80. Trump's Totalitarian Playbook: War on Harvard

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Hello and welcome to the Rest is Politics US.

I'm Anthony Scaramucci.

I am Katie Kaye.

A little late to this recording.

I'm so sorry, Anthony.

I rushed.

I haven't had my coffee, but maybe somebody's going to bring me one in, so we may have a little coffee break.

That's okay.

You're entitled to be a little late, given some of my tardiness in life.

So we're going to talk about Trump's war with the Ivy League, and we're going to talk about Harvard hitting back.

We finally found a large-scale institution in the United States willing to hit back at the administration.

We're going to talk a little bit about the revenge tour that Trump is doing now.

Is this now in full swing?

And then, Catty, in the second half, we're going to talk about my favorite topic, your probably not so favorite topic, Wall Street, how they totally misread Donald Trump and the second term playbook, and how they're paying the price now, and how they're all trying to figure out what to do.

Lots of private calls, of course, and lots of talking to journalists off the record about what's going on because these guys are afraid of Trump.

But we'll talk about that as well.

But let's start with Harvard for a second, because I had an interesting conversation.

I'll be vague about this, but let's just say there's 30 presidents on that list of people that signed that letter in support of Harvard.

I talked to several of them last night.

The story so far is the United States government does block grants out to some of our largest, most prestigious universities to do research, military research, healthcare research.

It could be research that's top secret in nature.

I can tell you that when I was at Tuffs University in the mid-80s, there were two Nobel Prize physicists there that got a block grant from the United States working on anti-ballistic missiles.

People may remember it was Ronald Reagan that came out with the Star Wars speech that he was going to build these ABM systems.

That research became the precursor to the Iron Dome, as an example, which is used with great success in Israel.

And so the President has its disposal, discretionary investments, if you will, that can go into these universities.

And he's holding back that money now on the universities, simply saying that well he's not holding back all of it right because the government spends 9 billion and they're holding back 2 billion that's what they've said they're going to do they're holding back 2.2 billion for now but he's threatening to hold back the entire nine billion he's also threatening now to revoke harvard's non-for-profit status and so i'll explain that to viewers outside the united states if you are deemed to be in the goodwill of the country and you're doing something in the country that isn't in the minds of the tax authorities, the IRS, a profitable thing to do.

A hospital could be non-for-profit, a charity could be non-for-profit, and so you have a different tax designation.

The money that comes into you, you don't have to pay taxes on, as an example.

So if I make a donation as a member of the alma mater of Harvard, if I gave them, let's say, a dollar, they wouldn't get taxed on that dollar.

That would go right into their coffers, if you will, and that they could use that to allocate across whatever spectrum that they wanted to use it for.

The government is now saying, listen, you have to abide by certain rules related to what we think about protests, protests that were related to anti-Israel protests, things like that.

Now, I'm a pro-Israel person.

I'm someone that believes that in the right of Israel to exist dates back all the way to the 40s and the Harry Truman decision, but I'm also a free speech person where people who are protesting and expressing their point of view, as long as they're doing it in a non-violent way, I think they have to have that opportunity in this country and other free countries.

But the president is saying no, there are certain things that cannot be allowed or abided by.

Okay,

that is a YouTube moment.

Caddy, what are you doing?

How nice is my 25-year-old son?

Jude, thank you very much.

Giving you the thumbs up.

Very kind of you.

Thank you.

The 25-year-old son, very handsome young man, comes in delivering the coffee to the mother, Caddy Kaye.

And there's an unbelievably smug expression on Caddy's face, which,

you know, I'm a little envious because I have no coffee here.

I'm sitting in a hotel room with no coffee,

trying not to wake up certain people that are sleeping.

But anyway, this is a big topic in the U.S.

right now because it's the intersection of government using its force, government being an intimidator, government projecting policy.

in places where it never projected policy before.

So Ronald Reagan, he may not have agreed with some of the liberal professors at Harvard, maybe didn't agree with some of the liberal students, but those block grants went into place.

