96. Trump vs. the Dollar: A Battle He Can’t Win

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Welcome to The Rest is Politics US.

On this eve of July the 4th, Happy Independence Day.

Anthony, how's it going, that independence thing, by the way?

Going good?

You know, I need to call the king, okay?

I got to ask him

if we're going to be okay.

You remember that scene in Hamilton?

Who was it, Charles III?

Charles III.

You'll be back.

So he's like,

you know, now that you did this to yourselves, you're in trouble.

You don't have me.

Let me give Charles a call and say, hey, how do you think it's going so far?

And the good news is it's still Charles.

So there you go.

You can ask him again.

Anyway, I'm very excited for July the 4th.

We have big fireworks here in Washington, D.C., which is always kind of fun.

I can see them from the roof of my house.

I'm going to be doing that tomorrow.

And you're going to be grilling hot dogs, right?

Well, no, I am a diva.

I mean,

listen, we're a year into the podcast.

I've exposed my full personality to everybody.

So, no, I'm a full diva.

I'm going to some beach club here in Southampton to eat grilled hot dogs that someone's grilling because that's just the diva nature of me, you know.

And by the way, as you know, because you've met my mom, I'm an Italian mama's boy.

I don't cook.

You've never cooked in your life.

I know.

You can't even make cookies for me.

These people cook for me.

And yes.

So if you're listening and it's like nails scratching a blackboard, I'm very sorry about that.

But I would rather just be me, Caddy.

Yeah.

Fireworks, fireworks and pasta in my house, I think, being a good non-American so far.

But you never know.

By this time next year, I may have joined your ranks.

Right.

Today, we are going to get into the big drama up on Capitol Hill.

As we are recording this Anthony on Thursday morning,

it looks like the House is about to vote on it.

No surprises.

President Trump has managed to wrangle all of the holdouts in both the Senate and the House to get his bill passed.

And this bill is going to, it's a massive, the big, beautiful bill.

Some people people are calling it the big ugly bill.

It's enormous.

It's 900 pages long and it's got permanent tax cuts for the rich,

a lot more money to

deportation efforts.

It also cuts some people's access to food stamps, which is the food security program in America, and to Medicaid, which is the health care for poor people in this country.

And Democrats are trying to do as much as they can to say the politics of this are political suicide suicide for Republicans when they run in the midterms in 2026.

So we're going to talk about that bill.

Then after the break, we're going to discuss President Trump's big Supreme Court win.

The court has ruled that lower courts can't block his national policies, his executive orders anymore.

And that is a huge deal, especially it's being seen as a win for his push to end birthright citizenship.

But we can see whether we think that is actually going to end up passing.

We'll unpack what all of that means, why legal experts are freaking out, and what happens next.

So, I think the reason I wanted to talk about the big, beautiful bill, not just because I've been on television every morning talking about this damn thing, and nobody has left Capitol Hill for days, and they're all exhausted because they've been voting all through the night and talking about it all through the night and being coerced all through the night.

But it kind of, I want to set the sort of broader picture of this week.

And it seems to me, Anthony, that President Trump has just had like a string of wins.

This has been a very good week for the White House.

They've got the Iran strikes and there hasn't been much blowback from them yet.

And you know, the caveat there that we have to say yet.

He's got the big beautiful bill, which we're going to talk about in more detail, which had a lot of fiscal conservatives saying we don't like this because it's going to increase the American deficit.

He looks like he's managed to wrangle all of those holdouts.

Canada has backed down on a Canadian tax in order to get trade talks restarted with the Americans.

And he's had that win at the Supreme Court that we're going to talk about in the second half.

And it just feels to me like Donald Trump this week, if we had to take a snapshot of this week, as he wrote on Truth Social this week, said, I hold all the levers and I have all the cards.

And it turns out that if you have total control of your party and your party has control of government, and you're pretty shameless and you don't really care about the future health of your party, you can get a heck of a lot done.

And that's what it feels like this week.

I don't think Donald Trump has been in a more powerful, successful position in his presidency ever since he was inaugurated.

This is a high point for him this week.

Am I wrong?

No,

you're not wrong.

I guess,

let me just play Devil's Hill.

