81. The Moment Trump Snaps
Join Katty and Anthony as they discuss all of this and more.
Become a Founding Member
Support the podcast, enjoy ad-free listening, gain early access to our mini-series, and get a bonus members-only Q&A episode every week!
Just head to https://therestispoliticsus.com to sign up today.
Instagram: @RestPoliticsUS
Twitter: @RestPoliticsUS
Email: therestispoliticsus@goalhanger.com
Assistant Producer: India Dunkley
Producer: Fiona Douglas
Social Producer: Harry Balden
Senior Producer: Dom Johnson
Head of Content: Tom Whiter
Head of Digital: Sam Oakley
Exec Producers: Tony Pastor, Jack Davenport
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Listen and follow along
Transcript
Bundle and safe with Expedia.
You were made to follow your favorite band, and from the front row, we were made to quietly save you more.
Expedia, made to travel.
Savings vary and subject to availability, flight inclusive packages are at all protected.
Adobe Acrobat Studio, so brand new.
Show me all the things PDFs can do.
Do your work with ease and speed.
PDF spaces is all you need.
Do hours of research in an instant.
With key insights from an AI assistant.
Pick a template with a click.
Now your Prezo looks super slick.
Close that deal, yeah, you won.
Do that, doing that, did that, done.
Now you can do that, do that with Acrobat.
Now you can do that, do that with the all-new Acrobat.
It's time to do your best work with the all-new Adobe Acrobat Studio.
Honey Punches of Otes is the forma perfecto dependencies familia.
Cono juelas crucientes and verdad qual los niños les encantas.
Hademas delicios trosos de grandola, nuces y fruta que'todos vana disbrutal.
Honey punches a votes for allos.
Tocal bene para sabera más.
This is The Rest is Politics.
U.S.
for our founding members.
I better turn down CNN.
There is so much news happening to bring to you today that I've got CNN up in the background.
I'm Catty Kaye.
Thanks for joining us, everybody.
I'm Anthony Scaramucci.
It's good to be here.
I am fully moisturized.
I did go to the bathroom before the live session.
Any other questions?
I'm just going over the questions, Gatty
in the private chat.
And we got, hey, we got people from every, I love that all my Swiss compatriots are reaching out.
That's so nice from the Swiss Mountains, from Tun, which is very near where my grandmother lived in Switzerland, also from East London, Vienna, Austria, Tuscany.
Hey, we're going super global and all the nice places.
Hello from Denmark.
Denmark might be in the news today.
Shaftesbury, Dorset, York, oopsala.
There we go.
Join us from everywhere.
Thank you very much, everybody.
Hey, look, there's a lot.
Usually we take one topic in these live streams, and I should tell you that next week is the last of these Monday live streams, but we will come to you with emergency.
That's it.
That's 100 days.
That went by fast, right?
Are you feeling sad?
Yeah, I thought I was starting to get used to the live streams and the cheeky questions and everything.
Okay, all right.
Okay, but look, guys, how about if there is big breaking news, which of course there never is in the Trump administration, we bring you emergency live streams?
How about that?
We'll be having live streams every hour.
Then, I mean, I don't know if they want that.
You'll be living with Anthony and Cat in your head.
So, I apologize for that idea.
And also, we are doing a series on Elon Musk, which will be for founding members, just for you guys, a four-part series on Elon Musk from his childhood, which we are starting to record at the moment that we're super excited about.
So, join us for those.
Caddy, I will give you, first of all, our production team, a big shout out to Fiona, who put the notes together on Elon Musk.
And I've gone back back to Isaacson's book, and I've looked into other things related to Elon, even going back 20 years ago when I used to attend these Allen and Company conferences where he had just sold his business to
PayPal had just sold to eBay.
And so I think we're going to have a lot of great things to talk about there.
And of course, Elon's story is evolving.
There's a rumor today that he's going to be on his earnings call announcing his departure from Doge.
I don't know if that's eminent or not, but I know that him and Trump are trying to exit gracefully.
It won't be one of those ignominious exits like many of us experience.
But I think that'll be a great series.
Is that just for founding members, Caddy, or is forgotten?
That is just for founding members.
Okay, here's what we're going to talk about today.
We want to talk about the markets, which are dropping as we're speaking.
Monday, we are recording this at 3 p.m.
on Monday, just before the markets close.
Big sell-off in U.S.
markets.
We want to talk about Defense Secretary Hegseth.
He is still the Defense Secretary.
Is he going to carry on being the Defense Secretary?
And of course, the Supreme Court ruling that broke overnight Friday into Saturday
on what the government can do with reference to people that it wants to send to El Salvador.