Barack Obama, he may not have agreed with certain things that happened at right-leaning universities.

Those block grants went into place.

But now, Trump and his people, this is right out of Project 2025, are going to flex on these universities.

They told Columbia University we're canceling $400 million.

One of Caddy's friends now and co-authors of two best-selling books, Claire Shipman, is now the president of Columbia.

They've gone to, I guess, two presidents now as a result of the tumult going on at Columbia.

But Harvard has taken a stand.

Harvard has decided, if you're not going to send us the money, it's no problem.

We have a big enough endowment.

We have to stand.

And I'm going to quote somebody that I spoke to last night.

If we at Harvard don't take this stand, who will against this administration?

And of course, the person also recommended to me to read the book, Caddy, How Democracies Die, which is a book that was pretty famous 24 months ago.

I went back last night and looked through the table of contents of that book and skimmed various sections of the book.

The Trump administration is taking the playbook out of these books.

They're trying to silence debate.

They want to silence dissent in the country.

And they want to flex and use the wheels of the federal government to do this.

And so

that's where we are right now.

And I'd love to have you react to all the stuff that we're going to start this podcast with.

Yeah, so that's a lot and a great update of where we are.

I think a couple of things are happening.

One, it's becoming increasingly evident that the Trump administration really wants to do all they can and go as hard as they can for as long as they can, as fast as they can, to destroy liberal institutions.

And by that, I mean the institutions in American life and democracy that have tended to skew more liberal, and those they would see as academia,

the federal government, the federal workforce, very often law firms.

I'm told they are going to go after the broadcast industry next, particularly cable, television, news next.

So they want to really stamp out what conservatives have seen for a long time as dominating.

these institutions and that is a kind of left-leaning, liberal, coastal,

elitist, educated tendency, bent, however you want to put it.

And they could have done this in a legal way.

They could have had an investigation and then said they were going to cut the funds.

That would have been the legal way to do this.

I was told by somebody actually at Harvard that what the government is doing at the moment is illegal because they haven't followed process.

And, you know, there's been a lot of talk about immigration and the guy that was sent to El Salvador this week as well.

And somebody smart said to me just this morning, look,

it's called due process.

And sometimes we think of it as one phrase, but don't forget the process.

In all of this, there is a process, a way that these things are done.

There are systems in place.

And in not following those systems, the administration is going afoul of the law.

But their ethos is in the White House, you know, move fast and break things.

Let's see how fast we can get.

Let's see how fast we can irrevocably change these elite universities, which for a long time have been in the crosshairs of conservatives in America.

And

there is a point

that elite universities in the United States skew massively liberal.

The rates for the faculty in some of these universities are something like 75%

are liberal, only about 5% are conservative, the rest don't really say.

But there's a very strong liberal bias in the american university faculty and that is what the white house is trying to stamp out and they're egged on by activists people like chris ruffo who's of italian origin but moved to the united states with his parents actually went to georgetown and has become

vehemently anti-elite university and would basically like to destroy them would like to either make these universities very conservative or take away all the federal funding and what the conservatives say is hold on a second it's just not fair that harvard is getting nine billion dollars a year when it already has a $53 billion endowment.

It gets $9 billion of federal funds, our taxpayers' money, and yet we're funding these organizations which are so clearly politically skewed.

So that's kind of, I think that I wanted to spell that out because that is the backdrop to what they are trying to do.

And that is why...

they have quite a lot of support around the country.

I mean, there's not much tears being shed for Harvard University in Middle America at the moment.

They think this is a political win for them.

I agree, and I've spoken to people at Harvard in the last couple of days, including one very

more conservative professor who says the way the administration is doing this, first of all, it's illegal.

And second, it's going to do a huge amount of damage to the very things that keep that you mentioned, Anthony.

All of the research that keeps America in the forefront,

it's going to hit that hard.

I mean, there's no way this is not going to damage America's international competitive when it comes to America's already losing out in patent wars to China.

This will further impact that.