Let me play Hakeem Jeffries for a second.

He's the minority leader now, but could potentially be the Speaker of the House should the Democrats win the majority.

So let me just play him for one second, get you to respond.

He, yes, having a good week, but he's gone against a lot of things that he said he was going to do for you, Mr.

and Mrs.

MAGA.

He said, no more forever wars.

He's dropping bunker buster bombs.

He said, we're going to get the deficit under control.

He's now extended the deficit $3.3

trillion of more deficit spending over the next decade.

MAGA doesn't care about the deficit.

Well, we know that, right?

So that's a very important

thing to tell people on this podcast.

Not only does MAGA not care about the deficit, Trump will tell you privately that his base is socially conservative and fiscally liberal.

But I'm just telling you what he campaigned on.

He's doing things very, very differently than he campaigned on.

So what is your reaction to that?

That's okay because it's popular?

So the Iran strike so far, I think he's got away with it.

We don't have American boots on the ground.

We don't know how much they've set back Iran's nuclear program, and we still don't know where that missing uranium is.

But in terms of the American public, are you seeing Iran on the front pages anywhere?

Zero.

Iran is not on cable news.

Nobody's talking about it.

Which in political terms for Donald Trump is a huge win, because we would be talking about it if there was retaliation against American soldiers in the Middle East.

Now, I'm not saying that that is over, the Iranians are patient, and that could well happen.

You know, we have to remember the invasion of Iraq here and how it looked like it was going well until it looked like it was not going so well.

And that could happen again.

But in this moment, there is no retaliation on Iran.

And I think MAGA has more or less decided, I'm hearing crickets from those MAGA people who didn't like the strikes.

You're not hearing Steve Bannon up in arms about them still.

You're not hearing Joe Rogan up in arms about them still.

You're not, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a little bit, but even she has been quiet this last week about Iran because they've moved on to something else.

I mean, this is, you know, Trump is the master of the art of distraction.

So you have Iran, that happens, no fallout.

So far, he can count that as a win, both tactically and politically.

On the deficit spending, Donald Trump's genius back in 2016, when he ran and upended decades of Republican orthodoxy, economic orthodoxy, was that actually Republican working class voters don't give a shit about the deficit and they do really like social welfare programs and they don't want them to be cut.

So I would say actually the risk for Donald Trump in what's happening right now on Capitol Hill is not the deficit exploding, although that could lead to interest rate increases, which could lead to more inflation, which people don't like.

It's the cuts to Medicaid.

And because we've had this shift in the demographics of who votes for what party,

rural Republican voters actually like Medicaid.

A half of American children are on Medicaid, and many of those families may well be Republican.

I think that's the bigger political risk for him rather rather than the deficit.

I may be wrong.

Comment on the following.

We have this woman, Lisa Murkowski.

She's an Alaskan senator.

She votes for it.

And then she says, please in the House, don't vote for it.

So somebody please explain that to me.

Profile and courage.

What do we think?

Yeah,

profiles encourage.

Exactly.

And then we have Ron Johnson.

who basically says, under no circumstances is he going to vote for it.

I'm a deficit hawk.

Under no circumstances am I voting for it?

Blink, blink, he votes for it.

So go ahead.

Yeah, look, I mean, Donald Trump manages to get to these people.

And what happened with Lisa Makowski is that she was, as is the kind of old tradition of, you know, American politics, you have a bill, a budget bill that you don't like, and you end up saying, okay,

I will vote to expand the deficit, which I don't like.

I will vote to cut Medicaid, healthcare to some poor people, which I don't like.

But, you know what we could really do within Alaska is more support for whalers.

So there's in those 900 pages, there is a provision slipped in with

help and assistance for people who are in the whaling industry.

How many states in America have whalers, Anthony, I wonder?

Okay, but that's Washington.

What you just said.

This is how she got it.

And what did she say?

She said, I realize this is going to be painful for the other 49 states, but Alaska is my state and I have to watch out for Alaska.

So she sold out millions of Americans to get relief for whalers in Alaska.

I mean, I guess good for her, right?

That's the way politics works.

How many Americans have been taken off Medicaid?

