69. Is ‘Woke’ Politics Hurting the Democrats?

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Hello and welcome to The Rest is Politics US.

I'm Catty Kay in the Goalhanger Studio in London.

I love that studio.

I wish I was there with you.

I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and I'm down here in Tampa about to attend Yankee Spring training, Catty Kay.

And we have just agreed that both of us have massively overindulged our children in life.

If there's a hookie warden somewhere in Manhassett listening to this, I did take the kids out of school that they go the Yankee Spring training.

But there you go.

There's my confession as a Catholic.

I'm glad you confessed that because I used to take my kids out of school the whole time and figured that nobody was really counting until one day somebody did count and I got a very, very angry call from the principal saying, okay, your children actually do have to go to school most of the time and taking them off on holiday is not okay.

I've been there.

What do you want to talk about?

We've got a lot to talk about, actually.

And I've written down the five reasons to be positive, which at some point I'd like to insert into the podcast.

I like that.

I think we need more positivity on this podcast instead of all the car crashes that are happening.

I feel like you and I are like reporting on car crashes, but there's some underlying things that are going on that I think people need to focus on and feel positive as they go into the weekend.

I saw your tweet on that the other day, the things that the administration is getting right and wrong, but actually quite a lot of the wrongs, it seemed to me, cancelled out the rights, that they were right in theory and wrong in practice.

So we'll get to that.

We'll get to it because the wrongs are now coming home to roost for the administration.

And you can even see it with the Prime Minister of Ireland.

We'll talk about it.

But what do you want to talk about today?

I thought it was worth talking about the Democrats.

We haven't touched on what the Democrats are doing.

I've had a few conversations over the course of the last week with some members and former members about the splits in the Democratic Party and how they are kind of the progressives and the centrists are locked in a battle to define the party's future and who seems to be winning out in the moment in that battle.

And then after the break, we're going to do something we haven't done before on our main podcast, which is kind of give you a flavor of our question and answer session that we have for our founding members every Sunday.

We're going to take a few of your questions and touch on the private sector.

Are you promoting

memory?

If you would like to become a founding member, you can sign up, drumroll please, at the restispoliticsus.com.

How did I do it?

I'm taking some credit for this.

I've turned you into a sales monster.

It's like unbelievable.

I mean, you're a Brit.

You're supposed to be like a little bit more reserved on the selling, but you've become

a commercial spokesman.

Listen, I'm going to buy you one of those plastic flowers.

So when you're meeting people, you can shoot them with the water that comes out of the flower have you ever seen that you seriously think that that is my style can you can you imagine

your style but i it's a way to get people's attention in sales and you walk up to them and so they get hit in the head with water and then you say hey could could you be a founding member just throwing it out there it's an idea It's such a bad idea.

We're going to move on.

We're going to talk about a little bit about Ukraine, the latest.

Also, there's quite a lot on immigration that's bubbling around too.

And we will get to your five reasons, Antony Scaramucci's five reasons to be happy, which sounds like a self-help book we all need right now.

So the reason I want to talk about the Democrats is that they've been having obviously big conversations about what went wrong in the last election.

And it's kind of emerging fairly clearly that there is this battle going on for the future of the party between the progressives who feel that the last election was lost because Kamala Harris was not progressive enough, didn't stick to progressive values, didn't fight hard enough, and that they need more of a resistance of the kind that we saw in what I'm going to call the State of the Union, even though it wasn't the State of the Union, of Al Greene standing up and waving his cane at the President and the people holding those little paddles.

And they need more of that and they need to fight everything that Donald Trump is doing, point out all of the injustices that he is, they say, committing.

And then the centrists in the party who think that really what the Democrats need to do is get away from the whole issue of identity politics and that is what lost them the last election and move in a direction that is much more focused on economics and the working class.

They've got a couple of things that data points that I think are worth throwing out there as we start this conversation.

There's a Quinnipiak poll that has just come out that showed that 21% of Americans approve of the job that Democrats are doing in Congress.

I mean, their approval ratings as a party are under the floor.

If you could kind of lift up the floorboards and look into the basement, they're somewhere down there.

Compare that to 40% who approve of what the Republicans are doing.

So we may be focusing a lot on Donald Trump and the problems that the Trump administration is having just at the moment.

But still, the Republican Party has double the approval ratings of the Democrats.

And they do realize that they've got to come up with some kind of coherent strategy for connecting to the working class of America.

But this civil war that is brewing beneath the surface, I think is very indicative of

the fight that they're going through at the moment.

And I think one thing that in my conversations has become pretty clear to me is that this fight will only really be resolved when the party gets a leader.

And that the direction the Democratic Party takes is not really going to be defined by whether it's going to be more progressive policies or more centrist policies, but by the candidate.

