93. Will Trump Go To War With Iran?

This episode is brought to you by Revolute Business, the all-in-one account designed for efficiency and built for business.

The less time you spend agonizing over a repetitive financial admin, the more time you've got to focus on what's next for your business, or in your case, Anthony, for your next tweet.

Listen, I call it multitasking, Caddy.

Why not both?

Yeah, whether you're scaling up in Sheffield or consulting in Chicago, Revolute Business gives you everything you need to manage your business finances in one account.

Pay and get paid globally in over 30 currencies with no hidden fees and at great rates.

There's spend management too, cards with custom spend limits.

We like those for our kids.

And automated expenses, full control, no administrative headaches.

Open a Revolut Business account today by scanning the QR code on screen or using the link in this episode's description.

Add money to your account by the 7th of July 2025 and you'll get a £200 welcome bonus.

Feature availability varies by plan, fees and terms and conditions apply.

You know, that's Revolute Business, designed for efficiency and built for business.

Mike and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other.

When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a four-litre jug.

When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.

Oh, come on.

They called a truce for their holiday and used Expedia Trip Planner to collaborate on all the details of their trip.

Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool.

Whatever.

You were made to outdo your holidays.

We were made to help organize the competition.

Expedia, made to travel.

Starting a business can seem like a daunting task, unless you have a partner like Shopify.

They have the tools you need to start and grow your business.

From designing a website to marketing to selling and beyond, Shopify can help with everything you need.

There's a reason millions of companies like Mattel, Heinz, and Allbirds continue to trust and use them.

With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into...

Sign up for your $1 per month trial at shopify.com/slash special offer.

Hello and welcome to The Rest is Politics US.

With me, Katie Kay, not in the US, I have to confess.

Before Anthony rumbles me, I'm actually off the coast of Turkey in the Mediterranean on a boat.

And I thought I would say that before somebody else did.

I mean, that was like a defensive, what are you, like, Eminem, where you start rapping with all the insecurities before I can get in there and start talking about your bouginess?

All of a sudden, Caddy Kay becomes Eminem on the Rest is Politics episode 93.

I knew where you would go.

I was actually going to try and record this.

I mean, open up the blind.

Let's take a look at the view.

You seriously want me to?

Okay.

Of course I do.

Let's take a look at the the view.

What the hell?

All right.

Rubbing it in.

Rubbing it in for all of our YouTube people.

Okay, now I have to actually move the computer.

There you go.

Okay, anyone on YouTube?

Okay, if anyone's on YouTube, she's in Yachskalor, somewhere off the coast of Turkey.

Okay, and she's brightly suntanned.

I'm sitting here struggling in a low air conditioning environment in London.

I'm so sorry.

I'm so sorry.

Well, look, you make choices in life, Anthony.

I don't want to lose this moment of Wi-Fi glory on your beautiful yacht, Caddy Kay.

So what do you want to talk about?

We'll admit, everybody, this has been a bit of a struggle.

So obviously, we're going to talk about the situation in the Middle East as the Israel-Iran conflict, as we're recording this on Wednesday

afternoon UK Middle East time.

We are now into the fifth day of attacks, and we are asking whether the United States will get involved in this conflict further or whether Donald Trump will listen to the voices in the isolationist wing of the MAGA movement who are saying America spent 20 years in the Middle East to no avail, lost blood and treasure, please do not go there.

So there's this big split in the politics, but we'll also talk about the situation in the Middle East itself with Israel and Iran.

And then in the second half, we're going to talk about, talking of violence, this is awful, the killings in Minnesota.

and the rise of political violence and the threats, violent threats against politicians and judges in the United States as well.

So let's start, though, in the Mideast.

And I've been speaking to a few people, Anthony, who are in the kind of national security world and in the intelligence world.

And this is the way the debate is being framed at the moment.

As far as I can see from the White House's position, we're talking as Donald Trump is still weighing his options.

And the options are to use American pilots to fly an American bomber, to drop an American bunker buster bomb on a nuclear site in in Iran and therefore get America more involved militarily in this conflict, or to say to the Israelis, no, we'll give you other support, but we are not going to actually use American military hardware, American military personnel, because we think that the risks of retaliation against the United States are too strong.