How many women are now going to give birth to a baby, and then the day after, they're not going to have the Medicaid, and they're going to have to pay the hospital bill?

Oh, but by the way, they can't pay the hospital bill.

And so, what's ended up happening is the hospital and the insurance companies around the country are going to absorb the expense of that.

And so it's going to end up on the consumer of the insurance.

It's going to end up on America's businesses.

It's going to end up on our insurance premiums.

We'll pay more, right?

Yes, exactly.

But what I'm saying is there's a hidden tax to all of this.

So

let me say this to our viewers and listeners.

Deficit spending.

A lot of people in our society, the MAGA people feel, hey, no problem.

It's not my money.

Borrow the money,

blow it out, give it to me.

Deficit spending is unfunded tax liability and it's going to get paid.

And if you're not going to tax the people what you're spending, no problem.

You're going to inflate and destroy the money.

And inflation, Caddy, is the worst form of taxation because it's the most regressive form of taxation.

The wealthy don't care about the inflation because they own the assets.

And so the $10 house goes to $1,000, no problem.

And, you know, this is an interesting thing because I was trying to explain this to people.

If you bought my parents' house for $16,000 and gold was $35 an ounce, you know, you had, I don't know, we could do the math.

It's probably 700 ounces of gold.

Today on Zillow, my parents' house is worth $700,000,

but gold is at $3,000.

an ounce it's 450 ounces of gold it's actually gone down in value compared to

caddy because it's an older house.

It was built and purchased in 1962.

But people see inflation and they don't understand it.

They look so my net worth just went from 100,000 to 1 million.

I'm rich.

No, no, you don't have any purchasing power.

And this is the big crime that's happening in these societies right now.

So, yes, we're going to spend an extra $3.3 trillion in deficit spending.

And you are 100% correct.

MAGA does not care, but you're going to feel it in your cost of living.

You're going to feel it in your insurance premiums.

You're going to feel it in terms of how you are going to reach or your children are going to reach escape velocity in an economy like this.

It's going to be very, very hard.

It makes it harder for people, Gad.

Easier for the politicians, harder for the people.

And I'm not sure it is easier for the politicians, not for Republican politicians trying to defend the Medicaid cuts in 2026 anyway.

Before the podcast this morning, I reached out to somebody who's very senior in MAGA economic circles and advises the president and I asked him what he thought of the bill and this is the argument just to put the kind of case for this bill for and we've heard Donald Trump make this case which is that basically this bill

will stimulate so much economic growth that that will grow America out of its deficit problems.

And they say that is the only way to do it.

And what they like about this bill is that there are no more, that there's no more spending, that there's no, and that's what

the real

fiscal conservatives, what they hate is the spending.

Now, other people could argue that these tax cuts are a form of spending.

That is not the argument they buy.

And what he said to me is that there are significant private sector investment incentives in this bill.

You can get full tax deductions, for example, on

property, on plants, factories, on equipment, on land improvement.

And their calculation is that that leads to higher growth and to a productivity surge, something like

for every one percentage point of growth above the baseline, you actually get about four and a half trillion in revenue.

Now, that's their calculation.

We know that the historical model for growth managing to grow America out of its deficit and

rise all the boats, which is what this guy says, is slim to non-existent.

But that is the argument that Donald Donald Trump has been making, partly because of advisors like this one, is that what this does is it massively stimulates growth.

And America is on the verge of a huge productivity boom, fueled by this, but also fueled by AI, which will make the deficit something that Americans don't have to worry about.

What do you make of that case?

I mean,

I hear the case, but up against that, I feel the people.

And by the way, I'm giving that because that's the case, you know, I wanted to give them.

No, no, no.

I think it's an important.

Listen, I think it's important.

If you didn't give it, I was going to give it.

And so it's important.

But there are people now below $50,000 in income that are losing $690 worth of credits or value to themselves.

And there are people that are worth more than a million, that are making more than a million dollars in income that are getting a $6,900 benefit from this.

I don't know.

Does that sound right?

Let's reincarnate Teddy Roosevelt and let's ask Teddy, the father of progressivism.

Does that sound right?

The poor are going to pay more money as a result of the BBB and the rich are going to pay less money as a result of it.

So I don't know.

Does that sound right?