Before we get to all of that, I was very sorry, Anthony, to hear about the passing of the Pope.
I know you are Catholic and your family came back from holiday to celebrate Easter weekend.
And I was thinking of you and I was thinking of your mum when I heard the news this morning.
He was
a huge
a huge fan of his.
I never met him, unfortunately.
I didn't get that opportunity, but I've just finished his book.
Actually, I would encourage people, if you are Catholic, to read the book because he was Catholic in the truest sense of Catholic.
We have a hard time.
Many of us lapsed Catholics like me have a hard time being purely Catholic.
But the Pope had three things about him that I really loved.
One was he did not judge human frailty too harshly.
He had a forgiving soul.
So this orthodoxy he was more flexible on.
The second thing, which I think was clear, he was very delineating in terms of what was good and bad in a world.
And I said this to you, and I'm going to share this if you don't mind on this
open mic here about the Vance situation.
So, Vance is a Catholic.
Vance goes to see the Pope.
The vice president.
The vice president.
J.D.
Vance goes to see the Pope over the Easter weekend.
Not even clear if the Pope actually wanted to see him, by the way.
And I'm not saying that he brushed off the vice president, but it wasn't the formal
audio and wasn't the formal video that you would see if a head of state or somebody as significant as Vance was seeing the Pope.
It could have been because he was unwell, but it could have been because of the symbolism of it.
And then you may know that he sent one of his
cardinals to talk to Vance about his responsibilities as a Catholic.
And so I'm not saying that J.D.
Vance had a wake-up call.
And if you don't mind me, because you say that I share our secrets, so I'm going to share some secrets.
You said that J.D.
Vance may not be as self-aware as me.
And I wrote back to you on text this morning that I read J.D.'s book, The Hillbilly Elegy, and he is actually very self-aware, but he's now pursuing something I think is very dangerous, which is the blind ambition of power without the grounding wire necessary for that power.
And so I'm just wondering how that went with the Pope this weekend and whether or not that Vance got a wake-up call or got his bell rung,
because the Pope sees good and evil.
And one of the last things the Pope said was over the weekend is that evil may be upon us in this hour, but God will obviously have the last say.
And it was directly related to the Ukrainian war.
So
we'll see where J.D.
Vance ends up.
I'd see him as a very flawed guy, but a very smart guy, because remember, that book was written before he was famous.
He didn't have a ghostwriter.
And we'll see.
We'll see what happens.
But it's very sad to lose the Pope over this past weekend.
A little less highbrow, but if you, obviously,
many of you may have watched Conclave, which I suspect people will be rushing to watch again, given what's about to happen in Rome.
But if you haven't seen the two popes with Jonathan Price playing Pope Francis and Anthony Hopkins playing Pope Benedict, it is worth watching.
It's a really fantastic movie.
Okay, let's move on to the markets.
Somebody has pointed out actually in the chat that Darryl Kuzens has pointed out that the FTSE is up.
That is not what is happening in New York at 3.23 on Monday afternoon.
My understanding, Anthony, that we've talked a lot about the markets in relations to tariffs and what the administration is doing or not doing with tariffs.
This seems much more in relation to the president's comments over the weekend and again today attacking Jay Powell.
He said on Friday that if he wanted Jay Powell out, he would be out quickly.
He put out on Truth Social today saying that calling him too late Powell.
He's complained that Jay Powell brought down interest rates when it was the Biden and Harris team and now he won't bring down interest.
He clearly feels that Jay Powell should be doing what he wants.
I was speaking to somebody from the IMF over the weekend who was saying that actually financial markets and international investors and economists watching the United States are as worried by what Trump is saying about Jay Powell and what that could mean for the independence of the Federal Reserve as they are by the tariffs, which I thought was interesting.
Can you,
what's your thoughts on that?
Unpack that a bit for me because I was surprised by that.
Well,
there's a lot going on.
So
I'll hit the highlights quickly, and then we'll try to get to some of these questions.
But
I think the big thing is that he wants to weaken.
So let's talk about Trump.
He wants to weaken the dollar.
He wants to flood the consumer markets outside of the United States with U.S.
goods and services.
And one of the ways to do that is you weaken the dollar, you make our stuff attractive overseas.
But he's doing
everything ass backwards, if I could say something simplistic, because if you really wanted to help the United States with its trade imbalances, you really wanted to help the United States figure this out and not just go for attention,
you would go one by one or you would go meet with people privately and say, listen, I got to make these adjustments.
I got to get living standards up for the Americans, more disposable income.
