85. Trump’s America: Presidency For Profit

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Hello and welcome to the Russ's Politics US with me, Anthony Scaramucci.

And me, Katie Kaye.

Before we dive in today, we want to tell you about the series that we have been working hard on and have just finished recording all about Elon Musk, perhaps the most powerful unelected person on the planet.

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So, Caddy, what are we going to talk about today?

Well, first of all, that was 10 out of 10.

I mean, possibly actually 15 out of 10, Anthony.

That was a brilliant,

brilliant pitch.

Could have said 100.

It's just, I mean, it's funny, isn't it, people?

It's just never enough.

It's never, ever enough.

I mean, listen, it's like a Donald Trump gathered meeting up in here.

We are going to talk this episode about corruption.

We've always said to you that we'll, you know, try and cipher the signal from the noise.

And we've both been saying for a couple of weeks to each other in our text, Anthony, that corruption is something that we should address a bit more in depth.

So we're going to talk about that in the first half of this episode.

And then the second half, we'll talk about, we're actually going to talk about dolls

and Barbie and whether Americans are prepared to sacrifice for the greater cause of having a reformed economy and the latest on any trade deals or not deals.

But the issue of corruption, I think, is worth talking about.

I've spoken this week to a couple of constitutional lawyers and a Republican former member of Congress, a Democrat up on the hill, to try and get a sense of the scale, because it looks to me like this is on a sort of scale that we haven't seen before.

Now, American politicians have always been prone to bending the rules throughout history to try and benefit themselves and even benefit their families.

And Republicans will point to Hunter Biden.

They will point to Nancy Pelosi, who, as you've often said, is the greatest stock picker in American politics.

Stories are going all around the

conservative media sphere about Mikey Sherrill, who was elected as a congresswoman, who has also apparently done very well in the stock market.

But I haven't found anyone who has said to me that what the Trump family is doing in this administration, in Trump 2.0, is not on a kind of scale we haven't seen.

We just haven't seen this before in American politics.

It makes the kind of terminology that people are using is that it makes the first Trump administration look quaint, what they're doing this time around.

I mean, in the first Trump administration, we all worried about whether, and there were investigations by reporters.

to some extent into whether, you know, he was using the Trump hotel that he owned in Washington as a kind of waiting room for the White House and foreign dignitaries would go and stay there and then the Trump organization would get benefit financially.

But here, I think in the kind of in the crypto space in particularly, in the meme space, but it's not just that.

I mean, there's lots of other areas where people around Donald Trump, particularly in his family, are just making an enormous amount of money out of this presidency.

Is it something that's going to come back to bite them?

Certainly not at the moment.

But one thing that I think is worth pointing out is that if Democrats get elected into the House of Representatives in the midterms, expect the second two years of the Trump presidency to be full of investigations into what's going on right now in terms of enrichment.

But why don't you spell out for us, Anthony?

I think it's worth us kind of spelling out what the kind of buckets are that we see of corruption and some of the examples of it.

Let's step back because

what's happening is it's happening so quickly.

And to quote Steve Bannon, they have flooded the zone on so much corruption that you're looking at it and it's sort of overwhelming and then people get numb to it.

But let's pretend it's not the United States.

Let's say that it's a third world country.

Let's say it's a, I don't know, I'm not going to name a country, but let's say that you were an intelligence analyst for the UK or for the US.

And I said to you, listen, there's a leader of a country.

58 million wallets were used to make over $10 million on that leader's meme coin.

And so it's just important for people that are not in crypto to understand you can create on the blockchain, you can replicate elements of the software of Bitcoin or Ethereum.

Doge is effectively a sorted replication of Bitcoin as an example.

And you can put it up on the blockchain and then people can use it as a gambling token.

And so Donald Trump launched this right on the eve of the inauguration, dollar sign T-R-U-M-P.

You could look it up on CoinGecko to get the pricing.

But let's say that you were a securities analyst, and I reported to you that there were 58 people that did something that's called a rug pull.

They go in and they buy the coin at very little money.