And I think that's so interesting, particularly speaking to you from London, where, of course, it's a parliamentary system.

And in a parliamentary system, system, it's the party, not the leader that predominates.

In America, I think in this election, it's going to be the person and whoever emerges as the most charismatic, most successful

Democratic candidate who's eligible to get their message across, that is going to be really determinative of whether they go into the next election as a more progressive party or as a more centrist party.

I'm sure you've been hearing some of these discussions too that are taking place, right?

I mean, this is all the Democrats are consumed with at the moment.

Aaron Ross Powell, So

it's a weird battle.

I'd love to have you react to this.

So

there's old white men, which, of course, I would be included in old white men.

So it's not like I'm being denigrated to anybody, but it's not.

So old.

Yes,

I do need the confidence boost.

I do appreciate you saying it.

But let's face it, okay.

James Carville, Bill Maher, and Stephen Smith have the answer.

And again, this is my opinion, but that could be because I'm a jaded, older guy.

But I think they have the answer.

What is the answer?

Get off of the DEI.

Get off of the woke stuff.

Move the party back to the core themes of blue-collar aspiration, helping blue-collar families with their living standards, their economic security, a platform of healthcare security.

Caddy, just think about it.

How insecure most Americans are with their healthcare.

Whatever the problems are with NHS or other universal health care standards around the world, at least somebody waking up if they've lost their job or if there's something going wrong in the family, they can get to a hospital, they can get to a doctor and not have to worry about it bankrupting them.

And so there are five or six pillars of the Democratic Party that have been completely lost now.

And you brought up something very interesting, which I do agree with.

They need a galvanizing leader.

And unfortunately for the Republicans, the galvanizing leader was Donald J.

Trump.

2012, I brought this up, I think, last summer.

I sat in a room with Republicans.

They were schmeisted by Barack Obama for the second time.

And we put out this statement.

We're going to be more favorable to immigrants.

We're going to do this.

We're going to do that.

We put this whole statement out.

And in came Donald Trump with an anti-immigration message and an anti-statement.

It was almost like the last gasp of white supremacy running for office in the site.

And he galvanized the party, ultimately decapitated it.

So you got to be very careful.

I think you're right.

There's going to be one leader, one charismatic person, man or woman, is going to come in and marshal the party.

But you got to be very careful who it is because

the Democrats are the best thing.

I just want to repeat this.

The Democrats are the best thing going for the Republicans.

They're disorganized.

They're going after each other.

They are unbelievably arrogant.

You talk to these Democrats.

They are unbelievably arrogant.

They wouldn't let people that are against Donald Trump into their reindeer games.

You know, it's like poor Rudolph, which is sort of the moderate person who wants all of this nonsense to end.

They've got that person shoved to the outside.

It's very, very dangerous with Democrats.

And now they've got Rahm Emmanuel.

He's saying that he's not running for president, but he's on the air every day.

He's on the air every day running for president.

God bless him.

I like Rahm.

I have no problem with Rahm.

But I would say to Rahm,

think outside the box.

You are a centrist Democrat.

You are a tougher Democrat.

I respect you.

A lot of moderates respect you.

Go meet AOC.

Go figure out what you need to do to tie up that wing of your party.

It's going to be very important because if you have a fractured coalition, one thing about the Republicans right now, they're not fractured, Caddy.

No, No, they're definitely not fractured.

I mean, it's interesting that in that kind of battle of who's managing to kind of get their voice across, one thing I heard from a Democratic strategist who's actually a pretty centrist one was saying that if you look at the coordination

of messaging, the person who is the clearest voice on the Democratic side is not a centrist.

It's Bernie Sanders.

And that since the election, he's had a well-organized tour around the country.

He has been speaking around the country to packed-out crowds.

He's been on television a lot.

And the more progressive wing of the party, whatever you think of their kind of antics up on Capitol Hill during that State of the Union address, is very well funded.

And this is, I had a conversation with Matt Bennett, who's in the Third Way movement, which, as its name suggests, is a more centrist movement.

And he was pointing to the fact that the progressive wing of the party is very well funded by these outside groups.

So you've got all of these foundations like the Hewlett Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Soros Foundation, and the leadership of those foundations may not necessarily in itself be particularly progressive, but a lot of the people that work there are very progressive.

They're kind of on the front lines in the fight against poverty and inequality around the country.

And they have a lot more money and a lot more resources to put into campaigning than the center of the Democratic Party.

And you look at the progressive caucus on Capitol Hill in the Democratic Party, it's big.

It's a big, well-funded operation.

And at the moment, it is their voice in the form of kind of Bernie Sanders, not actually so much AOC, who has not been going around the country talking that much.

Some of the other squad members, it's Bernie.