The Americans are buying one-third of the goods from the rest of the world.
It would be better for everybody if lower and middle-income Americans have more money to spend.
And here's ways you can, the rest of the world, help me do that.
But he didn't do that.
He wanted to start with high levels of antagonism, and he set himself a trap.
And so now here's what's the components of the trap.
Number one, Chinese are going to their trading partners and saying, hey, if you're cutting deals with the U.S.
or you're going to go around us, we're the Saudi Arabia of manufacturing.
Oil to Saudi Arabia is what manufacturing is to China.
And we're going to get very tough with you because we've had war declared on us.
The Admiral Yamamoto, who declared the war, this we're in tariff.
Ladies and gentlemen, not that this is a news flash, but don't be in denial over this.
We're in tariff war one.
Okay, it's a world war.
It's an economic world war.
It was started by Donald Trump.
And that's just the facts of it.
And so now all of these variables are happening outside of the U.S.
control.
So, Caddy, he's going to jawbone the Fed, but the Federal Reserve Guy, Jerome Powell, is pretty tough.
He's not going to back down because he's an establishmentarian and he knows that he has to keep the system together.
If Trump goes to fire him, he's probably right.
At some point, it becomes impossible for him to stay the same way it became impossible for Ray to stay at the FBI.
But that'll be a cataclysm in the markets.
That'll be a 20 to 25 percent downdraft in U.S.
markets.
It'll demolish the the dollar.
And then at that point, I think even if you're afraid of going to jail in this sort of Prussianistic Donald Trump regime, you'll start speaking out against it.
So you have had I mean we've had some Republicans speaking out already.
And we had
Senator Kennedy from Louisiana, Republican John Kennedy, saying over the weekend on the Sunday shows that the administration shouldn't fire Jay Powell.
Carla Hesseltine has got an interesting question.
Thank you for being a founding member, by the way, Carla.
Asking, very confusing, he can't fire him, but can he?
And you're right that it's confusing.
The clearest answer at the moment is probably not, but things could change.
Secretary Powell has recognised that himself.
He has said that the Fed's independence is a matter of law and that they're not removable except for cause.
And the question is, what is cause?
There is a...
case that is going through the courts at the moment with Trump firing the head of another of these independent bodies, the National Labor Relations Board.
And I think the way that the Supreme Court rules in that case could have an impact on whether Donald Trump can legally fire Powell.
But
one of the things that I had heard, Anthony, is that from economists and financial people is that
the damage that Donald Trump is doing already by signalling these things is
quite considerable and just bringing into question the idea of the Federal Reserve's independence.
If it looks like Jerome Powell, even if he doesn't fire him, but if it looks like the Fed is making decisions about the dollar and interest rates based on the politics of the White House, that is already undermining the system and will further undermine foreign investors' confidence in the american system
so so he's he's doing damage even by saying well what they were saying to me is he's already doing damage by saying there's a weird thing going on though and this is and i'm not giving investment advice to people but i am sitting here at skybridge where we run money i'm just letting you guys know that i'm very bullish and i'm going to explain to you why i'm bullish because The system is going to hold.
Seven to two, the Supreme Court, sorry,
got to have deportation, has to have human rights.
Now, there's a lot of Americans that are confused by this because they're in the Trump cult.
And they, well, what the guy's an MS-13 gang member deport him immediately.
Okay, well, time out.
A second.
Suppose they were accusing your family member of being that.
Okay, Ben Franklin had one of the best lines ever, which I'll repeat here.
If a hundred guilty people go free to save one innocent person, Caddy, a hundred guilty people go free to save one innocent person, it's worth it.
Okay, and if you either get the concepts of freedom or you don't, and we're getting dangerous now where you've got a guy that thinks that we're working for him.
We don't work for him.
They work for us in this country.
So the Supreme Court seven to two.
I mean, you know,
at some point, we've got to talk about these two guys that are in the two, because I think, you know, to use Justice Dolito, if my grandmother was alive, she'd say, Google's, you know, the guy's crazy, okay?
And he's embarrassing to me as a fellow Italian, but that's a whole other topic.
But just saying to you, the system is holding.
Supreme Court is shoving Donald Trump.
Jerome Powell is shoving Donald Trump.
And so what's going to happen is Neil Ferguson, who's a Trumpette, okay, you know, Neil, I know Neil, and I like Neil.
And I was with Neil and Davos debating Trump, okay, and the virtues or the vices of Trump, is now saying that they're going to get demolished.
Okay, one of our listeners just brought this up on the original.