They announce the coin.

The excitement around the coin causes the coin to pop or go up in value.

Those 58 people make $10 million apiece or just over a half a billion dollars.

Actually, it was $1.1 billion to be exact.

And you can, over the blockchain, there's a company called Chain Analysis.

You can actually identify every wallet that's trading in that coin.

The blockchain is fairly transparent.

There were 764,000 wallets of mostly small holders who lost money on that meme coin.

And so you had 10 wallets make the money, Caddy, and the others lost billions of dollars as they were trading this into the pits.

And I don't know.

I think it's crazy, but he's doubling down.

Let me just say one more thing.

He's doubling down.

May 22nd, Trump National Golf Course, Washington, D.C.

If you're one of the 25 largest wallets in dollar sign Trump, you know, you're going to get a lunch with him or dinner alongside of a White House tour.

So just imagine if we were, say I was reporting that to you, you were my case officer.

I said, this is going on in this country.

How would you react to that?

And then again, where is the outrage related to it?

And we're not even getting into the $500,000 membership or some of the foreign deals that are going on.

Yeah, no, I think that is the big question is who is it that has invested in the meme coin?

There's reporting in Bloomberg just this week that the biggest holders of this meme coin are actually foreigners from other countries.

We know that the Trump organization and the White House says, look, there's no conflict of interest here because Donald Trump is not the Trump organization, but we he his family is certainly running still.

His sons are still running the Trump organization.

Every time there is a transaction on that meme coin, the Trump organization gets a cut.

If it's a buy or a sell, by March, they'd generated something like $100 million, according to the reporting.

So the family is enriching itself through this meme coin, certainly, even if the White House says that Donald Trump doesn't have anything to do with with this, and there are a lot of foreign buyers of this meme coin.

Now, listen, if I put and I and those dinners that you talked about, there are three of them this spring

with big donors to the meme coin.

They've actually pulled the White House tour.

It's sort of the words White House have kind of suddenly disappeared from the invitation.

Maybe they thought that was even pushing it a little bit too much.

But if I was an intelligence analyst, I would be thinking, who's buying this?

What do they hope to make out of it?

What access do they think they're going to get?

And what influence do they think they're going to have over American foreign policy?

I mean, that's the classic questions, right, that an intelligence case officer would ask themselves.

Now, maybe some of these people are just thinking, well, Donald Trump's behind this.

Donald Trump makes money, so I'm going to try and make money.

I suspect that's some of the smaller investors in this collectible who perhaps even lost money, something like, you know, 80,000 people lost money in the first couple of weeks because the price crashed.

I fear they may be the people who felt, oh, well, Donald Trump's going to make money, so I'll make money too.

They may be thinking this will be deregulated, and so that will help me.

And they're right, because suddenly the Securities and Exchange Commission after the inauguration said, oh, meme coins, we're not going to investigate those, so there's no investigation of what's happening.

But some of them may be people who are from other countries who are investing in Donald Trump or giving money to Donald Trump's organizations and families, own coffers with something expected in return?

I mean, if you gave me $100 million, Anthony, I mean, I would think that you probably want something out of it, right?

I'm not quite sure what you'd want from me for $100 million, but you'd probably want something unless you're a bit of a, you know, a bit of a fool, really.

I think you would out-trade me, actually.

I think you would out-negotiate me, and so I wouldn't even enter into the arrangement, knowing that I would be on the ground with like your heel on my Adam's apple.

So let's not even go there, okay?

But this is the thing I don't get, okay?

And again, I want you to be the Democrat strategist if you don't mind.

So, hello, this is what these guys are doing.

They are literally going to conferences and saying, hey, guys, we're open for business.

And if you send us money to family-owned businesses, you'll be able to get favors and special treatment from the U.S.

government.

And so the Democrats then say, What?

Now, I know there's a what-about-ism.

Trump's using it in the Oval Office.

You know, we have Hunter Picasso Biden.

His middle name was Picasso.

He was selling paintings for millions of dollars.