The other thing is, and I want to ask you this because

we talk about Elon Musk a lot, you and I.

We had a great mini-series on Elon Musk for our founding people.

Elon Musk is like, why have a debt ceiling?

If you're going to, all you do is every time you have a debt ceiling, you raise the debt ceiling.

There's no spending control.

We had a group of politicians 30 years ago that were like, whoa, we have to be responsible.

Dick Gephardt lost the speakership, the opportunity, because he voted for the pay-as-you-go legislation, which tightened the guardrails on the House, which George Herbert Walker Bush put in place.

And a result of adhering to that, Bill Clinton and Newt Gindrich ran a budget surplus at the end of the year 2000.

Today, bye-bye.

Caddy, I'm not a catastrophizer, but we could be 25 years out with an $80 trillion

deficit, and the money will be, I don't know.

I'm not going to say it's Zimbabwe, but it's not, you're going to have to print the money.

Remember, my buddy Ray Dalio said the debt crisis starts when you're borrowing the money to pay the interest on the money that you borrowed.

That's when the acceleration starts.

So, so to me, I hear you and I understand it.

And by the way,

this is another terrible thing for me to say.

So, people don't turn off your radio or don't switch off your iPhone.

I love the idea that you think they're listening on radio.

That's so sweet.

Well, whatever it is.

I mean, because I dated yourself by about 30 minutes, but I don't know.

I listen to you in the car.

Not on the radio.

I'm the only person on this podcast.

I just want to make this public service announcement.

I'm the only person on this podcast that listens back to the podcast.

Okay, don't that is a total deflection.

You're not actually answering the question.

This is what politicians do all the time.

I asked you about the radio and how that dated you.

Listen to the podcast.

And then you go in with, oh, well, you don't even listen.

That's Bluetooth, but you're not on the radio.

You're on a podcast stream.

But

let me get the gun back on the bird here.

Let me just say this to you.

You got an $80 trillion deficit coming.

You're going to liquidate the dollar.

The dollar has lost 10% of its value since the tariff nonsense started and the BBB started.

Sorry, Europe's expensive at least.

So tell me, guys, what you want to do, you know, because this is not going to work for the country.

And by the way, this is what your old country did.

Your country did this.

They inflated and they lost their currency standing.

And then their empire weakened.

And then they had the fiscal collapse that they had to dig themselves out from under.

And guess what?

America has already had its credit rating downgraded this year, right?

We've already seen the rest of the world say you guys, American politicians are simply not serious about dealing with this thing that is a ticking time bomb, which is why you've got this phrase anything but USA abuser going around.

But the other thing that I think is interesting, two quick things I wanted to say and then we should take a break.

One is that I don't really understand what the upside is for the Republican Party on this because

there's a lot in it that's unpopular.

Polls are already showing us that, even though people don't really know, they have got the headline that people are going to lose their Medicaid.

But it doesn't actually even really give people a tax cut because all it does is stop them from getting a tax raise.

And it reminds me of, you know, Barack Obama back in 2008 when he had to try to prove the negative, which is that the economy might really have fallen off the fiscal cliff if he hadn't done what he had done in terms of bailout.

It's very hard to prove a negative to voters.

They're not going to really feel the benefits of this because they're going to be in the same position that they were in six months ago, right?

It's not like the Republicans have actually given them something massive if they're middle class.

At the same time, they've actually taken away something for them.

I think the other thing that's worth pointing out is that...

to our friends around the world, America is not actually a country that is completely heartless and lets people bleed out on the street or, you know, die of flu outside a hospital because they can't afford to pay.

That is not the way this country works.

What's going to happen now is that people who have lost their Medicaid health insurance are still going to get treated.

But guess where they're going to get treated?

They're going to get treated in a hospital emergency room.

So they have a sore throat, they're going to go to the hospital emergency room.

They've got a sprained wrist, they're going to go to the hospital emergency room.

And where is the single most expensive place to treat people?

It's in the hospital emergency room.

There's a provision in this bill that is a bailout for rural hospitals to make sure they don't go under.

So they're going to give money to rural hospitals in in order not to treat people.

It'd be far better to give those patients Medicaid and let them be treated because you're still funding the rural hospitals.