I don't know, maybe Fiona can find the question,
but I read that over the weekend because I'm part of Neil's Green Mantle research.
But the points that I'm making is the system is going to hold, and Donald Trump is arrogantly with a few people flexing on the system.
And watch me, the system's going to hit him, going to punch back.
And so the market will rally on that.
Okay, the market's going down now because they're like, holy shit, no one's taking control.
But under the surface, control is being taken by the system.
You see what I'm saying?
Push back on me if you disagree, but that's what I'm seeing.
That's what I'm seeing.
Okay, so, okay, here's the counterpoint.
I think you're right, and
we'll spell out that 72 ruling that came down, extraordinary emergency ruling from the Supreme Court in just a second.
But the thing,
the counterpoint that I'm hearing to the system will hold, and I have always tended to believe that the system will hold, is that there are real concerns about competency.
And that those concerns are kind of across the board.
There is concerns about competency when it comes to the tariff, concerns about competency when it comes to the way they're doing immigration, that they're rushing things, which is actually getting them into trouble.
There are concerns, and we're going to talk about it, around staffing.
Pete Hegseth, who is back in trouble yet again.
So,
and concerns from international economists that Donald Trump is making policy both based on personal relationships, like he has with President Bukele in El Salvador, or he sent Scott Besant, his Treasury Secretary, down to Argentina this week, last week for a day when actually Besant would have been much better off being in the United States handling the situation with the American economy just to kind of congratulate Millé on a new IMF program, I think it was.
So there's a lot of questions about whether this is a competent administration and that in and of itself and the lack of checks and balances from Congress makes people nervous when they're looking at the United States.
I think what we're seeing, and we should spell this out
about the Supreme Court ruling, is the Supreme Court doing what the court is meant to do.
Fabio Sandra is asking, is Trump aware that lowering rates will fuel inflation even more?
I'm sure he's aware that there is the risk of that.
He is not stupid.
He's being told that by people around him.
Scott Besent will have told him that, but he thinks that
in the end, he wants a cheaper dollar.
And he thinks, he said it.
Americans have to go through some pain.
And he believes that MAGA will stay with him, and that's all he needs, is MAGA to stay with him.
He's not running for re-election.
If you're going to have a glitch in the economy and make people unhappy, do it early on in your term before you get to the end, before he can hand over to whoever he's going to hand over to.
But I'm sure he's aware that lowering rates is going to fuel inflation.
Well, I mean, listen, it will, but you said something earlier that we should talk about.
The FTSE is up.
The DAX is up, the German exchange is up.
And so, and for the last three weeks, there's been incremental capital flight outside of the United States.
And so,
he is setting up a narrative now that's very dangerous to the U.S.:
evacuation of dollar supremacy, evacuation of the stability of the rule of law, where you're going to actually have the executive branch now go after judges, calling them activist judges when they're obviously not.
And you're setting up a situation that capital does not like, Caddy.
And so, here's the flywheel: Capital leaving the United States, trade barriers going up smooth hauly-like around the world, dollar getting devalued.
And guess what, ladies and gentlemen?
We're having the worst April since 1932.
And 1932 was dead center.
In the markets, you mean?
Yeah, 1932 was dead center in the middle of the Great Depression.
So we're having the worst stock market activity since 1932.
So a shout out to John Torrance for bringing up Professor Ferguson, by the way,
and basically saying, hey, Trump's going to get crushed in the midterm.
So he's getting pushed back by the courts.
He's going to get crushed in the midterms.
He's getting pushed back by the Federal Reserve chairman.
One other person on here is saying, well,
is that going to make him more erratic?
It might, but
if the system holds, I think it's great news for America.
On the long run,
getting crushed in the midterms, it would be a blow to him, and obviously it's not something he can brag about.
But the degree to which Congress has been sidelined, what does that actually do?
It increases investigations, it increases subpoenas, but I think the country really has to wait until 28 to have a real check on Donald Trump because he is going round Congress at the moment.
I mean, none of this is being done through Congress.
There is no legislation happening in Congress.
He's doing everything by circumventing Congress.
So even if Democrats were in control of the House, I'm not sure how much real impact that would have on Donald Trump's agenda.
So
here's the question for you.
Edward R.
Murrow went on television in front of 40 million viewers and rebuked Joe McCarthy.
And then he said to Joe McCarthy, and CBS said, this is Joe McCarthy, you can get an hour of our time to give the counterpoint to my rebuking.
So you're the media person here, Caddy.
I just play one on television and on podcasts.
You're the media person.
Is there a call out of Donald Trump?