And now all of a sudden, his father's not president anymore.

So we've dropped the middle name Picasso from Hunter Biden's name.

He can't get the painting sold anymore.

So there is

nastiness and there is general lack of ethics on both sides.

And so my crypto bros, as they're called, okay, they're like, hey, well, at least he's with us.

He's long Bitcoin.

And so who cares?

Hunter Biden was a long Bitcoin.

But Trump has taken this to a totally another level.

You remember they used to say there's 10% for the big guy?

And that was references to Joe Biden in business transactions.

Now,

Caddy, there's 10 billion for the big guy.

It's not 10%.

I mean, it's so wild.

And again,

if you were a Singapore official here, you would be looking at this and saying, well, in Singapore, we pay our politicians.

In Singapore, they get a requisite amount of money where they can live.

If you're paying somebody $175,000 a year, and I'm not defending Nancy Pelosi or Mikey Sherrill, but if you're paying them $175,000 a year and you give them a loophole where they can trade on insider information,

how are they not going to do that?

Of course they have to do that.

Are they going to live in Washington, have a home in their district co-temporaneously on $175,000 Paul Ryan used to sleep on his cot.

He had a pull-out couch in his office.

Those were the days, right?

Well, yes, but I'm just saying to you, you've got a bigger problem.

It's not just the Republicans are corrupt and the Democrats are corrupt.

The system's incentives are aligned in a way that hurt the system.

And let me just give you a hypothetical.

Let's say I said to you, each member of the Congress, there's 535 of them, they get 20 million US dollars in after-tax cash if they balance the budget.

If you do the math, it's $10.7 billion, which is a rounding error on the budget.

How quickly do you think they would balance the budget?

The answer is they would balance the budget, right?

So it's not just the corruption.

It's the incentives around Washington that I believe need massive reform.

I heard Scott Galloway make that same argument about we should have a Singapore system where we actually pay our politicians properly.

You know, you play the president and whatever it is.

He said, I think it was, you know, five million a year.

You pay members of Congress a million a year.

And then you have a complete zero tolerance policy when it comes to anything.

around corruption or conflicts of interest.

I don't know if members of Congress would vote for that.

Maybe they would.

I don't think it's going to happen.

I think you're right that there do need to be reforms.

I think the concern around what is happening in this administration, and this is, I'm hearing this from conservatives who are saying, listen, Republicans need to be a little concerned.

And I think this is perhaps not just on the corruption issue, because whatever is done in this administration, if a Democrat is elected in 2028, is a Democrat going to come in and say, kind of Jimmy Carter style, right, we are going to be purer than Driven Snow.

This is back to the age of

Congresspeople living simply.

We're not going to have any hint of corruption around the White House.

Or are they going to come come in and kind of up the ante?

Now the norms have been slashed.

Is the next president going to do the same thing?

I mean, I think we're in a sort of cycle of, you know, both in terms of power grab for presidents, where they seem to be one after the other grabbing more power.

But the levels of kind of self-interest do seem to be accelerating.

Another area I wanted...

to ask you about, though, in terms of what we're seeing that is different with this White House compared to previous presidents, but also compared to uh trump in the first administration is explain a little bit to me world liberty financial because that seems to be it's again it's in the crypto space that's why i want to talk about this this week because we've seen eric trump out in dubai getting a huge investment it looks like to me i don't know how else you describe it of two billion dollars from the united arab emirates into this stable coin that world liberty financial is going to produce which again, some people have said to me, this is an opportunity for massive enrichment on a scale that the Trump family hasn't seen before for the Trump organization.

And by the way, second question, if I'm allowed one, in the press briefing room right here, do you buy the White House's argument that Donald Trump is not part of the Trump organization and so there is no conflict of interest?

And then explain World Liberty Financial.

Well, first of all, there's a broader argument, which is why I'm talking about a macro level of reform.

I think people may know this, but it's worth repeating.

The president is the only one

excluded from having a business.

So if I'm in his cabinet, I'm supposed to shed my businesses.