I mean, I think the kind of maths of this is pretty nonsensical, but I'm not even sure that the politics of this.

Maybe Trump just wanted, what did, why did Trump want this bill, Anthony?

Answer me.

You know Trump.

Why did he want this bill?

He doesn't even know what's in it.

He said as much.

He said, you know, oh, I'm not sure what the numbers are.

It's going to be smaller than that.

I don't know.

Trump wants to make money for himself and his family, and he knows if he can get this bill in place,

that it is a long-lasting bill and that's going to guide the government into the midterms, basically.

And then he can focus on getting attention for himself, producing reality television in the Oval Office and making money for his family.

And that's basically why he wants the bill.

But you brought up such an important point.

I just want to remind people of this.

In 1986,

Reagan socialized medicine in the country.

And he did it by exactly what you said.

He basically said: if you walk into the emergency room with a strep throat, the doctors in the emergency room have an obligation to give you treatment.

You walk in the emergency room with a broken arm, the doctors have an obligation to give you treatment.

And it was a way of socializing medicine in the country at the most expensive possible way to do it.

And so we've never really 100% still figured it out because of the politics, like the gun control.

But before we go to the break, I have to ask you this.

is america

capable of tough medicine meaning could a person you see you're shaking your head so you say no but could a person get to the podium and say okay listen this is what we got to do here's the growth of our economy our economy doubled in size relative to europe over the last the gdp relative to europe over the last 15 years We can use these incentives, market-based incentives, to double the economy again, but we have to, at the governmental level, slow down the growth.

The BBB sucks, Caddy, because it's outpacing the spending, is outpacing the growth, and a result of which it's going to have a bigger percentage of the GDP in terms of deficit spending.

And you're saying, if an American president or American politician said, listen, we can get there.

It's a couple of nicks and cuts here and a couple of nicks and cuts there.

Oh, by the way, if I don't do this, you're going to pay for it anyway.

And inflation and all this invisible stuff that you can't see day one, but you're going to feel pain from.

And you're saying, no, nobody would accept that.

I think you'd have to go back and ask Bob Rubin, who was Clinton's Treasury Secretary, who's the last person who managed to do this.

But he would probably say the politics are so much more divided.

There's really very little room for cooperation.

I mean, that's the craziness of America right now, right?

You have the system that was built on and for cooperation.

It's not a parliamentary system.

But no one can cooperate because the moment they do, they get primaried.

And the gerrymandering is such, to go back to what you always talk about, Anthony, the structural thing of gerrymandering and how votes are cast and the way districts are drawn up make it really difficult.

I think there's just almost no room.

All we're doing is incentivizing extremes, and those extremes never want to be caught reaching out to the center to do something that is difficult.

And doing something that is difficult, like reducing spending, requires political cover.

You can't have the opposition party then run out and run campaign ads saying, you know, the Democrats are killing seniors or the Republicans are, you know, taking away your social security, because then you can't make the cuts, right?

You can't make the cuts unless you have political cover from the other side.

And we live in a world where they don't.

Okay, we're going to take a break.

But before that, Anthony, I have a present for you.

I mean, that was a brutal reality, what you just said in such an English accent.

It was fantastic.

I mean, if you're listening to this and you're an American, you got to be bummed out by what Gatty just said.

A little bit more than that.

Go ahead.

What's your

gift for you?

So Donald Trump, God bless him, has produced a new perfume called Victory 4547.

And it comes for men and for women.

And the men's perfume, apparently the scent, costed me a $250, by the way, which is a bit more expensive than Chanel.

I looked it up.

For men, it's a blend of rich masculine notes.

So I thought you might like that.

What do you think?

I thought the subtitle of the cologne was beta male.

But here's what I'm going to do, Caddy.

If you give me that cologne

on stage at the Indigo Theater,

I'm going to torture you by spraying it on myself so that you will have to smell that cologne while you're trying to concentrate on entertaining your delegation.

Well,

$250.

I think rich masculine notes, who doesn't want them?

And you get a statuette of Donald Trump.

So that's nice.

I thought the bottle was fantastic because it makes Trump look like he's 180 pounds.

I need a bottle like that for myself.