And, or is the media too fragmented?
Is his space too tied to him?
In other words,
could something here,
you remember the famous lines, right?
Do you have no dignity, sir?
Remember, they said this to Joe McCarthy.
They censored him.
They knocked him off all of his committees.
And then eventually he died of the disease that he was suffering from.
My point to you, though, is there something you could see that could break the fever?
Because I can tell you that the business people are getting this close to being done with Donald Trump.
They're not ready to admit it on a podcast like this.
They're not ready to go public because they're communications people.
Their lawyers are saying, please don't do that.
But they're here now.
They're done with the guy.
You had Stan Druckenmiller saying two days before the Biden administration, very anti-business.
The business leaders are giddy at Trump's coming into power.
$14 trillion taken out of the stock market, total disarray, worst stock market performance since 1932.
They're right here.
So my question is,
can it be popped, Gatty?
I think
the closest we've come to it being popped was in the market meltdown after the tariffs were announced.
And that is because the business community's self-interest was impacted.
And
I was struck actually during that crisis by how few CEOs actually came out and forcefully said this is not okay.
But then Trump put in that 90-day pause.
I think if the markets go crazy again, then you could see the business community speaking out in much bigger numbers.
And at that point, you could start to see people like Joe Rogan, Theo Vaughan, the podcast world.
even some of the Fox News anchors were starting to get anxious around the time of the tariffs.
So yes, the media is more fragmented.
It is different from Joe McCarthy.
Joe McCarthy was one senator.
This is a whole
administration, and at the moment, a whole party.
So, there's a lot more people that you have to move.
But if people were gonna, if I think it is still looking at the business community that we have to look at, okay, we're gonna take a quick break.
We'll be right back.
We'll talk about Pete Hegseth, the latest with that.
Is he in or is he out?
And then also, we'll explain that 72 Supreme Court ruling, which we have tantalized you with.
This is a paid ad for BetterHelp.
In moments of stress, we tend to turn to whoever's in reach, that flatmate in the kitchen, the barrister 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 betterh.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 tires matter they're the only part of your vehicle that touches the road tread confidently with new tires from tire rack whether you're looking for expert recommendations or know exactly what you want tire rack makes it easy fast free shipping free road hazard protection convenient installation options and the best selection of firestone tires go to tire rack.com to see their firestone test results tire ratings and reviews And be sure to check out all the special offers.
TireRack.com, the way tire buying should be.
Okay, Pete Hegseth, Peter Korachan,
is messaging us.
The Pentagon's newly resigned spokesperson predicts Trump will fire Pete Hegseth after a full-blown meltdown of a month.
Can we look forward to this happening soon?
So there are two schools of thought on Pete Hegseth.
One is that Donald Trump doesn't like to be to back down on anything, especially under media pressure.
He didn't like the fact that in his first term he fired General Flynn after media investigations into General Flynn as his national security advisor.
He regretted doing that.
He doesn't want to be seen as weak.
So now that Hegseth's in, he doesn't want to let him go or force him out.
The second school of thought is that Donald Trump is kind of done with having to defend Pete Hegseth in public and it's getting embarrassing for him to have to do so.
A quick recap on the latest, which is that
there was revelations of a second signal chat with details of that Yemeni strike that went not to a journalist but to his wife, his brother and his personal lawyer, none of whom needed to be on the chat.
It's not clear whether his wife even has the security clearance to be in that kind of a signal group.
I spoke to a general this morning who said that Pete Hegser's personal phone, which is what these chats were on, is certainly not secure.
That signal is not necessarily secure.
It is possible for people to break in behind these walls.
And this general
Barry McCaffrey said to me this morning that Iran, Russia, China, even America's allies, the UK.
Denmark, for example, would be very keen to get access to those signal conversations just to see whether whether the Pentagon was about to invade Greenland, for example.
So they have these systems that cost America billions of dollars.
That's where they're meant to be
communicating to keep these things secure.
And he's gone around that for a second time that we know of.
There is reporting that there may be as many as 20 of these signal threads.
The NPR then reported today that Hegseth is on his way out.
The White House has vehemently denied that.
They wheeled out Donald Trump to say that.
The press secretary came out and said that that was absolutely fake news.
Hegseth gave this kind of excruciatingly embarrassing kind of couple of minutes to camera at the White House Easter egg roll, which has just been happening, saying, I'm not going anywhere.
This is old news.
You know, this is the fake news media.
Do they protest too much, Anthony?
What do you reckon?
Well, I think he keeps them because he doesn't want to give a win to the fake news media.