And then I think then the question is, how does this play out?

The White House, I'm told, is hitting particularly universities with big hospitals because they know that hurts the universities and makes them want to cave.

Does Harvard keep going in the fight back and do others join them?

And does this then trickle through to other institutions like the law firms that have so far been pretty passive in their response to Donald Trump?

Well, you know, listen, I think Harvard has the muscle to fight back.

And just to explain people,

we've allowed these universities through the taxation code, if you will, to grow these big endowments.

So again, if I make a donation, let's say I grant a billion dollars to Harvard, they're allowed to put it right into their investment vehicles untaxed.

And then it grows, Caddy.

You know, when I was at Tufts University, as an example, they had a $65 million endowment 40 years ago.

They've got almost a $3 billion endowment today.

I think Harvard's endowment was like $5 or $6 billion.

Now it's $50 billion today.

And so they have assets

on their balance sheet that they can use to sort of stave off what's going on from the government.

But I guess my question to you is about the brittleness of this U.S.

administration, the brittleness of this leadership.

In years past, and for as long as I can remember, American presidents, they may not have liked some of the liberals if they were conservative presidents at these universities, but they understood that these universities were part of the research heartbeat of the United States.

And so they ignored whatever the rhetoric was.

Why is this administration so brittle, Caddy?

I just don't think they care that much.

I think they're super short term.

I mean, you've often talked about, you know, chess and checkers.

Trump, you know, moves in 10-minute increments or news cycle increments, right?

He's not thinking, oh, damn, you know, five years down the line, this is going to mean we don't have the latest cancer therapeutic that's going to come out of Beijing or Tsinghua University.

That's not the way he operates.

He operates on what's a win for the moment.

And they know that the right in America has hated these institutions for a long time.

They also feel that Barack Obama and Joe Biden did threaten to cut funds to these universities to make them more liberal, effectively, to make them more in line with civil rights around gender and race.

And so they feel, well, look, you know, Barack Obama and Joe Biden did that.

We're just going to go a step further and actually take the funds away, not just threaten to take the funds away, but actually take the funds away.

And MAGA base is not going to care.

And I don't see anyone in the White House saying, oh dear, what is this going to do for America's long-term security?

They're thinking about what gets MAGA happy now.

It's so short-term, this administration.

It's short-term on the tariffs.

It's short-term.

It's even short-term on immigration and deporting, if they ever manage to do it, millions of people who are working in the country who are undocumented, because the American economy depends on those people.

Point to me the long-term thing that Donald Trump is doing that has any kind of long-term consequences in terms of it, okay, we'll have to invest now.

I mean, I guess he would say tariffs, he would say this is short-term pain for long-term gain.

But most economists dispute that.

This feels to me just like he wants to do it.

He's pissed at the universities.

Fuck it, throw it in the air and see what happens.

Okay, I mean, again, I think the long-term thing is the power.

The long-term thing is the weakening the law firms, weakening the colleges, weakening the media, taking on more power,

and then potentially trying to flex that power in a way that's never been flexed before in the United States.

And I think that's one of the risks.

So

you mean he's doing it because he can, and then that shores up the presidency's power.

Dominoes.

Let me click this domino of the El Salvador situation by that deportation.

That's a civil rights domino.

That's a human rights domino.

This relationship now that we're going to have with the universities, that's a domino.

That's a flexing domino, intimidating these universities to break their current liberal

leanings, if you will, their liberal slants.

The law firms,

you supported too many liberal causes.

Now you're going to support my causes for free.

There's dominoes that are going off now.

And as they click around the table, you get to more and more presidential power and you get to more and more mutedness.

We're going to talk about the Wall Street executives in a moment.

They hate the tariff plan.

They hate everything the administration is doing.

They won't say a word to anybody because

they're afraid.

They're afraid for their families.

They're afraid for their companies.

Or boards are telling them not to do anything.

And so I think this is about power.

But I didn't just want to point out to people, these universities, we think of them, and some people think, okay, some kid goes to school at age 18.