And those are the kind of options that are being discussed in the National Security Council and in the Oval Office as we are speaking.

When you look at President Trump's rhetoric on Truth Social and the things that he's saying to reporters, it looks at the moment as we're speaking, and obviously we don't know which way he's going to go definitively, but it looks like he is leaning to helping Israel try to get rid of Iran's nuclear capacity and use an American weapon to do that, which of course puts him at odds with the promise that he has made for a long time as a politician when he was running for office, which is that he would get America out of wars.

He would not start wars.

He is the no-war candidate.

And I think that that no war element of Donald Trump and of the MAGA movement is actually quite in line with American voters and quite in line with American young voters in particular.

So he kind of has a dilemma at the moment about which way to go.

Is that how you see the framing of this?

Yeah, I do.

I guess there's a couple of things that are going on behind the scenes because the good good news is we've been talking to a lot of sources inside the administration.

So let's just lay out a couple of things for people and then get you to react to some of them.

So number one, did he or did he not need to leave the G7?

Could he have done all of this from the G7?

And the short answer to that is yes.

You mean they have phones in Canada?

Yeah, they do have phones and they have secure.

They have situation rooms and secure rooms and things like that.

But there was something going on with him in Canada.

I don't know what it was.

He dropped the papers with Keir Starmer.

He was slurrying some of his words.

Again, if we're just being honest, you just look at the videotape.

He went up there to make a proclamation about Vladimir Putin.

As you know, Putin invaded Crimea in 2014, but he said Trudeau kicked him out of the G8

with Obama, but he didn't get elected till 2015.

So there was a little stuff going on with him.

So they say that he's got to leave.

And so he leaves, but there was something going on there.

Not exactly sure.

It could have been just him having a bad day.

And he doesn't like those multilateral gatherings.

Doesn't like it.

And why doesn't he like it?

Because the attention is not on him.

He likes a unilateral gathering.

Multilateral, no good.

Unilateral gathering, lights, telephone, spotlight on me, microphone, I'm good.

So that's why he needed to leave.

He didn't like the upstaging he was getting from Prime Minister Carney, who was hosting the meeting.

And of course, if he was hosting the G7 and this was going on, he would have never left the G7 because he was the host.

So let's just make all those distinctions.

People need to understand how the man thinks.

But now let's go into what he's being told.

Iran has caused the problem for the United States 46 years.

Iran has hurt us in Iraq with the helping of ISIS.

Iran has hurt us in Syria.

in confluence with the Russians.

Iran has hurt us in Lebanon and also hurt us in Gaza and obviously hurt Israel and some of our allies in the region.

So Iran is a genuine American national security problem.

That is clear to everybody on all sides of the argument.

So the reason I'm bringing this up is I don't want people to underestimate the hawks that are in Donald Trump's ear.

I agree.

The Israelis have hit him.

We can take him out.

One bunker buster bomb.

Now, somebody smart is in the room telling him, you got to be careful because if you hit the thing and it's tied to one of the tributaries that leak into the Gulf and you have radioactive material goes into the Gulf, you're going to hurt the entire region because that's the water supply for the region.

They're desalinating the Gulf.

And the Gulf doesn't have a lot of movement.

You find it's a fairly stagnant piece of water.

And so the catastrophe would be you bunker bust the thing,

you cause radioactive fallout that leaks into the water system for the entire region.

That would include all of the Sunnis on the Arabian Peninsula and obviously Israel, et cetera.

Although Israel does draw from the Mediterranean, but you get my point.

So you've got, yes, let's hit them, but what if we hit them and this unforeseen catastrophe happens?

And you and I both know the minute a war starts, all these unexpected things happen.

But that's not the only unforeseen catastrophe that the anti-interventionist, anti-bombing faction of MAGA is talking about, because you've also got Tucker Carlson out there very directly criticizing this effort and talking about how Tucker, who was for the Iraq war, a bit like John Kerry before he was against the Iraq war, saying, look, George W.

Bush's presidency got derailed by the invasion of Iraq.

And he had all of these big domestic ambitions that he then couldn't carry out politically because the whole of his presidency got sucked into the Middle East.

And that is the warning that MAGA is giving.

Beyond the kind of, will they strike us in the Middle East in our American military bases with ballistic missiles?