Now, Trump won.

Many of these people didn't shed their businesses.

Wilbur Ross didn't.

Jared Kushner didn't, but you're supposed to.

You go to an ethics lawyer and they say, you're going to go work for the White House.

You have to shed your businesses.

You have to cleanse yourself of any potential conflict of interest.

But the president is carved out of that.

It dates back to George Washington.

They wanted him to do the job.

He was like, yeah, that's great, but I still want my farm.

So if you go back, they carved out the presidency.

And so Trump is technically, technically allowed to run the Trump organization while being president of the United States.

So there is space there for him to do certain quote-unquote nefarious things.

And so him saying saying that he's not involved, him and his lawyers think, well, that's giving you enough air cover.

But you know, and I know there's the letter of the law and then there's the spirit of the law and then there is what is in the best interests of the people of the United States.

And so it's hard.

You know, I like Eric Trump.

I know Eric Trump.

He's always been friendly to me.

If I have a crypto conference, I certainly will invite him because he's an important player in the crypto industry.

But I would recommend to him and I would recommend to the Trump people, delineate and explain why this is not hurting the American people and why this is not infringing on the president's decisions as it relates to policy.

And if you can't do that,

out of respect for the American people and the population, don't do what you guys are doing.

Getting $2 billion from Dubai, you would not put in the bracket of being necessarily good for the American people in this context.

Again,

I don't don't know what the quid pro quo was, okay?

And I'm not sure.

I'm sure they would say there was none.

Yeah, exactly.

So I'm not trying to accuse anybody of anything.

I'm saying the appearance of it, the appearance of it, right?

We'd say that we got to be cleaner than Caesar's wife or whatever the statement was from Shakespeare, that the appearance of it hurts the country and it causes a downward shift in more people saying, well, if they're doing it, I should be doing it too.

If there's a feeding frenzy here, I should be a part of it too.

It's bad on both sides.

Okay.

I don't want to be a whataboutism person, Caddy,

because if you say this to the Trump people, they say, well, what about Hunter Picasso Biden?

Yeah, I'm not saying that.

I'd rather just say, listen, it's bad on both sides.

Trump is taking it to an extra level, but we need massive reform.

So you'd say he is taking it to an extra level.

Because one of the things I'm hearing is that, yes, there is it on both sides, but this is different in scale.

And the other thing that is different is the degree to which since the inauguration, the White House has kind of gutted the investigative capabilities of the Justice Department when it comes to corruption.

Basically, whether it's in the SEC or the DOJ, firing the inspectors general, the non-partisan inspectors general, the people who are meant to be the watchdogs and the units that are meant to be the watchdogs who are meant to investigate whether there is any impropriety going on, not just from the White House, but from members of Congress and the Senate.

As far as I understand it, they've been gutted.

So you've got this massive enrichment of the Trump organization and the Trump family happening potentially at the same time that the White House is deciding to have a policy of not really investigating anything around fraud.

And I think that is new.

One question I had for you, Anthony, I don't know how you feel about this, and I don't know if you, how you would want to answer this, but a couple of people who are involved in the crypto world, who I was talking to this week ahead of this show, have said to me, look, there is concern amongst people who believe in crypto that what is happening right now is not good for the currency.

It's not good in terms of perception.

And actually, they would like some kind of regulation, and we know that.

But just because of what is happening with the Trump family and World Liberty Financial, it looks like the banking committee and the Senate may be moving away from enacting some kind of regulation that could be good for the currency.

Because you've even got a Republican senator from Wyoming who is very pro-Trump saying that this gives her pause.

Do you think this is potentially bad for crypto?

Here's what I would say, because I'm obviously steeped in the industry.

And full disclosure to everybody, I own a lot of Bitcoin for my clients and for myself.

And when Trump announced the meme coin and prices were shooting up, I turned to my colleagues in the industry.

I said, this is going to be very bad for the industry because what will end up happening is there's 60-year-old plus people in the Congress that will look at this and they're going to get very turned off by it.