He graduated at age 22.

He has a degree.

It's an academic institution.

But as Caddy and I know, these universities are so much more in the United States.

They're research centers, they're healthcare centers.

They're hospitals.

I mean, they run like massive hospitals.

And they run massive hospitals.

If they cut that, it's going to decimate Boston's healthcare.

My mother, today, at age 88, is a survivor of leukemia because of the research that's been done at these universities.

At the University of Pennsylvania, they discovered a way to use a new drug called Gleevac.

It's 20 years old now, but it was discovered as a result of these research grants.

And so this has improved the quality of life of Americans, extended people's lives, made Americans safer.

Technology that we've used in the military has made our servicemen safer and, frankly, the country freer.

So it's a.

One question I have for you, Anthony, is: okay, so now Harvard has said it's not going to capitulate.

And let's see, I'm, you know, some people at Harvard seem to think, let's see how these negotiations go.

But they've made a stand.

Princeton, similarly, has made a stand.

Rutgers University, some of them not, they've started with the Ives, but some of what are called the Big Ten, which I think is actually 18 universities.

I don't know why your university system is as complicated as it is, but anyway, those the next level down, they've also, some of them started to say no.

So do you think there's a knock-on effect?

And this is what opponents of what the president is doing in terms of trying to get executive power and have this kind of chilling effect on the institutions of American democracy.

They hope this is what's going to happen, is that then there is, you know, knock-on effect on the law firms.

I am told that they are going to go fairly soon for the broadcast media and particularly for cable television channels.

Full disclosure, I regularly appear on one of them, MSNBC, which is in the crosshairs of the Trump administration, which is more of a left-leaning channel.

They're going to go after those broadcast media channels.

Do you think if Harvard sticks to its guns, that has a kind of solidifying effect?

Because that's what Democrats are hoping, right?

They are longing for a fight.

They're looking to anybody who's going to like fight back.

I don't know if it has a knock-on, but it would be interesting to see if people standing up, I mean, you have to kind of read, you mentioned how democracies die, which I think is actually by two Harvard academics.

You know, you read Tim Snyder, you read Anne Applebaum.

There's a lot of the symbolism, the power of people standing up.

Do you think it translates?

Well, I mean, you know,

so the two authors are Steve Levinsky and Dan Zimblatt.

And it's a phenomenal book, by the way, and it's a scary book.

But, Caddy, here's the thing.

Here's how the fight starts with a bully.

The bully comes after you.

You then respond to the bully.

The bully always gives you one or two more counter punches to see if you've got a backbone or not.

So there's something going to happen to Harvard now from this administration.

Exactly what it is, I don't know.

Maybe the tax exempt status, they're going to push and try to make it go away.

They just put the head of the IRS now, the commissioner of the IRS, is the person that audited Hunter Biden.

And this is what Trump does.

The Secret Service guy that was in front of me at Butler now runs the Secret Service.

You went after Hunter Biden.

You're my guy.

You're now running the IRS.

And so they're they're going to hit Harvard again.

And then the question is: is Harvard then going to capitulate?

And the irony of the whole thing is that Harvard actually did things

early on in the conversation.

You know, they made some concessions, they dismissed some leaders for the Center of Middle Eastern Studies, they suspended a religious conflict and peace initiative person over accusations of anti-Israeli bias.

And so, the question now is: the fight has started.

Harvard has stuck up for itself.

What's going to happen next?

You know, Wilmer Hale, as you know, very prestigious law firm in Washington, said, hey, sorry, we're going to fight back.

They won a court case.

And now the next fight is going to happen.

So with a bully like Donald Trump and with bullies like these, and by the way, the thing about this that I find absolutely reprehensible is the meanness.

You know, the president of El Salvador, which I did cancel my spring break to El Salvador Caddy.

So those two guys are sitting there in the Oval Office laughing at the meeting.

While the cool guy's wife is saying, please, can you send him back again?

And then the lies.