You know, will there be a terrorist attack against American interests around the world?

The kind of political argument that you're hearing from the Carlsons, the Steve Bannons is don't do this, Mr.

President, who we love, they keep saying, because you will not be the president you could be politically if you do.

So there's a kind of military argument and a political argument that is coming from the doves.

Doves and hawks is a bit of an odd expression here, but anyway.

Okay, but let me make the historical argument for a second.

So let me give a newsflash to our American listeners.

We haven't won a war since World War II.

Okay, so we had an armistice in the North Korean War.

That war is still going on.

It's effectively a ceasefire.

We lost Vietnam.

We lost Afghanistan.

We lost Iraq.

You could say that the Gulf War won, we won, but it was really a three-day battle.

It doesn't really consequence as a war.

so we don't win wars anymore let's just stipulate that number two every time we go into the area we hurt ourselves uh reagan deployed troops into lebanon in 1983 we lost several hundred of them it set reagan back almost cost them the 84 election we were told don't go into afghanistan afghanistan is an empire killer takes out all the great empires uh go into afghanistan you're going to get killed we go into Afghanistan, 20 years, several trillion dollars, millions of lives.

The Taliban replaces the Taliban after 20 years.

And America comes out with its tail between its legs.

Okay, so if you want to do this, you're going to have a real problem.

Now, if you want to do this because our allies, the Israelis, want us to do this.

Okay,

I'm happy to tell people on this program that I am a Zionist.

I believe in Israel's right to exist, but I am not for American interventionism, jingoistic American interventionism, where diplomacy can happen.

And that's not to say that they won't be terrorizing us using these terrorist fronts that they have all over the world.

We have to figure out a way to combat that.

But I don't want this to go into another level.

And by the way, you know, Trump is tied to Putin.

We all know that.

So why pretend that he isn't?

Putin doesn't want that.

That's why Trump is speaking about Putin at the G7,

and that's why Trump has been a reluctant warrior in this fight.

One last comment, Caddy, and I'd like to get your reaction to this.

If you're intercepting missiles and you're trying to defend an American ally, I don't think anybody has a problem with that.

I think that's fair play in the rules of engagement, in the rules of a theater war.

But if you're landing bombs on behalf of your ally who has struck,

you could call it preventative, you could say it's preemptive, you could say it's more aggressive than that and an international law violation, we could discuss whatever it is.

All I can tell you is that in 1981, when the Osirik nuclear facility was attacked in Iraq, It was a great move by the Israelis.

They destroyed the reactor.

The president at the time was Ronald Reagan.

He praised the decision.

He left it at that.

And he was still funneling arms to Saddam Hussein to fight the Iranians.

So it's a very complex part of the world.

I have never sided with Tucker Carlson before, at least that I can remember.

If I was sitting at that table, I would say,

you don't want to do this.

Okay, we have to find a diplomatic way to resolve this and to de-escalate this.

It's better for our people.

It's better for our troops.

It's better for our economy.

And if you are really quote-unquote America first,

you actually don't want to do this.

Let's send the Israelis more anti-ballistic missile technology.

Let's put some aircraft carriers in the region to protect our ally.

I understand what their interests are, and they may in fact have a bomb, but our intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, told you in March, they don't have a bomb.

So now you're telling people in the press, who the hell cares what she says?

No.

I'm not saying that we're right about this stuff because we've got the WMD wrong in 0203, but let me tell you something.

You don't want to do this.

You've got 20 years of dramatic history of ill-fated militarism in the area that has hurt the country and hurt the morale of the country.

Don't do this.

I'm going to add two more concerns that people have on the side of let's learn from the lessons of history.

And you're right, that there was nothing about Iraq or Afghanistan that went well.

And it's part of the reason that Barack Obama got elected, except, you know, other than that his own political skills was that people were fed up with wars.

It's part of the reason that Donald Trump got elected in 2016.

It's part of the reason that Donald Trump got elected again in 2024 was that he made this promise to the American public.

I hear you.

We don't want to get involved in wars in places that we don't understand.

And it's the reason that Tucker Carlson's clip, and I'd advise our listeners to go and take a look at it, Tucker Carlson's takedown, total demolition of Senator Ted Cruz on this issue where he's basically asking Senator Ted Cruz, how much do you know about Iran?