Yeah.

Anyway, I thought you'd like that.

I'm going to order one for you.

We're going to take a quick break and we'll go.

And I'm going to use it, Gaddy, in front of you.

Thank you.

Hello, everyone.

It's Garrett Lineke here from the Rest is Football.

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Welcome back to the Restless Politics U.S.

with me, Anthony Scaramucci.

Me, Katty Kay.

Caddy, another Supreme Court win by Donald Trump.

And so there's nothing like packing the court before you leave in 2021.

That was a small move.

And benefiting from that here in 2025.

But let's just explain to some people.

They issued a 6-3 ruling on Friday, the 27th of June, and it basically limited the lower court's ability to block policies from taking effect nationwide.

And I'm a constitutional student, and so I just want 30 seconds to try to explain this to people.

The court actually, in my opinion, made the right decision.

And I know it went for Donald Trump.

So people that hate Donald Trump will say, oh, they made a terrible decision, blah, blah.

But they didn't.

The court is really trying to hold the ground of what are the checks and balances in the system.

And Amy Coening Barrett wrote a brilliant piece, and she basically said, listen, and I'm going to paraphrase, Trump is a complete asshole.

I didn't remember the justice using those words.

This is the mooch decoder.

This is the mooch decoder ring.

The mooch whisperer of Amy Cohen-Barrett.

This is the mooch decoder ring.

Okay.

Trump is a complete asshole.

I'm not allowed to call him a fascist because Caddy Kaye from the Rest is Politics U.S.

will be mad at me.

So me, Amy Coney Barrett, cannot call him a fascist, but we're going to say he has authoritarian tendencies and he's a complete asshole.

And I understand why you at the lower court would want to check this dope, but you can't do that because you're creating symmetry.

You're doing the exact thing that he's doing and you don't have the right to do that.

So we're going to rein you in.

And if you want to check Donald Trump, which you probably should,

we have to find other ways in the system to check Donald Trump.

I loved the way she kind of like pointed.

Like it was like sort of wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

Guys, try this way.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay.

And so, but, but, but, Caddy, she's right.

Now, the beauty of America, the headline, right?

You remember when the Attorney General William Barr, he got the

notes together on that whole commission that was studying Trump's collusion and people were waiting with bated breath, and the summary was: Trump is innocent.

But if you read the whole thing, you're like, oh,

Trump's a bad dude.

But nobody read it.

They just got the top line that Trump was innocent.

So here, Trump wins the court case.

But if you really read it and you're a jurisprudential scholar, you're like, okay, she understands the Constitution.

And she wrote a really effective piece on the checks and balances in the system.

And I give her a lot of credit for that.

The one thing I will say is the birthright citizenship, and I'm going to let you take over from here, Caddy, that I didn't get because it's now in doubt.

They didn't renege it.

They didn't try to revoke it, but they left us with this vagueness.

What say you?

I guess what I'm really asking is, am I getting my citizenship?

I was born here.

Am I getting my citizenship revoked, Katie Kay?

You know, there have been cases.

I mean, there are cases.

There are something like 10 cases a year of people getting citizenship revoked in this country.

And there has just been one where it looked like somebody's citizenship was revoked because of something they said against Donald Trump or views they took that the Trump administration didn't like.

Usually citizenship, naturalized citizens like my husband, Tom, who was born in the UK, but was naturalized as a U.S.

citizen, you only revoke their citizenship if you find out, I don't know, that they were a kind of Nazi guard in a concentration camp and they lied about it, right?

That's that's why you have to do that.

I don't know.

Maybe Trump will write a recommendation for that.

I don't know.

That might be, I don't know, that might not be a qualifier.

So now people are a little bit more concerned about whether you could have your citizenship revoked just because you don't support the administration's policies.

But so basically, what happened as far as I can see it is that Trump issues all of these executive orders, and you have courts around the country that say, we don't like those executive orders.

They are not lawful, for example, on birthright citizenship.

So we're going to put a total stop for the whole country.

And that executive order has been overturned by a court, say, in California.

And then the Supreme Court comes along and says, actually, California court, you can't do that anymore, which is seen as a huge win.