It's been proven that the guy is an MS-13 gang member, which, of course, it hasn't been proven.

And you have a 9-0 Supreme Court decision.

You have blood on the floor from the number of lies that have been massacred.

There is blood on the Oval Office floor at the moment.

Yeah,

it's just absurd.

And by the way, the Oval Office now, you know, Trump's apartment, I said, you know, once it looked like, you know, Louis XIV smoked crystal meth and made the apartment.

Now now this looks like liberace came out of the grave and showed up and said let me throw some candle golden candelabras around the oval office right i mean i mean i don't i don't know it it's it's just it's just this is like it's literally like a crazy show but i just want to say this one last thing get you to react to it will they fight back when the counter punch happens that's the seminal question okay because the counter punch is now coming and then so what happens do you capitulate in the counter punch and then boy does that really embolden Donald Trump?

So what do you think, Caddy?

We are seeing the universities coordinate more.

I know they're talking to each other and they're talking to each other in different regions of the country and along, you know, different athletic conferences, whatever.

The Ivies are talking to each other.

So there is more coordination.

And they have learned, read all of the books, that they are stronger together, right?

So if they push back together, and don't let Donald Trump pick off, the White House pick off one institution, they have more of a chance.

If he really comes after their tax event status, all of this is going to hit them financially.

And a couple of people I spoke to at Harvard said, look, we cannot believe how incredibly successful they have been.

I mean, it's random.

They're hitting the science faculties and they're hitting the hospitals when actually what they have a beef with is the liberal arts colleges and the humanities.

it's not actually hitting the most egregious parts in their view of the universities.

They had a lot of time to think about it, Caddy.

They've had time to think about it.

And the universities now are realizing they have to think about it.

So that's what I mean is they have to plan what the comeback is.

One thing I think is worth saying, the White House has

sort of cast all of this under the umbrella of fighting anti-Semitism.

Speak to every president of an Ivy League university and they will tell you they've had a problem with anti-Semitism and that they have taken steps on campus since October the 7th and since the demonstrations that did threaten Jewish students in those organizations.

They've taken pretty serious steps to rectify that.

And most Jewish student groups, even at Harvard, will say, yeah, they have.

They have done what we needed them to do.

They've made the progress that we needed them to do.

So I think the anti-Semitism thing at this stage is a bit of a fig leaf.

What they really want to do is destroy the liberalism of these universities.

liberalism with a big L.

It's more about trying to make these universities more conservative.

And that's why they're pushing to be able to dictate who the professors are that are hired to review which students are given um posts in positions in these universities to review what is being taught in these universities i mean talk about big government i thought the whole point of this administration is they wanted government out of people's lives not big government this is the kind of like the ultimate definition of big government is that this is you know the government taking over the curriculum of big universities.

I wouldn't have thought they want to get into that myself at the time that they're cutting the Department of Education.

But I mean, yes, and we're going to take a break now, but I'll just say this to you: that

first came the chaos, but it's organized, well-planned chaos.

Now comes the retribution.

Now that he's got everybody on their back, back part of their foot, he's now going to start the retribution process.

And we're going to take a break, but this is something the Wall Street guys are worried about.

They're worried about the retribution.

These guys like their yachts, Caddy,

and

they don't want to have their yachting life disrupted in the Mediterranean this summer.

They want to be the have-yachts, not the have-not yachts.

They want to be those guys.

Okay, we're going to take a break and we will be back to talk about Wall Street.

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Welcome back to the Rest is Politics US.

We are going to talk about Wall Street and whether Wall Street got Donald Trump right.

They were so excited when he came into office, of course, and there was this big moment where people in the Republican Party, but people also in the business world, the CEOs and the Wall Street people were thinking we're going to have tax cuts, deregulation, and then they got completely blindsided by the actual commitment of the administration to tariffs.

We saw the chaos last week on Wall Street.

in the bond markets.

From my understanding and talking to business leaders, Anthony, it hasn't necessarily turned them from being Trump supporters to Trump to Democratic voters to voting against Donald Trump.