And Ted Cruz doesn't even know the size of the population of Iran, nor the ethnic makeup of the population of Iran.

And it's pretty clear he doesn't know very much about the country.

And Tucker's argument is that

was exactly the Bush problem back in 2003.

We went into an area of the world that we didn't know.

The other issues that I'm hearing, one is that I'm hearing from people in Israel itself who are critics of Bibi Netanyahu's, which is that Bibi is very good at starting wars.

Look at Gaza.

He's not very good at having a political strategy for ending them.

And nobody is hearing a political strategy for getting out of this.

And Bibi has his own domestic interests for keeping this war going as long as possible.

That he is facing all sorts of political problems at home.

He's facing legal problems at home.

And that could give him a political interest for starting this war and for bringing the Americans into it.

The other thing is what you've just alluded to, which is the Tulsi Gabbard issue.

And I think this explains that weird video that I think we mentioned last week, this kind of odd video of Tulsi Gabbard speaking into camera warning about a nuclear holocaust, is that he has a very inexperienced team.

I mean, the national security team, you have Mike Waltz, who is now gone.

Rubio has experience, but there aren't very many big politically experienced national security heavyweights around Donald Trump advising him at the moment.

I don't think you put Tulsi Gabbard in that category, and I don't think you'd put Pete Hekseth in that category.

They just don't have the national security clout to be running this kind of advice operation.

My instinct, Anthony, was where you are, which is that America doesn't have a good track record on this, doesn't win wars, what the hell are they doing?

Because you don't know what the knock-on effects of one, two, three are, right?

You've mentioned one of them, which is the potential of radioactive material leaking.

Another could be, let's take, say they take out Ayatollah Khameni.

What happens then in the country?

We all supported the Arab Spring.

Did it leave many of those Arab countries better off, or more stable, or more friendly towards the United States?

So there are second and third-term consequences that it's not easy to foresee.

But I have also spoken to people who I respect in the national security world who have said, this is not 2003.

Nobody is talking about going in with American boots on the ground.

This is not shock and awe.

This is take it out at Fordo with this one Minnesota-based USB-2 stealth bomber with a 30,000-pound bomb, and then it's a unique opportunity to get rid of the national security threat, which is Iran's

coming capability to be able to build a nuclear weapon.

And do we want Iran to have a nuclear weapon?

And I think it's very complicated.

I hear the argument in favor of doing this more than I thought I would, having spoken to people that I respect in the national security world, who say Iran is a genuine threat.

Kamala Harris during the campaign said Iran's nuclear program is the biggest national security threat that America faces.

It's an interesting one because it doesn't split along Democrat and Republican lines, this one.

I'm very glad I'm not in the situation room right now making this decision.

I think actually the rest of the world is pretty glad I'm not in the situation room making this decision either, to be honest.

I don't know.

I mean, there's only one thing you've said so far that I disagree with.

I can't believe that you don't think doing push-ups with the military is a qualification to be the defense secretary.

I find that hard to believe.

I would think that would be the number one thing.

Well, and the hair.

Yeah.

Well, the hair, forget about the hair gel, the body fat composition,

all the stuff that matters to Donald Trump.

I don't know.

I'm surprised that you don't think there's a lot of people.

He has a little sparkly pin, too, I think.

Yeah, but my wife gave it to me.

I have to wear that.

It's a peacekeeping, it's a peacekeeping device.

So, so here's the thing I would say, Caddy.

I get it.

I get it.

I get it.

I get it, and I get it, but I still wouldn't do it.

You think the risks of what we don't know is too high?

Also, you know, the Israelis have deep intelligence in the country.

They've had four decades of putting implants in the country, and they have removed a lot of nuclear scientists in that country.

They're shooting them on motorcycles.

You remember the situation where they had the dilapidated car?

They put the rifle in the car and robotically controlled the rifle, blew the guy's head off as he was walking to work.

They have weakened the regime.

The sanctions have hurt the regime.

But the regime, to me,

I don't see the threat.

Now, if you're telling me we're in the situation room together and I have definitive information, but remember what Richard Nixon said, because I went back last night and I looked at some of the Nixon interviews related to the Yom Kippur war.