And it's going to slow down the regulatory train for

propitious stablecoin regulation.

It's going to slow down the train for money center banks custody things like Bitcoin or not, and what will be the capital requirements for it.

And so that's effectively what it's done.

You know, Ruben Gallego got a lot of money from Fair Shake as an example.

He said he was pro-Bitcoin, pro-crypto.

Adam Schiff got a lot of money from FairShake and the Bitcoiners, they've both walked away from the legislation citing

this activity that's going on with the Trump family.

And so now they're at odds now with the people that gave them that money, right?

And so they'll probably, you know, there'll be a tussle and a fight with those guys, but they've got six years in the Congress or five and a half more years in the Senate, I should say.

But here's the bigger issue.

The bigger issue is I'm going to channel Trump for a second because I know him and I know the family members.

They're going to say, this is totally in our rights to do it.

Nancy Pelosi trades the stock market.

Mikey Sherrell trades the stock market.

It's totally in our rights to do it.

So we're doing it.

We're just doing it bigger and bolder than you guys, but we're doing it in a bald-faced way.

And we're not corrupt.

We're not doing anything corrupt.

And my father's not making any decisions related to this.

This is just us milking the machinery that we're allowed to milk.

The other thing that they would say is that you guys have been unfair to us.

You came after us with lawfare.

You came after us with inspector generals.

You appointed a special prosecutor against my father for the Russia hoax thing.

And by the way, I'm not saying it is a hoax, but I'm just saying they said it was.

I'm just giving you their point of view.

That's why they fired all these inspector generals.

So the whole thing is a mess.

And it would require political leadership, literally non-partisan or post-partisan political leadership.

It would require a leader to get into the mix and say, wow, this thing is a mess.

You guys have had no constitutional amendments.

You've had no reform to the American government.

And we have to think about this not as partisans, but how could we reform this to reset the table so that the American people will be less cynical about us and what we're doing here in Washington?

Yeah.

I agree.

I think you're right that there needs to be reform and it needs to be a situation where this doesn't become an arms race.

And each administration, and whether you're a Republican or a Democrat, feels that they can use the system to benefit themselves financially.

I don't hold out out much hope for reform in America happening, and I don't hold out much hope for kind of members of Congress doing the right thing over this one or coming together to do the right thing.

We're going to take a quick break, but one quick thing.

I didn't know if you know this, Anthony, but I couldn't resist putting it in, kind of why not, just before we take a break.

Two of the partners who were in World Liberty Financial with the Trumps, one of them sold colon cleanser.

The other had sold a website, I kid you not, called datehottergirls.com.

So I don't know, do with that what you want.

I'm just so glad you're bringing this stuff up and not me.

Okay, because for some reason, when you bring this shit up, you get away with it.

And I obviously wouldn't be able to get away with that.

So, keep it, keep it going, Caddy.

Keep it going.

Datehottergirls.com.

I mean, you know, who doesn't want that?

Amen.

Amen.

And trust me, there's several of our producers right now that are looking at that URL.

They're checking that website right now.

They are checking that right now.

I won't mention names, Dom, but I'll just let you know that there are some producers that are actually looking that up right now.

Yeah, Fiona's trying to make sure he doesn't touch the keyboard.

Okay guys, we're going to take a break and we'll be back to talk about tariffs and trade deals and Barbie dolls.

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Welcome back to the Rest of Politics U.S.

I'm Anthony Scaramucci.

I'm Katie Kay.

Katie, I want to flip over from the golden age of corruption to, I don't know, use a great word, the Fakakta trade deals.

The Fakakta trade deals.

It's a little bit of Yiddish.

Basically means effed up, but it's close enough.

And here we are where we actually don't know what's happening.

The Trump administration, people there actually don't know what's happening.

It was announced last night that the Chinese, and they put out such a communique on their embassy site on X, they basically said that because of the business community globally, their alliances with people globally, and U.S.

business leaders, they're going to meet with Scott Passett May 9th to the 12th to discuss trade.