But I think it's made them think, how do we handle this administration when we can't make plans?

I mean, actually, as you and I are talking, the markets are pretty stable at the moment compared to where they were when we spoke a week ago.

But there's no feeling that any sort of, as I understand it from speaking to business leaders, there's no sense that they can have security in their investment planning.

So, if you're planning to open a factory in the United States, you don't know how much it's going to cost you to import the stuff from China, to open that factory.

You don't know whether your exports that you make in that factory are going to be hit by retaliatory tariffs from other countries.

You don't know what the economic situation is going to look like in the United States.

How do you make plans?

Is there a kind of, are you hearing anything on Wall Street to suggest that those famous American animal spirits have become mouse spirits and a little bit more timid.

So it's interesting.

So there's a dichotomy that I think it's worth explaining.

Volatility in markets, short-term, very good for Wall Street.

And so what Trump is doing is creating a lot of trading profits.

And they're making money, the big banks.

And so they do, because when you're selling, they're buying.

And when you're buying, they're selling.

And so they are playing that volatility game to great profitability.

And so when when you look at the quarterly announcements of these banks, they did quite well in the volatility.

But that's juxtaposed against long-term consistency and long-term policy planning.

This is something Bill Clinton was very big on, and he understood this.

Bill Clinton was like, here are the plans.

This is the four-year plan.

If I get re-elected, here's the eight-year plan.

And I want everybody to understand what the plan is so that you can now adjust your capital allocations pursuant to that plan.

So if Wall Street had to choose between those two, Caddy, they would choose the second one.

They want more consistency.

They want more stability.

It leads to more MA activity, more investment banking fees.

It leads to better market visibility, better predictions on earnings, and long-term stock market growth is better for Wall Street.

When you talk to your friends on Wall Street before the election, and they'd heard the campaign, so they had heard Donald Trump talk about tariffs.

Did they just kind of think he was bluffing?

Was it a failure of imagination?

Did they just hear tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts, deregulation, deregulation, deregulation?

What were they saying to you about the tariff situation?

Well, no, I think the mistake they made is

they missized the staffing in the White House.

You know, there's a great John Oliver on HBO.

If you really want to laugh,

he shows you every time Trump mentions the word tariffs in like one week of campaigning, which is like maybe a thousand times, and yet the Wall Streeter's like, I can't believe he's doing this.

How could he possibly be doing this, right?

I'm shocked.

Shocked to see gambling going on in this establishment.

Right, exactly.

But the thing is, I think they missized the staffing.

They didn't think that Lutnick was going to go in there and side with Peter Navarro.

They didn't think that Scott Bassent was going to have no voice at the table to block some of the, you want to talk about animal instincts, the barbaric instincts of Donald Trump.

If they'd listened to Bannon's war room, Scott Besant has been on Bannon's war room several times and has been funding Donald Trump since 2017 and supporting vocally at least some of the tariffs since then.

He's not opposed to tariffs.

And by the way, I just want to make it clear to everybody, surgical tariffs that protect certain industries and protect certain workers from price dumping, I'm all for.

I don't think anybody who's a policy thinker is going to say we're going to have unfettered free trade, let people have rampant protectionism on their side, and we're going to get pummeled and take out all of our workers.

I don't think that that's fair.

I think we all know that the concept of free trade is really fair trade.

We have to make things fair, but we also have to understand America's standing in the world.

And so this is why the quote-unquote reciprocal tariffs are flawed, because they're going after penguins, Caddy.

I mean, they're telling the penguins they have $140 million.

Penguins are tricky things, you know.

They can be very tricky players.

They're not known for their honesty.

But this is what's driving the Wall Street people crazy.

So they're sitting there saying, wow, he is going to cause a recession.

He's going to bring down the economy.

The manufacturing is never coming back pursuant to the policies that he's initializing.

He will get some revenues from the tariffs.