And Nixon said something to David Frost that I had my mouth open.

He said, yeah, they presented me the intelligence, and he said, but you know what?

Our U.S.

intelligence sometimes not very good, particularly in this region.

Exactly what Donald Trump has just said, effectively, right, about Tulsi Gabbard.

So 50 years ago, an American president who was a very smart guy, despite whatever his moral proclivities were, a very smart guy, he said, well, I got to try.

Okay.

They turned to Jack Kennedy and said, well, we got missiles in Cuba.

And Curtis LeMay said, Let's just throw a couple nuclear bombs around.

And Kennedy said, Okay, well, how many people are going to die?

150 million.

And he walked out of the cabinet room, went into the Rose Guard, and grabbed his brother by the neck and said, Hey, do you think we're generals?

We're relying on this.

So you're a civilian, Donald Trump, and you're a commander-in-chief of the military for a reason because the founders wanted a civilian elected by the people

to understand the bandwidth of what we're talking about.

And thank God Kennedy had wartime experience as a war hero, the PT-109 disaster, where he was saving his fellow sailors in the water.

And he knows the horror of war.

And he's trying to prevent that horror of the war, not encourage it.

When I hear militaristic jingoism, I'm like, okay, hold on to my wallet and I got to hold on to my four sons.

What the hell are you guys doing?

Cut it out, okay, and let's find a diplomatic solution.

And the tone of Donald Trump's Truth Socials, where he says, we have air dominance.

Well, first of all, we don't.

The Israelis are doing daytime raids over Iran, which suggests they have air dominance, which is another argument that people are making for this is the moment to go, because you won't face the kind of pushback you may face if you leave this.

But when he says things like, we have air dominance or, you know, about the supreme leader, he's safe for now.

We're not going to take him out, brackets, kill, exclamation mark.

I mean, that truth social worried me a lot because that

read like something from a movie script.

Does he think he's, you know, living some kind of jingoistic, you know, he's a director.

Like you've always said, he's a director.

He's a reality TV show.

He's a TV director.

Yeah.

We've become numb to this moronic behavior.

What American president should be putting that out in the...

First of all, we have a law.

We have a law that we pass in the country, passed by the Congress.

We're not going to militarily assassinate other heads of state.

Ah, but Senator John Thune says, you know, the president can do pretty much what he wants.

So I don't think he's going to get much pushback from Republicans.

I think he's going to go for this.

I think it looks to me like he's going to go from this.

I think he's listening to the hawks.

I don't know that it's the right thing to do.

And what I do worry about is that there has been very little discussion, either in Israel or in Washington, about what happens next, the political strategy for getting out of this, the possible ramifications of this.

And when you get J.D.

Vance, who is in the isolationist wing of the MAGA movement, even coming out and saying, okay, we have to give the president the benefit of the doubt on this one.

He's been patient and his patience is running out.

To me, that felt like a signal that Trump was saying to Vance, you've got to go out there and you've got to speak directly to MAGA in the way that Netanyahu is speaking.

Netanyahu's learned how to speak Trump.

He's going directly to MAGA.

I didn't think that America first was America dead.

I mean, he's literally trying to appeal to these guys, right?

He's going over the heads of Donald Trump to trying to to appeal to the MAGA base.

So I think they could well go ahead with it.

Okay, quick question for you though, before we're going to take a break and then come back and talk about more violence.

What does this do

if he goes for this and he drops the bunker buster and American pilots have flown an American plane to drop an American weapon on Iran?

What happens

to the MAGA, politically, what happens to the MAGA base that doesn't want this?

Does this hurt Donald Trump politically with the MAGA base?

I think it hurts them.

I think some of them will splinter from him.

I think it hurts

us in our relationship with China.

I think it hurts us in our relationship or lack thereof a relationship with Russia as we're trying to resolve the conflict in Ukraine.

And also, the problem with him is that he's an overcompensator and he's hyper-masculine.

And let's just state the facts for what they are.

He's a hyper-insecure guy.

You can just tell by his demeanor, you can tell by his anger, you can tell by his need for attention, the whole reality TV bluster, all the stuff that he's doing.

So, Netanyahu is playing into that.

Hey, big boy, show people how tough you are.