But when the President was together with Mark Carney, I do want to talk about Prime Minister Carney as well.

He's talking senselessly.

I mean, he's there saying

we stopped the boats with our 145%

tariff, and a result of which now now we're going to save a trillion dollars.

He thinks that a trade deficit is a ripoff.

But what I want to remind people, if you buy a flat screen from South Korea and you put it on your wall, you have the requisite value from South Korea and you have utility that you're using.

You've got a TV on your wall.

I mean, you've got exactly.

And so the fact that the president is saying this stuff and he's saying it unchecked unchecked and there's nobody in the room saying, well, Mr.

President, that's really not how the economy works.

And Prime Minister Corney, you know, I know Mark a long time.

I was impressed with his body language.

He was so good, by the way.

That whole line about, I've been speaking to the owners of Canada and it's not for sale.

It was such a good line.

Well, remember, he worked at Brookfield, right?

He was on the board at Brookfield after he left.

And so it was a great line to use in the context of real estate.

And it put Trump off pace there a second because he looked at him and said, You know, you're a real estate developer, and I worked in real estate.

There are some buildings that are not for sale.

Buckingham Palace, the building we're in, the White House, not for sale.

And then he flattered him saying, Buckingham Palace, where you have been, Mr.

President.

He was very, he was good.

He did a very artful job, but I have to tell you something because I know his personality.

I'm telling you, he walked out of there frustrated.

I guarantee it.

And Mark, if you're listening, you did a great job.

And I'll just let you know, I know you walked out of there frustrated because you're like, how is this possible that I'm talking to somebody who's the leader of the free world and one of the richest economies in the history of the world that is speaking this illogically and this irrationally?

Now, I'll say something good about Carney's situation.

He's not Trudeau.

And so I don't know what it was about Trudeau.

Maybe it was the Melania kiss.

I don't know if it's the flowing hair that Trudeau had.

I think I'm saying.

And Mark, Prime Minister Carney, I'm not saying you're not a good-looking dude, but you don't have the flowing Trudeau hair.

And, you know, Trump is super jealous of people that have flowing hair.

And so, whatever it is, Trump has taken it down a notch.

So, I think it's three things, and then we'll go to trade.

Number one, I think he looks at Carney and says, okay, that is a tough SOB.

That's a guy that's worked at Brookfield.

He's worked with Mike Bloomberg.

He ran the Central Bank of England.

And this is is a tough SOB.

And I got to be a little bit less steamrolly with him because

he's going to push back and he's going to do things in a very smart way.

And so there's instinct there on Trump's part.

And then the second thing, which I think is also important, is that Carney has a diplomatic sense about him.

He's got...

I don't know, it's a street smarts related to diplomacy.

And I think he handled that situation very well.

And then the last thing, of course, which you know and people on Wall Street know, and I want our viewers and listeners to know, Carney's already done a very good job of reaching out to other international trading partners

and to help his provinces sell their goods and services away from the United States.

Just want to remind people, yeah, we're 26% of the world's output, but that means that there's three-fourths of the world that are opportunities for places like Canada.

So, anyway, I'm off my soapbox there, but I have to tell you, I was very impressed with that yesterday.

Yeah, I think he handled it well.

Full marks, I mean, yeah, he may have come out frustrated.

And I think there are a lot of, I mean, I was making some calls before this on the kind of trade deal side.

There are a lot of people who are frustrated in their negotiations with the White House at the moment because they don't quite know what the White House wants.

I mean, you keep hearing that.

One thing that my understanding is there's reporting in the FT this week that Britain may be announcing a trade deal with the US.

But speaking to both Brits and European officials, it's pretty clear that other countries are starting to think they have more leverage than America and the White House may have anticipated.

And the leverage they have is this, that they realize how much Donald Trump needs to announce these trade deals.

And Trump may go on television as he did this week saying, we don't need deals.

I mean, it's so confusing.

He's gone and said, we're about to announce trade deals.

Scott Person is out there saying we're about to announce trade deals.

And then you've got Trump saying, We don't need deals.