I was speaking to the constitutional scholars, and I think you're right, Anthony, this is actually also a win for the Supreme Court because the Supreme Court managed to extract from the government's lawyers, from the White House's lawyers, a promise that the administration, which has never been made as far as I understand it on the record, the administration would agree to any Supreme Court ruling.

So if the Supreme Court rules that birthright citizenship is law of the land, which my understanding is at some point they're going to have to rule on this, they didn't rule on it.

You're right.

In this one, they've left it kind of out there in limbo.

But my understanding is that at some point they will have to rule on that particular issue.

The likelihood is that the Supreme Court rules that birthright citizenship is a right.

It's in the Constitution.

It can't be overturned.

And that will be a loss.

And the White House,

Donald Trump can change his mind.

He can say, yeah, whatever.

I don't care what my Solicitor General said on the record to the Supreme Court.

And I'm going to do what I want to do anyway.

But they've kind of gone this further step.

The Solicitor General went this further step.

I agree with you.

I'm not surprised that this is the way the Supreme Court ruled.

And actually, one constitutional scholar I heard was saying that President Biden also wanted to get rid of that universal injunction.

And his argument, his DOJ, his solicitor general made exactly the same arguments that the Supreme Court has just made.

So I think this is president after president has not liked these universal injunctions.

Barack Obama famously tried to give parents of

kids born in America, illegal people who are here illegally, if they had a kid born in America, he tried to give them U.S.

citizenship and he got a universal injunction as well.

So he railed against that.

Democrats haven't liked this procedure as well.

But it does,

I mean, I agree with you that the Supreme Court was likely to do this and they were in their right to do this.

And in some ways, this is a win for the court because they got this clear concession or agreement from the White House.

But does this make

presidential power even stronger in the era of the Trump administration?

And is that something to be concerned about when we have a president who has already taken as much power as previous American presidents.

Okay, so now I'm let me just

oh I'm channeling my Amy Barrett and the answer is yes.

Yes, it does.

But I don't care because we're going to wait the son of a bitch out and he's got another three and a half years to go and I think the system is going to hold on him.

And this document that I just wrote is going to be in the permanent record.

And this document that I wrote is going to help us get back to that stasis of evenness of what I would call separate but equal branches of government.

And so that's her hope.

And if you read the document, I think it's a brilliant document.

And by the way, if you're MAGA and you read her decision, you're not in love with the decision.

You're in love with the headline.

But you're not in love with the decision because, as you point out, she's telling you what to do.

You've got to go to the legislature.

You've got to use

people in the state and local governments.

Which could take longer, right?

It's not an instant recourse.

It's a slow recourse.

It's not an instant recourse, but it is a guidepost.

She's giving you a guided tour of the U.S.

Constitution and the state constitutions on what you can do to rebut somebody who is not a fascist,

but has authoritarian tendencies.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Why doesn't the Supreme Court put on your legal hat, Mr.

Scaramucci,

decide to shut down the whole question of birthright citizenship?

Why have they not,

as well as ruling against the universal injunctions, why didn't they just put it?

I mean, why didn't they just say, listen, guys, if you're born in America, you're a citizen, that's it.

Okay, so this is such a great question.

Always makes me happy when you say that.

I feel like the school kid in class.

No, but I have asked this question.

I've gone to constitutional professors and I've gone to friends of mine that have clerked for the Supreme Court and I have asked this question and I'm going to give you the consensus answer of the question

and I'm going to use the word ipso facto how good is that

ipso facto okay what they would say to you is it's clear that from the constitution that birthright citizenship is permanent right of the human beings that live and are birth in the United States.

So why would we even have to address that?

If Mr.

Trump and his solicitor general want to come super hard and find somebody that has standing, right?

Because you remember how procedure works.

Like if I don't like Trump's emoluments abuses, I don't like the fact that he racked up $3 billion in the last five months.

I don't have standing.

He didn't hurt my business.

Let's say I had a crypto meme coin and he was sucking out the liquidity of my crypto meme coin.

I could then go to the court and say, Mr.

Trump is breaking the emoluments clause, and he's cost me money and my crypto meme coin.

And a result of which I'm going to sue him.

So, what the court is saying is that the president and his solicitor general bring a case, MFs, bring a case.