Let's drop a few bunker busters.

Yeah, and look how well we've done.

And don't you want a piece of our success?

Are you a little girly, man?

Are you a little girly, man?

You're not going to drop the bunker buster?

Okay, you see, see what's going on?

Yeah, no, I see that.

Yeah.

I don't like it.

And by the way, I'm a friend of Israel.

I want Israel to survive long after I'm gone.

The Jewish people deserve their own state.

They deserve the protection of the West, particularly after what happened 80 years ago in the Holocaust.

I'm all about preserving them, but I don't want to take America into another forever war in the Middle East.

Okay.

And then, and by the way, I just want to remind everybody before the break, Rumsfeld said, and Cheney said, We're going to go into Iraq.

They're going to cheer for us.

And then three months later, everyone's going to be joyous.

23 years later, there's not a lot of joy anywhere.

The known unknowns is what the problem is, and the unknown unknowns.

Okay, I think that's a good place to leave it.

We'll come back and we will talk about what happened in Minnesota and more broadly.

America just feels like it's got a rise in kind of politically violent rhetoric, and it feels like it's on a bit of a tinderbox at the moment.

So we'll talk about that.

We'll be right back.

This is a paid ad for better help.

In moments of stress, we tend to turn to whoever's in reach.

That flatmate in the kitchen, the barista on a slow morning, the stranger who simply asks you how you're doing.

It can help, but being heard isn't always enough, and the more confidently people speak, the more we mistake it for wisdom.

But if you're dealing with anxiety or loss or something that's been weighing on you, what you need isn't noise, it's actual experience, somebody who really knows their craft.

BetterHelp has spent over a decade helping people find that match.

A short questionnaire sets your preferences and they'll connect you with a therapist who fits.

It's completely online, it's fully flexible.

And if your first counselor doesn't really feel right for you, you can switch at any time.

There's no pressure, no extra cost.

As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp gives you access to credentialed mental health professionals with a wide range of expertise.

Our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com/slash tripus.

That's better H-E-L-P.com/slash T-R-I-P-U-S.

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest-paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, No, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

AKA Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

Welcome back to The Rest is Politics U.S.

with me, Katie Kay.

And I'm Athony Scaramucci.

We spent the first half talking about the prospect of violence.

Well, there is violence already, but the prospect of even more violence in the Middle East.

And we're going to spend this half talking about violence that is happening in real time in the United States.

There was the awful shooting over the weekend of a state senator, Melissa Hortman, and her husband Mark, and the attempted shooting of Democratic state senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette, who were both taken to hospital, and the discovery that a guy had had a list of multiple state local officials that he wanted to shoot, including the governor Tim Waltz.

There was a manhunt that went underway for the shooter.

And I think it was just a reminder to people in America that there is an awful lot of violent rhetoric in the country, but there is also real violence in the country.

And I just looked up a couple of statistics for us to kick this off, to make us feel a sober moment of realization of how bad this is getting.

In 2017, there were 3,939 threats investigated by Capitol Hill Police against members of Congress.

By 2024, that number had more than doubled to 9,474.

There have been this year, if you run through the list of politically motivated attacks in the United States, there have been six already of attacks against people or things, against the Minnesota lawmakers, against the two, the murder of the two Israeli embassy staff officials, the attacks on demonstrators attending a march for Israeli hostages, the arson attack at the house of Democratic Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro's home in April, the arson, the vandalism of New Mexico's Republican headquarters in March, and the arson and vandalism of Tesla properties in early 2025.

The amount of political violence in the country is picking up and it's directly related, I think, to a shift in the language, that when people hear violent language, as they have been hearing, particularly since 2016, it's not a big step from that to acting upon it.

And I think that the awful attack that we saw in Minnesota and our thoughts go out to those families up there.

This was just a terrible tragedy of a shooting of a lawmaker who had actually tried to work across the aisle in Minnesota and was killed because of what she did, along with her husband.

So I think there is a rise in political violence in the country.

And I think it's very worrying for America.

The hearts and minds issue troubles me.

We say it all the time.

but we don't do anything.

It's pretty much meaningless at this point.

And it bothers me.