You all talk about deals.

We don't need any deals, actually.

But I think there's a realization from America's trading partners that there is a political leverage they have because the timetable is slightly different because Donald Trump wants this trade deal very soon.

Because as you said, the ships are arriving now from China.

The first ships are starting to arrive without full cargoes.

And there is an general understanding that if that carries on happening, Americans won't have full shelves.

And American consumers, God bless them, are not the ones that are most likely to be told that austerity is a good thing or that they can't have as many Barbie dolls as they want.

And so the White House is kind of under the gun to get this done.

And other countries, from my conversations, are saying, well, yeah, we want a trade deal too, but it has to be the right trade deal for us.

We're not just going to sign anything because the White House wants us to sign something fast.

And in a way, that has slightly shifted the power balance in a way the White House didn't really understand.

I don't know.

How many Barbie dolls do you want for Christmas, by the way?

That's what I was going to get you for Christmas, was a doll.

I thought you'd like that.

Well, actually, I was going to give you 30 dolls because that's clearly what every American wants.

Just make sure it's not life-size and everything will be fine.

But, but, yeah, I'm not going down that route.

We're not going that way.

I guess the question I have.

This is not datehottergirls.com episode.

I guess the question I have is: is it possible we're sitting here at Christmas and he has literally COVID-19 or Donald Trump 2025

the entire supply chain.

And we're all sitting here saying, okay, he ratcheted this up.

He didn't have the leverage that he thought he had, a result of which he's putting small business owners out of business that

need these goods to sell on their shelves.

And we're sitting here and we're in a very steep recession.

Or is Kevin McCarthy, the former Speaker of the House, going to be correct?

Where he said to people privately this week that he spoke to Trump and he's basically like, dude, you got 60 days, man.

You got to figure this out.

And Trump has said to him privately, yes, we're going to effectively ease up or lighten up because we can't have that apocalyptic scenario.

So, I mean, he's already going to slow down the economy.

Very likely there'll be a recession.

Guidance from Mattel, guidance from other companies that are making products, Nike, all saying, I can't tell you what's going to happen now anymore.

Airlines are telling you, geez, I'm really sorry.

These routes into the U.S., many of them are being canceled.

People don't want to come into the U.S.

right now, and I can't give you guidance.

But which scenario unfolds?

I'm switching you from democratic strategist to Wall Street guru.

Okay, I'm not paid well enough to be either of those things because they earn a hell of a lot more money than I do.

This is improv at Trip U.S.

So go ahead.

Tell me, tell me what's going to happen.

Which way is this going to go?

Apocalyptic nightmare, where we're like in Soil and Green starring Charlton Heston?

Or are we going to pull this thing back from the abyss?

So long as I'm not, you know, role-playing a crypto guru.

Look, I think we pull it back from the abyss.

I think that you have the CEO of Mattel out there saying, listen, we're going to raise prices in the U.S.

And by the way, Mr.

Trump, toy manufacturing is not coming back to America.

I mean, he could not have been more clear that this idea of remaking remaking the American economy is just not going to happen.

He said, look, if we can't source them in China, we'll source them in other countries, but we're not going to start making toys here.

And you've got these other countries all making trade deals together.

You've got Canada talking to Asian countries.

You've got the UK announcing a deal with India.

You've got the European Union negotiating with India.

You've got the European Union negotiating with the Latin American consortium of countries.

Global trade is going to carry on flowing.

It's just going to build itself a channel around Fortress America and America is going to be left out.

And I think the White House has woken up and Donald Trump has woken up to that pain threshold.

He's hearing it domestically.

He's hearing it from his foreign trading partners.

He's hearing it from Wall Street.

He's hearing it from the bond traders.

Nobody likes this.

All that's happening is that Donald Trump is acting as an accelerant to other countries to lower their tariffs amongst themselves and carry on trading amongst themselves.

So my sense is, yes, we we may have a small recession.

Yes, we may have some supply chain hiccups because that's already happened.

You know, I hate the prediction business, but I just cannot see him wanting to have economic Armageddon.