They will not be as big as he thinks because he's creating deconsumption, which will create a recession, which will create create people saving money as opposed to spending money.

Talk about animal spirits.

You're creating a negative flywheel, if you will, in the economy.

But the big thing that's happening right now is the migration, Caddy.

This is something I study.

Take a look at the European stock markets.

Take a look at other markets.

They're going up.

Our market, the U.S.

market, is going down.

So there's capital allocation, international capital allocation that's migrating outside of the United States.

The tourism board last night put out an article.

They're estimating that there'll be a $90 billion drop in tourism in the United States over the next 12 months.

Which is basically an export, right?

On America's balance sheet.

It's on the balance sheet.

So

that's hotels, that's casinos, that's resorts, but it's also restaurants all over the country, restaurants in New York, restaurants in Florida, Disney World, pick the places.

And so, you know, you have CEOs telling me that they're going to come into the U.S.

with a burner phone.

I said, excuse me?

Well, yeah, I'm going to come into the U.S.

with a burner phone because if I have something on my phone that they dislike or I've said something untoward about Donald Trump on my phone, I don't want to run the risk that I'm at the border and they have signal intelligence and the NSFA tells the border control person, hey, detain this guy or throw him out of the country.

So I'm bringing a burner phone with me.

I mean, for years, journalists have gone to China and wiped their laptops and wiped their phones.

I was speaking to a senior British journalist just the other day who was coming over here who said, now the advice in their news organization is to do that if you come to the United States.

I mean, it's the same, people are treating America the same way they're treating China.

And guess who's making hay out of this?

China, right?

We see China at the moment.

Xi is going on this, of course he is.

He's going on this trade tour of other Asian countries trying to sell China as the reliable superpower.

Which is the superpower you're going to trust?

Even if America makes a trade deal with you now, and I see J.D.

Vance is saying that they're going to make a trade deal with the United Kingdom because Donald Trump loves the king and loves the United Kingdom.

Ask Canada and Mexico how much you can rely on trade deals with America at the moment that Donald Trump has made.

Well, because it's because he keeps keeps switching them.

And again, all the trade deals that are in place in the U.S.

right now were negotiated by Trump won.

So Biden left all those trade deals in place.

So now he wants to retrade all those trade deals.

But Katie, answer me this, because you are a good journalist and you talk to a lot of sources.

And when a source calls you and says, I have to do this on background, sometimes it's fear-related, sometimes it's other things related.

But what do you think?

is going on on Wall Street.

Take me into the minds of these executives who they know everything that's going on is wrong.

They won't speak out about it.

I get texts left and right.

I got a call from a very senior

yesterday.

My phone is ringing, very senior private equity guy.

I was like, whoa, he never calls me.

Hello.

He goes, oh man, I watch you on Instagram.

I watch you in Caddy.

I listen to your private guy.

You're the only one on Wall Street that's actually speaking up about the economic nonsense and these faulty policy ideas.

Okay, so why aren't you?

Oh, no, I can't do that.

My boy, I'm in a public company.

My board is telling me I can't do it.

My law firm is telling me I can't do it.

And by the way, if I speak out,

you know, you're more of a pundit, Anthony.

You can get away with it.

I can't get away with it.

They're going to come after me with the full force of the government.

Well, I mean, that's super depressing, that conversation that you just related, Anthony, because I think whether we're having this conversation about the universities, whether we're having it about law firms, whether we're having it about the Republican Party, whether we're having it about the business community and CEOs, I'm hearing exactly the same thing when I speak to my sources, which is this has to be on background.

I can't risk putting my neck up because of the fear of retribution.

And this chilling effect, I think, is what if Harvard, and we spoke about, you know, Harvard standing up in the first half, if Harvard can stand up and other law firms can start to stand up, and more than Jamie Diamond can go on Maria Bartiromo's show and say this is going to cause a recession.

You kind of need, it's a bit like Sleeping Beauty, right?

The handsome prince has to come along and kiss everybody

and break the spell.

It feels like this spell, this kind of chill has been cast over any sense of opposition.