So of course my heart goes out to these people but i we got to do more than just the heart you know when gabby giffords was shot in an act of political violence i was astounded my question back to you were you astounded that there was an act of political violence over last weekend no i mean no i wasn't you're right

i mean look i just i just ran through the list so many you know i'm not astounded and and and i'm also really depressingly not astounded by the kind of jokey reaction on social media of somebody like Senator Mike Lee, who put out these awful things about nightmare on Walt Street.

In addition to being a bad guy, I think he's got some mental illness to be putting that out.

But Trump, though, is also an instigator.

So they say to him, the press, he's on Air Force One.

Are you going to call Governor Waltz?

You remember what he said?

Did you watch that clip?

Yeah, he says, I may call him.

I may call other people too, but he's a grossly, didn't he say he's a grossly incompetent person and a terrible governor?

That was his reaction.

His reaction was political.

I probably won't waste my time calling him.

That's how you respond to a political act of violence.

You know, Steve Scalese in 2017 was trying to play softball, and they almost killed him.

And he walks with a limp for the rest of his life.

And he was fighting for his life in a D.C.

hospital.

He was up one morning with a group of congressional colleagues to play a softball game.

And somebody got it in their mind that they were going to shoot Steve Khalese and others.

And of course, he was near mortally wounded.

So, so you know, to me, the response is sickening.

The response at this point is sickening.

You've been to Australia.

I traveled to Australia.

It was a conservative prime minister in Australia.

I believe it was Howard, wasn't it?

I think it was Howard.

He passed radical gun control legislation that wasn't that radical.

They turned back guns.

They got rid of the semi-automatics.

They forced everybody to register.

They've strained out all the people that are mentally ill.

And the shooting stopped, Caddy.

How about that?

The shooting stopped.

Anthony, is this because UK did something similar after the awful school shooting in Dumb Lane in Scotland?

And other countries have addressed this issue.

And you and I have spoken about school shootings before.

I think there are two things going on.

One, obviously, is the amount of guns and the amount of gun violence in the country.

But what's new, and I think it's interesting that you raised the Gabby Giffords issue, because you're right.

I was stunned when that happened.

I was pretty stunned, actually, when Steve Scalise was shot at that softball practice, because that, even back then, it was quite unusual.

And now, violence against politicians has become almost accepted.

And I don't know if there's something specifically about the violence against the politicians, which is separate from the school shootings and the gun.

I completely agree America needs to do something about gun control and to stop school shootings.

But is there something specifically about the threats against politicians and against judges?

And particularly, actually, the biggest rise is amongst state lawmakers.

What's that about?

What's behind that and how can that be stopped?

Again, it's broad-based legislation, and obviously these people need more protection.

But that's crazy.

If we have every local politician has to have protection, I mean, that's what a world are we in.

I understand that, but you got to start with the curbing of the guns.

If you have the person that shot

these people is a deranged person.

If you can work on getting deranged people not to have guns, that would be very helpful.

And so that's just the facts.

I have a retired judge who's a friend of mine.

She had two

SUVs running.

You know how they have on West Avenue, which is in between the old executive office building and the White House, there are four or five vehicles that are running.

The environmentalists are not going to like this part of the story, but there are four vehicles.

I'm sure they're electric.

They're not.

They're pumping out carbon, and all four of them are there.

And I remember tapping on the window once, and I said, hey, guys, why is the car running?

Because I didn't know.

I said, oh, no, the car is running because we don't want to have to start the car.

If someone's coming out of that White House that we need to get to a hospital or we need to move around, we don't even want to start the car.

In my neighborhood, I had a judge in my neighborhood that had two cars running all night because she had death threats on her.

And of course, you may remember there was a woman killed

in New Jersey.

A judge was killed in New Jersey.

Someone didn't like the decision.

So,

okay,

we're going to let this go.

We're going to let this go because money controls politics and the gun lobby is still very powerful, even on the left.

It's on the left and the right.

They will block legislation.

Even though 85% of the Americans want the legislation, it will get blocked because the money controls politics.

So until you get some type of systemic reform,

We're going to be faced with this.

And I would tell an elected official, you're going to have to get some security.

But this is done

also

to mute people's opinions.

I'm not going to take a controversial opinion because I don't want to get shot at.

You see what you see what's going on?

It's chilling.

It's chilling the debate.