Carlos Cabello, the former Republican congressman from Florida, says something super smart to me this week.

He said, look, you're going to have domestic constituents that don't like being told that they have to have austerity.

And in particular, Latin American voters, Hispanic voters who came from countries where there were empty shelves and where the government told them what they could and couldn't buy and kept telling them, like Venezuela and Cuba, that they had to sacrifice for the greater good of the regime and the socialist experiment.

They're not going to like being told, you know, they can only have five pencils, as Donald Trump said this week, or that they can only have two or three dolls.

I thought it was such a smart point.

So, you, all of these constituents were saying, stop it, this is not going to work for us.

Let me push back.

Oh, you think there's going to be Armageddon?

Go on.

No, no, I don't think there's going to be Armageddon, but I find it astonishing.

So if Joe Biden said, we're ratcheting up tariffs, we're going to cause a recession, we're going to take 7% to 10% out of the stock market, and then was at a microphone in the Oval Office where we're running a press gaggle every day, like a reality television show, he said, hey, but who cares?

You know, forget the $30.

We're only going to down to two, and they're going to cost more.

Again, what would the Fox people say?

Or what would the Newsmax people say?

Or what would the conservative talk radio guys say?

They would have Joe Biden's head on a spike, okay, outside their radio station, outside their television cable network, but they sit there in silence, and it's like a Maoist sort of chant.

Well, this is for our greater good.

I was on the soccer field, and I got a guy who I think his IQ is over 100.

No, I was watching my young kids, okay, and I got a,

we'll call it football because that's British football, but I got a guy, I think his IQ is over 100.

He comes over to me.

He knows that I'm not a big Trump fan.

He goes, oh, you know, he's doing great.

These tariffs are awesome.

He's resetting the playing field.

And so I just pushed him a bit.

I was like, how is he resetting the playing field?

Well, now we're going to get fair deals that we're not going to be taken advantage of anymore.

Okay, well, how is he going to do that?

There's nobody because you can't answer the question because it doesn't conjoin with the way the integrated global economy works in 2025.

So there's no answer to the question, you know, I can't get on Fox News to debate these guys because they get pissed off because they can't chant the talking points that are illogical.

So to me, we're sitting here with a situation where

people like Kevin McCarthy, CEOs, business leaders, are going to figure out a way to go around the president to try to get deals done, to try to get us out of the situation that we're in.

And of course, when that happens, Donald Trump is going to be declaring victory.

Aaron Powell, if he declares victory and the world economy doesn't get crashed, that's probably fine.

But he can declare victory.

Other countries will already have taken note of what happened.

They will know that this isn't victory, and they will also know that the United States is not the reliable trading partner that they thought it was.

And that is the long-term damage to the United States, that its reputation as a country that adheres to the rule of law, that adheres to norms and practices, that has checks and balances, and that can be relied on to trade, is not going to be there anymore.

And they'll have already, in that meantime, they've started investigating other places that they can trade with.

Somebody said something really smart to me this week.

I'm going to finish this.

That Donald Trump often has the wrong answer to the right questions.

Because I also think there might be quite a lot of parents out there, myself included, who thought, well, actually, you know what?

He's quite right.

We don't need 30 cheap dolls.

We are kind of over-reliant on cheap consumer goods that have come in from China over the last 20 years.

It would be good to actually cut back on that a little bit.

But his way of answering that question

has with it considerable risks for the rest of the world as well.

Okay, we're going to leave it there.

Thank you very much, everybody, for listening.

This has been the weirdly smutty issue of hottergirls.com and dolls.

That was some of my best behavior.

You started it.

We'll be back next Friday with our regular episode.

But if you can't wait until then, we do do have our founding members question and answer every Sunday where we're going to talk about Trump's plan to reopen Alcatraz.

Where did that come from?

And of course, it's going to be the first episode of our Elon Musk series that's going to come out next Tuesday.

We do hope you'll listen to that too.

Bye, everyone.

Bye, everybody.

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