And they're afraid of, and actually, you know, you can see why.

Look, this, in the past week, there hasn't been much reporting on this internationally because there's been so much other news.

But check this out, guys, because it's worth taking a look at.

There are two people who worked in the first Trump administration: Chris Krebs, who was a cybersecurity expert, and Miles Taylor, who worked on the national security side.

And they have just been singled out in an executive order, and Donald Trump has said he's going to go after them and have investigations.

And in this country, even if you're never found guilty, your life can be ruined if you are hit with lawsuit after lawsuit or tax audits.

They can make your life miserable.

I know journalist friends of mine,

you know, who are in both the print and the television world, who are very worried about the spotlight of retribution falling on them because they say, even if I'm ultimately cleared of any wrongdoing,

you can lose all your savings in fighting off lawsuits and audits.

And that's a real cost for people.

And that's how they do it.

They make people afraid.

They make people afraid of the retribution.

I hear you.

Why haven't they come for me yet, Caddy?

Well, because

you're so strong and you've got huge.

Oh, my God.

I really shouldn't have asked that question.

Just so you know, Dom, our producer, asked me to ask that question.

And Dom, that's the last time I'm going to go.

You're going to throw Dom under the microphone.

He's going right under the.

Dom, I'm the driver and the conductor on the bus, and I'm driving it right over you.

That's the last time I'm allowing you to prompt me with a question, Dom.

Okay, I'm going to ask you one more question and then we're going to go, which is if the CEOs and the business leaders and the Wall Street people who you speak to and I speak to, who won't give us their names, if they stood together, went 24-7 on cable television and said,

this is a disaster for the American economy.

We are not going back to a manufacturing country.

This is going to ruin American consumers and MAGA voters.

Could they have pushed back harder?

No question.

No question.

If they got together and said, hey, listen, we just dumped a half a billion dollars into a political action committee.

We're going to now be the Elon Musk of pro-democracy and pro-growth and pro-American economy.

But also,

this government was designed by our founders to be off the backs of the American people and not to intimidate the American people or not to flex on the American people.

And so we're going to put people into office that understand that, elementally understand that.

They would scare the life out of these people.

But the bullies are winning right now.

The bullies usually draw first blood.

And the bullies usually, you know, can break a nose and

they can get you on your back foot for a moment.

It's what you do in that counter punching, what you do in the ensuing moments.

And so I applaud Harvard.

You know, by the way, I am not that liberal.

I used to be bummed out at Harvard at some of the ultra-liberal nonsense that goes on there.

What I do love about the liberals is that they get that it's a democracy, fellas, and so that's what we're going to back.

You know, Lawrence Tribe, who was my constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School,

was on TV the other night.

I sent him a text saying, thank you.

You were a great professor.

Didn't agree with him all the time.

He's more liberal than me.

But you're a great professor and a great American.

And so maybe we can end it on a bright note.

Maybe Harvard is going to make a stand and get people on Wall Street, get people in in other parts of America that know how wrong this is to stand up.

Maybe it takes one.

You remember when the water hit the witch and the Wizard of Oz and she started melting?

You remember that scene in The Wizard of Oz?

You've seen it many times.

What happened to the soldiers?

They looked at Dorothy, said, geez, Dorothy, we're sorry.

You know, implying that they let this bully run roost over them.

And now that the bully was melting,

there's hope.

There's hope when you see a university like Harvard flex like that.

Just be ready for the counter punch and be ready to fight back.

That's my analysis.

I think with the witch from The Wizard of Oz, we're going to leave it there.

Thank you very much, everybody, for listening.

Of course, remember, you can join our question and answer sessions every Sunday that comes out.

If you want to become a founding member, go to therestispoliticsus.com.

This week, we're going to be looking more at the case of the man who was sent to El Salvador and what legal position that leaves the Trump administration in.

So join us for that.

We always love taking your questions.

Thanks, everyone.

Thanks, guys.

We'll see you next week.