It's chilling the policy.

It's curbing people's appetite for political courage.

So it's an overall recipe for disaster in the country.

It's heartbreaking on a level in terms of the physical and and mental anguish and the loss of the human beings, but it's also heartbreaking for the country that we can't get our you-know-what together to fix this problem.

Is there a politician who could appeal to the country to tone down the rhetoric?

Because I think there is a direct connection between the violent language that is being used in politics at the moment.

And I think that

you're going to hate this, but I think that actually calling people fascists and Marxists does not help.

It dehumanizes people who have different political views from your own.

And I think there is a moment for a politician to perhaps show some leadership here and say, okay, we are actually on our side going to tone down the language.

And I'm not getting at you for saying using the word fascist.

I understand why you do that.

You are.

I don't mind you getting that.

No, no, no, no.

Don't you think there is

a rules?

You use your British diplomacy and your accent on me.

You're totally doing that.

But I want to get away from that.

There is a risk that you use language like that.

I'm starting my car.

I'm going to run right over your conversation.

So I'm going to ask you a question, dear Caddy Kay.

With an electric car or a car.

Yeah, no, no.

I'm going to start with a gas-fired car that the Secret Service use on West Avenue.

I'm going to ask you something.

diplomatic catty k i'm going to ask you something am i allowed to call a friend dominic sandbrook am i allowed to call you my yeah you can call a friend because he he he's mr no one's a fascist but adolf hitler but just tell me the behavior The American president, the leader of the free world, sitting on top of the most powerful military and has the full apparatus of the government, says, and I quote, Elon Musk better not back any Democrats, otherwise there will be dire consequences.

Okay, describe that to me.

Describe that to me.

Without using the F word that ends in a T, not with a K.

Describe that to me.

Go ahead.

Go ahead.

Describe it to me.

Without saying he's fat or something.

Yeah, well, yeah, yes, exactly.

I wasn't thinking of that word, although he is fat.

That's exactly the kind of language that's a problem.

You're going to use the power of the American government to threaten you.

Because you see, what's happening,

you've been anesthesized to Trump's behavior.

What's wrong with the word authoritarian behavior?

Okay, hold on a second.

This could be a breakthrough.

So I'm in the Dominic Sandbrook camp here, which is that fascist is related to that particular party in that particular moment in the 1930s in Germany and Italy.

And that when you start throwing around the word fascist, you slightly

make generic something that was quite specific.

On a future podcast, I'm going to call him a fat authoritarian.

Okay, that's what I'm going to do.

I'm not going to use the word fascist anymore.

You've won the point.

If that makes you happy, you've won the point.

Anyway, it's very depressing.

I wish there was a politician that could somehow dampen down the political violence.

And I think even things like when you see Senator Alex Padilla of California being thrown to the floor by ICE agents and handcuffed on camera, then that is not the kind of incident that helps the tone that we're in.

We're living in a moment where things feel very febrile, let's say, politically.

And I wish that this had come as a surprise.

I really wish, you're right, that was such a great way of framing it at the beginning.

Now that you've run over me with your car, I'll pay you a compliment because that's what diplomats do.

I wish that the framing of this that I wish I had been surprised.

You've already hurt my feelings.

It's too late.

It's too late.

Your feelings.

I hurt your feelings every single episode.

Yes, I have.

Your poor wife.

Yes.

Your poor wife.

Okay, we're going to leave it there, guys.

We will be back on Sunday for our founding members question and answer episode.

We'd love you to join us then.

If you are not a founding member, please join the club.

We have more mini-series coming.

Are you going to be on the yacht on Sunday?

We're just the inquiring minds want to know.

Okay, full disclosure: we're taping this before I get back to hot, sweltering Washington, D.C.

on Saturday night.

So I will be taping this from the Mediterranean.

But when you are listening to it, I will be in the air conditioning.

This is Anthony Scaramucci signing off with not my better half podcaster, but my better nine-tenths, the very posh Caddy K.

I'm in a sweltering office in London where these people are hypocritical environmentalists, don't even believe in air conditioning.

Go enjoy the yacht in the Mediterranean.

One hour a week.

The rest is politicsus.com.

You can find us there and sign up.

Bye, guys.

Thanks, guys.