And I think that unless you're telling me there's something that's going to damage Donald Trump, unless someone's calling Steve Miller calls up Donald Trump and says, hey, XYZ is going to happen to you personally if you keep Hexeth,
I think he keeps him.
And I think that Hexeth has proven himself to be a complete and total amateur.
And Trump would have shed the first term of Trump.
Hexeth wouldn't have lasted.
But I think he'd last this time because I think he who is he going to put in there?
Is he going to put DeSantis in there?
Susie Wiles is not going to let him put DeSantis in there.
Who are you going to get to do the job?
So I don't think he's going to fire Hexeth.
I know that there's reports saying that he's going to fire Hexeth, but I'll believe that when I see it.
But
I think it begs a bigger question, though.
This is my question to you.
So he's not fired.
He's obviously proven incompetent and an amateur.
Does that
create its own set of problems, Caddy?
Meaning,
are we going to go down another slope into more
stupidity and more failed policy and bad decision making?
Well, I mean, it gets back to what we were saying about competence, right?
I mean, this is a classic example.
You've had a bunch of advisors leave, be fired from the Pentagon in the last three days.
So people that Pete Hagseth had come in with and relied on are now not there.
I mean, that's a problem in and of itself, right?
You need the Sec Deaf, the Secretary of Defense, to have people around him who he trusts and who can bounce policy ideas around.
So some of those people have gone.
That's a problem.
This is starting to look a little bit like Trump 1.0.
I mean, one of the things that's been surprising in this administration is that people have not left after 11 days.
You know how that feels like.
That actually they've stayed for longer, that he hasn't fired people.
But just below the principles, the big names, there has been quite a lot of turnover in the National Security Council, in the Pentagon
of advisors.
And
that is looking a little bit like the chaos of the first Trump administration.
It doesn't leave people in the strongest position to be getting the best possible advice.
And it gets back to that question of how competent is this administration.
I mean, one thing that General McCaffrey said to me today that he thought was interesting is that this
he was asked thinking to himself, why did Hegseth do this when there are these incredibly expensive, sophisticated systems in place that you know of from your time in the White House that you're meant to use?
And he thinks it was because Hegseth basically wanted to brag about the secrets that he knew and he wanted to do it kind of in a way that would not be in the official record.
I mean that that mentality in and of itself is a problem when you think that let's say some adversary or somebody who wanted to sell those secrets had got into Pete Hexeth's personal phone, was monitoring it, had broken into his signal chats, sold that in this is the this is the scenario that McCaffrey spelled out to me this morning.
He'd sold that information to the Houthis.
This was somebody from the Pentagon actually spelled this out.
You sell it to the Houthis.
The Houthis have pretty sophisticated anti-aircraft and missile defenses.
They get the coordinates of where these planes are flying from, and potentially they could have shot down an American plane.
And thank God nothing like that happened.
But it's not impossible.
And if you've got your Secretary of Defense doing this in order to kind of brag about here are the cool secrets I know, look at the cool stuff I know to his wife or his brother, then
that is not a great suggestion of kind of health of the administration, I don't think.
It's not the most competent way to run an administration.
Well, I mean, Pete is on tape in 2016 related to Hillary Clinton's using a private server and emails got out.
It's fireball offense.
The person should be immediately fired in the very second that it's happening.
And you see him there on tape eight years ago,
nine years ago.
But now that it's happening to him, he's not going to step down or not going to get fired.
But somebody's asking a really good question.
I would love Caddy Kay to answer the question if you don't mind, because I don't know the answer to it, Caddy.
The numbers have gone up for MAGA, right?
The numbers went from 27 to 30.
Trump's approval rating is holding at 45%.
He was actually Trump was bragging about his 45% approval rating over the weekend.
So
why is that, Caddy?
So there's people on here that think Trump is a jackass.
I obviously know that he's a jackass.
The question is, so what are these other people missing or what do I have wrong and the people that are listening to us have wrong?
So
you're right, Mark.
There was an NBC poll, I think I mentioned it maybe last week, an NBC poll that showed that the proportion of Americans who identify as MAGA has grown by about 10 percentage points in the last year.
So it was something like 26 percentage points in 2024.
It's now at about 35 percentage points.
I haven't got the numbers right in front of me, but that's about the range that we're talking about.
And it's largely fueled that growth by college-educated men under the age of 45, which I think is interesting in and of itself.
But there are also polls, there's an economist poll, there was a CBS YouGov poll out last week that showed that Donald Trump's net approval ratings are actually declining, particularly when it comes to his handling of the economy, which, of course, was his strong point.