And when you bring that case, because your solicitor general knows that, we're going to knock you into center field 410 feet over the wall.

It's going to be a 9-0 decision.

So the Solicitor General is talking to the orange maniac, and he's saying, don't embarrass yourself with this.

We're winning in terms of our ability to flex your authoritarianism right now.

After you go, we're not going to be able to flex authoritarianism anymore.

And there's going to be a group of people that are going to try to stop us while we're here.

But don't embarrass yourself by trying to find somebody that has standing on this.

So basically, if I'm in the country illegally and I'm pregnant and I give birth, whether it's in Minnesota or in Texas, my child as of this ruling is an American citizen.

Yes?

Yes.

100%.

Okay.

100%.

So

that is,

to me, what's going to happen.

Now, you asked that question because these assholes have created anxiety.

Exactly.

That's why I use that.

And that's why you asked that question because you're like, wow.

And this is why

I use the F word, but not the F word that I usually use, which ends with a K.

I use the F word, which ends with a T for these people.

Okay, so, but you asked that, and that's creating anxiety in people, anxiety in my friends, expats who've children, et cetera.

And I would say, wow, that would be an annihilation.

of what we call in our country, constitutional precedence.

That would really be a sea change in the way we're going about things.

And what I like about Ms.

Justice Barrett's rendition is she's letting you know, no, no, no, no.

One quick thing that I want to talk about before we go, and I'm very glad we clarified all of that.

You sent me an article

yesterday, which I thought was worth raising in terms of wins, because something happened this week, which was that USAID was disbanded

legally.

And Secretary Rubio put out a statement saying that USAID, which had been set up after the Cold War to help people around the world and bring democracy around the world, which I actually don't think is the role of USAID, but anyway, it was to help poor people around the world, had

done absolutely nothing, had had no benefit to the American people, and was just full of waste, fraud, and abuse.

And you sent me an article which is showing research published by the Lancet Medical Journal, which shows that the cut of US funding towards foreign humanitarian aid could cause more than 14 million additional deaths in the world by 2030, and a third of those at risk are premature deaths of children.

And I just think we, this story,

I'm still amazed, and maybe it was just because it was the first few weeks of Doge and that chaos and the chainsaw-wielding era of Elon Musk, but I'm still amazed that there has been so little coverage

of this story and of the awful impacts of shutting down USAID around the world.

So I just wanted to say thanks for sending that over.

And I think it's good that we keep talking about this.

And when research like this comes up, we should bring it up.

When I read that, Caddy, I'm filled with heartbreak.

You know, I look at that and say, okay, where do you guys want to go now?

What do you want to do?

Because we are a rich nation.

We have problems in the nation.

We've got to fix our infrastructure.

We have to right-size our deficit spending.

We have to obviously do some trade balance.

There are elements of what Trump is talking about that I do believe and think are true.

But do we have to go about it with this bellicose, caustic rhetoric and this malevolent action that is actually hurting fellow travelers here on earth?

Why can't we be the people that we know that we can be, which are just better people, more balevolent, more charitable, more understanding of each other's travails here, and find ways to help each other, particularly in countries like that that are looking for our help, that want our help.

And so, for me, I'm heartbroken.

I sent you that

more out of heartbreak than anything else.

Yeah.

And you look at the money that it costs them.

In last year, USAID spent $68 billion.

America is just voting, as we are speaking, to add $3.3 trillion

to its budget deficit.

USAID was 0.3%

of the American budget, and it did an enormous amount of good for many people around the world.

Anyway, that is a reminder that there are so many stories that we don't get a chance to cover every week because there is so much happening in this town and it's loud and busy here.

Another one is, of course, the feud between Elon Musk and Donald Trump.

They are back at it, all out screaming matches on social media.

There's even talk by Donald Trump of deporting Elon Musk and setting Doge on him.

We're going to unpack that whole saga and your questions, of course, on Zora and Mamdani in our founding members episode, though, which comes out tomorrow.

Hear the whole episode by becoming a founding member, of course, at You Know the Drill, the restispoliticsus.com, where we can get to more of the week's news.

Thanks, guys, for listening.

We'll see you next week.