.

You know, the reason why he pays Ukraine lip service, you know this because you're a great reporter, they go to the White House and they say, enough, you got to help Ukraine.

And he doesn't want to because he's got, you know, a B in his bond about Vladimir Putin.

God only knows what Putin has on him.

So he's always playing lip service because he doesn't want to lose these Republicans.

You know, like somebody said to me, I was in London last night giving a speech.

Somebody said to me, well, do you think he's going to pull one of these elections?

Well, let me tell you something.

If he thought he was going to lose the House and the Senate, then I would have that up on the risk table because he's going going to get annihilated if that happens.

He could end up getting impeached and convicted and tried for all these emoluments violations.

So who the hell knows?

But I mean, if he loses the House and he wins the Senate, he's probably not going to do it.

But that, that, you know, that's his nature.

But let me tell you what I notice about him.

He's lost a step.

He is tired.

His ankles are swollen.

His hands are bruised.

He's trying to pretend that he hasn't lost a step, but he's lost a step and he always projects it.

He said to the generals, I don't like Barack Obama, but how the hell did he run down the steps of Air Force One?

Okay.

And he's letting you know that he's grabbing the handrail because he could tumble down those steps and that would be a disaster for him.

And we're dealing with an 80, about to be 80-year-old Donald Trump, not a 50-year-old Donald Trump.

And I'm telling you, that's another reason to be optimistic that this is going to end.

It'll end very ugly for these willing sycophants.

History will treat them very poorly, but there will be a civil war in the party, not a civil war in the country, but there'll be a fight for the soul of that Republican party over the next two to four years.

And it may not end up being MAGA because without Trump, there may or may not be a MAGA, Nicole.

Are you generally

I mean, when you have kids, it's hard to have any answer other than yes, but are you generally optimistic optimistic that we'll get out of this?

I am.

But I'm not saying that in a Pollyannish way.

You know, you could also say I'm too short to see the glass anything other than have fall when I'm like looking at the glass.

You know, you know, I have to sit on phone books when I'm on your show.

But I am

because of every single thing that I just said.

And also, there's one weird thing about America that nobody fully understands.

De Tocqueville addressed it a little bit.

Lincoln, I think, understood it the best.

I have this great book on my desk here called Life and Liberty, which are the original writings of Lincoln.

And I try to go through that book every once in a while.

I was like, wow, he really understands this place.

It is adaptive.

It is risk-taking.

It is a neurally plastic country.

And I think the vestiges of this populist experiment where the populists finally caught the car, you know, William Jennings Bryant was barking at the car.

Charles Lindbergh barked at the car.

Donald Trump caught the car.

And it turns out that they don't have the answers.

They don't have the policy solutions for the dilemma that we're facing.

And so the question is, can a Republican or a Democrat speak to the people with the right eloquence and the right charisma to get them to understand that there are viable solutions for them?

And I don't think that looks like MAGA.

And I don't think that looks like the populism.

So yes, I am.

You obviously are around people that support Donald Trump.

I think there are a lot of people that we probably both know know in media circles who don't talk to Trump voters anymore.

If you're in a politically divided family, it's just not how most Americans live, I don't think.

I think most Americans have someone they love dearly who they disagree with on what feels like it's bigger than politics.

I mean, you know, our chipunker is, you know, a generational divide and it's a time of, you know, the last vestiges of racism and sexism.

This feels existential.

Like what's happening is they're disappearing humans.

It feels against the First Amendment, against the Fourth Amendment, against the 14th Amendment.

I mean, this feels so big.

And I guess I'm asking for myself personally.

How do you hold your heart open for the people you love who are enthusiastic about the things that Trump is doing?

Well, this is the problem, right?

This is ultimately...

where you have to understand the way your brain works.

You're in a 100,000-year-old piece of machinery that hasn't had a software upgrade in 100,000 years.

When they were building the pyramids, that's your brain.

This phone went from iPhone 1 to 17 in 15 years.

So you got to understand how your brain works.

Your brain is wired for survival, and your brain is wired to think linearly because that's what helped you survive.

But the world around you, Nicole, is moving exponentially.

So when Thomas Malthus said we were going to starve in the 1840s, he missed out on all the great tech, fertilization, irrigation, vertical farming, all the different things we did.

We had more people.

DoorDash.

Right.

DoorDash.

Prior to,

think about this: prior to Ozempic, we had more people dying from obesity-related issues than we did starvation.

When I was in college, I'm older than you.

When I was in college, they said peak oil.

We're going to run out of oil.

But they didn't think about fracking or the new technologies or the better energy efficiency of the cars or the generators, the electrical generators.

So, what I'm saying to you, be transformative, be sublime, be transcendental.

Make a decision in your heart that even though somebody's misguided, they could be making a mistake.

It may not be so deep in them that they're actually evil.

Maybe they're fearful of their job.

Maybe their xenophobia comes from financial anxiety.

Maybe their nativism comes from.

impulse towards nostalgia to a country that never really existed.

I don't know what it is, but make the bet that they can be convinced otherwise that it's in their best interest to go in another direction.

Because one of the things about populist rhetoric, it burns itself out.

You know, I can chant at you violently and you'll be excited about that for a while, but the yoke of that starts to fall off of people over time.

And I'm predicting that that's going to happen over the next three to five years.

Hopefully you'll invite me back on your podcast.

You'll say, wow, it's 2030.

Hopefully I'll still have my hair.

God, let me have my hair.

Okay.

I mean, this hairline has got me a long way, Nicole.

You've got my hair.

God, let me have my hair.

Let me have it.

It's a little messy today.

I put enough product in today, but I'm saying it'll be 2030.

Please, God, let me have my hair.

But we'll be there in 2030.

And you and I will be talking and you'll be like, you know what?

It got better.

It got better.

Economic innovation, some clarity on what the right policies were, some guardrails on the Congress as it related to spending, maybe some reform as it relates to Citizens United or gerrymandering.

And it got better.

And we made it better because we've been in periods of time in this country where it didn't look like it was going to get better.

Killed 600,000 people 160 years ago trying to break apart the country.

And it got better.

And so we're in it.

And we've had some establishment failures and some shortcomings where they didn't listen well enough to a very large group of people that got angry at them.

But I think that period of time is ending.

And that's why I'm optimistic.

Anthony Scaramucci, thank you so much for the time.

Thank you so much for the Mets conversation.

I really needed that.

The pain, the pain, the pain of it.

Thank you so much, my friend.

Thank you for all your time.

Hey, great to be on with you guys.

Thank you so much for listening to the best people.

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All that we do is put together people who are smart, people who are brave, people who are honest, and lots of times people who've never met each other to have a conversation that has never happened before, but on that day deepens everyone's understanding about the moment in which we gather.

Deadline White House with Nicole Wallace, weekdays from 4 to 6 p.m.

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