So you've got, I mean, it's a weird, that's an interesting juxtaposition, right?
You've got people who feel that they are becoming more MAGA.
Is America becoming more MAGA?
It's at about 35%.
But you've also got Donald Trump's own approval ratings in his handling of the economy declining quite substantially.
It's now underwater
since the election.
I suppose you could end up maybe those 35% of the country that find themselves, that say they are MAGA, just like everything about Donald Trump and other people are starting to lose
confidence in him.
I think we have to watch the polls.
It's only been three months.
Let's watch.
It's a little too early to pin too much on polls, I think.
And we haven't seen the fallout from the tariffs yet if they are re-imposed.
All the Fed check on.
You're going to get mad at me.
What have I done wrong?
No, no, no, no, you're going to get mad at me.
Everything you're doing beautifully, you're going to get mad at me right at this moment.
Yeah.
Okay.
And people are probably going to get mad at me, particularly for some reason, the Brits.
They get very mad at this stuff.
I am not comparing Trump to Hitler.
I'm just going to state a fact.
Is somebody saying that?
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
I'm about to say something about Adolf Hitler.
Okay.
And I need you to react to it.
Not comparing Trump to Hitler.
Okay.
Okay.
April of 1945, 60 million people are dead.
Germany is in rubbles.
Berlin has been completely destroyed.
What was Hitler's poll numbers?
What was his approval rating in his own country?
In the early 30s.
No, no, no.
April of 1945.
Oh.
He's dead in the bunker.
The place has been obliterated.
So I imagine it was still pretty high, wasn't it?
Yeah, so it was over 40%.
I would think.
Was it only over 40%?
Yeah, it wasn't.
Yeah, it was high, but it wasn't.
Brainwashed a population in the way that he had done for six years.
They had more than six years, obviously, since 32, but where else were they going to look?
You become dependent on, you have so much vested interest in that leader being right.
Okay.
Even though you're going through a terrible thing.
Okay, did everybody hear that?
I didn't compare the guy to Hitler, but
people have vested interest in what's going on.
And so even if you take the stock market down 10 trillion, even if you rebuke everything, even if you voted for him and you're an auto worker and you're now out of work or you're a steel worker that's out of work, you're still invested.
You're still invested.
I've got buddies of mine, middle class, lower middle class people out on Long Island.
Trump can do absolutely no wrong, but you just got laid off.
Oh, I know, but we're taking some temporary pain for this, the genius of all geniuses to
be personal.
I know people who have become more fervently pro-Trump,
having voted for Trump both times, but they've become much more fervent recently, partly because they feel he's under attack.
And when the economy started to look bad about a month ago with the tariffs, they were even more fervent because
they don't want to be proved wrong.
You know,
you become tribal.
Okay, I do want to quickly talk about the Supreme Court ruling that came down at 1 a.m.
on Saturday.
Super unusual for the Supreme Court to move as fast as it's in.
By the way, guys, in the courtyard and the gardens around the Supreme Court, they have little models of tortoises because that's a reminder of how slow the Supreme Court moves.
It's a bit, you know, like me sometimes early in the morning before my coffee.
And they issued this ruling at one o'clock in the morning, basically saying that the government could not send any more planes to El Salvador without giving...
rights to the people who were scheduled for deportation from Texas.
The buses with people were on their way to the airport from the detention centers.
They turned back again.
The Supreme Court would not have issued that ruling if they had believed that the
White House was going to act in good faith on previous rulings.
They felt the urgency to put out an incredibly unusual ruling saying, stop, you can't do this until we have had a chance to study this further.
And
it's now
handing down these very clear rulings, giving the administration no wiggle room.
So it's tightened the language as well.
This was one paragraph with dissenters.
We mentioned seven to two.
Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented from this one paragraph unsigned ruling.
But what the seven were doing was saying, we need more time.
You cannot do anything until we have ruled further, because they saw what happened last time.
The administration ignored the ruling to bring the planes back.
It ignored the ruling to facilitate the return of Mr.
Brego Garcia from the prison in El Salvador.
And they didn't want to give them any more room to say, okay, we've interpreted it one way.
They were crystal clear in what they meant.
So I think when Anthony was, when you were referring, Anthony, to the system holding, I guess that's, is that what you were referring to, to that Supreme Court ruling?
Yeah, I mean, I think you explained it beautifully.
So I'm not going to really add to it.
I'll just say that
the
creation of you as a human being,
you are endowed with inalienable rights.
And what Trump is trying to do and his team is trying to say that your location of your body and who you are and what your identity is makes your rights conditional.
And seven of those Supreme Court justices said, no, no, no, this is an inalienable right as a result of you being a human being.
And so said differently, I could take a machine gun, God forbid, kill people, drop the gun, I am innocent, and tell the court and the process.
You know, you said something so well last week that I've repeated it to so many different people.
You said that there's the word process.
We think of the words do process as one word, but you said focus on the word process.
You remember saying this last week?
And I've said that, I've repeated this to people because I think it's very, very important that we need a process to remain our civility.
I have buddies of mine who lost best friends at 9-11, widows lost best friends.
They would like to saw the fingers off of KSM, who's down in Guantanamo still to this day.
Okay, but we can't do that because you have a civilization and you have the framework and the pillars of a civilization that endows people with process and endows people with the human rights, even if we don't like them.
And the point that those seven judges are making, I just want to reiterate this.
So, if the next president shows up, doesn't like Caddy Kay or Anthony Scaramucci, or name one of the people on this chat, then what happens?
They get deported without process?
Yeah.
The whole system will break down.
So Trump is stressing the system.
The markets are being signaled right now.
Well, if Trump can beat this system that's been in place for 250 years, I have to get out of this market.
I've got to sell this market.
Is this Germany?
Is it Germany in the interregnum period during the war?
Or is this America where the system itself is going to hold?
And I believe after watching people this week, that they got him.
His arrogant approach to what he's doing and the capricious nature of his approach and the foolishness of his aids, they got him.
And he doesn't have enough strong, smart people around him, and he himself isn't adaptable.
He's going to inflexibly run himself into a ditch here, and the system is going to hold.
That's my belief.
Yeah.
I mean, let's see what happens to the country within the meeting.
Will Parker is asking a really good question.
How many times is Mooch going to use Caddy K's full name?
You know what, Will?
An infinite number of times.
Okay, I'm just fucking telling you that, Will.
All right.
You know,
sorry.
Oh, we got a curse.
But thank you for that, Antonio.
But thank you.
And by the way,
now you're going to turn red because I don't often curse on this plot.
You curse more than me.
Oh, I don't know.
But yeah, that was a big curse.
I thought
it at at you.
Will, I'm just letting you know, Will.
I don't know why I do that, but it's too late now, okay?
It's been.
You told me your kids like it, and you told me your sister likes it.
My family likes it.
My sister really.
Will, I'm sorry.
My kids like it.
Thank you for being a founding member, but it's always going to be catty cat to me.
I'm sorry, Will.
Okay.
And I will never, and it will never be mooch to me.
So there you go.
Good.
See, my wife likes that about you, by the way.
She's like, she calls you Anthony.
She likes that about you.
All right.
I'm afraid I say Anthony, not Anthony.
No, that's good.
saying it, but I'm getting that.
No, trust me, don't lose the accent.
Okay, that's but you know, it used to be worth like 15 IQ points, but I actually think it's worth like 25 to 50 now, given what's going on in the country.
You know what I mean?
It was a great thing.
At the moment, you want, especially if you're traveling around Europe at the moment, you want any accent apart from
these, I tell you.
So I saw Clooney over the weekend, which I've already regarded.
Oh, my God.
I'm not going to tell you.
I just knew you were going to.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, I'm just going to.
You were going to bring this up.
Your best friend.
Your best friend, George Clooney.
Just bringing up a funny line.
They were standing on stage.
He was talking to Fred Friendly as Edward Armuro.
And he said, you know, it's really getting bad here, this McCarthy era.
All the smart people are moving to Europe.
But he said it, you know, the scene was said in 1953.
But trust me, the 2025 crowd erupted in laughter and cheers.
And then George Clooney went and said hello to Anthony at the end of the show, which you'd love you to know.
I'm saying it in a whisper because it's just between you
and everybody else that Anthony knows.
He texted me within about two minutes to tell me this.
Okay, guys, thanks.
But they already knew I was a name dropper, Caddy.
They already knew.
We will be back next Monday.
And of course, we'll be back on Friday as well.
And do join us for that Elon Musk series.
We're super excited about this.
We have our last founding members live stream next Monday, 4 p.m.
UK time,
11 a.m.
Eastern time, right?
Great.
Yes, that's correct.
And we will see you for that.
We love it.
We love these questions.
I think we're just going to have to do more.
We'll have to find, we'll have to pester Fiona to find more emergency reasons to carry on doing these.
I think we'll have them.
We'll see you.
We will see you later this week, guys.
Thank you guys for paying attention, being on with us.
Thank you guys.
Yeah, bye.
Bye-bye.