Now, I don't think Bernie is the answer for the Democrats for the next election, but it's just interesting to hear how that progressive voice.

But some of his ideas are.

Tell the viewers and listeners what some of the ideas are.

Again,

I'm a right-of-center centrist.

I'm a centrist socially, but a little bit right-of-center politically when it comes to the business community.

Bernie Sanders is not, but there are elements in what he's saying that has lots of support.

I mean, we saw that in 2016, right?

When he ran for president against Hillary College.

This is Trump's message as well, Caddy.

You're right.

It's Trump's message as well.

So tell people, tell people what it is.

Bernie has worked his whole life on redistributive economic policy, on billionaires making too much money, billionaires should pay more taxes, big corporations are hurting American workers.

He actually is in favor of protectionist economic policies to help build up.

I mean, again, you're right.

Look, does this sound like Donald Trump and J.D.

Vance?

Yes, it does for a reason.

I mean,

he's not actually not been on the identity politics.

One of the reasons that Bernie Sanders had trouble back in 2016 was with Hispanic and black groups.

He didn't have, it was pretty white, his base of support.

I mean, he comes from Vermont, maybe that's partly why, but he was an old white guy that got a lot of young supporters, but struggled with some of the more

minority groups in America.

He's not particularly woke.

I mean, he isn't on that kind of cultural left of the party.

He's very much on the economic left of the party.

And he's still even, what is, how old is Bernie now?

He's got to be in his early 80s, 83.

He's 83.

And he is still playing.

It's like the Rolling Stones, right?

He's never going to go away.

He's like Mick Jagger.

He is playing to packed out houses around the country at the moment.

And I think it's this.

When I've heard Bernie speak since the election, there is a simplicity and a coherence in his message that Democrats, but more importantly, working class Americans find very appealing.

That we need to do more to redistribute income in the country.

There is too much income inequality.

The rich have got richer and the poor have not got richer.

Big corporations are not doing their part to help American workers.

And we need onshoring to build up American manufacturing.

I mean, it's a pretty simple message.

And I had this conversation just in the last couple of days with Tim Ryan, who was a former congressman in Ohio, who's very much more a centrist, who ran against J.D.

Vance in the Senate election, ran for the presidency, didn't get very far in 2020 as one of the candidates.

But I've always found to be a very impressive candidate.

And I wanted to kind of ask him about this.

And he was, he he did see that it's the clarity of message.

I mean, he talked about this as of needing somebody who makes a very clear connection between the Democratic Party.

and working class Americans.

I imagine for centrist Democrats, the fact that it's Bernie who's out there getting so much attention is alarming because I don't think they think that Bernie, as they thought in 2020, they didn't think Bernie could get elected.

That come a general election, he just doesn't have enough of a centrist support.

But he's certainly the guy that's out there at the moment.

One thing, the other thing that Tim Ryan Ryan said that I thought was interesting that I wanted to ask you about is that he agrees with more of the centrists that you have to connect to kitchen table issues, that you've got to be talking about that.

But he also recognises that we are in a moment of cultural extremism where it's not enough to be talking about kitchen table issues.

You have to also have a cultural connection that is kind of bigger than the part.

I mean, the thing about Trump is that he's not, it's not just the Republican Party, it's a wave, it's a movement.

And Democrats need to be part of that cultural movement.

And the thing that Tim Ryan was saying is that they need to come across as strong.

You know, Trump is there at sporting events, he's out at NASCAR races, there's NFL games.

He projects strength, and people like that.

And he says Democrats need to find their own way to project that kind of strength.

Has he built a multi-ethnic coalition, Donald Trump?

Yeah, that was the shocker for Democrats, right?

That's part of the soul soul-searching that's going on in the Democratic Party at the moment is how did Trump do so well, particularly with black men and Hispanic men, male voters?

I mean, it's more of a kind of male issue, I think, perhaps even than a cross-cultural issue.

So one of my Italian-American friends, old school guy who listens to our podcast, primarily for you, Katie Kaye, primarily for you.

Such a flatterer.

He said to me, this is really hard for the Democrats to understand, but Trump has a multi-ethnic coalition.

Trump is talking about issues that matter to Democrats, believe it or not.

He's just distasteful to them because of his attitudes, his mannerism, some undercurrent of the white supremacists being with them as a big turnoff to a lot of the Democrats, things like that.

But these themes are Sanders' themes.

These themes are, you know,

and I'm going to say something about Steve Bannon because, you know, I obviously can't stand Steve Bannon, but I listen to Steve Bannon.

And so, Steve, there you go.

You should be flattered by that.

I listen to him because I know how smart he is and I know how dangerous he is to the society.

So I do follow him around because I want to hear the arguments so that these arguments can be checked, they can be verbally hand-checked.

He's on Gavin Newsom's podcast.

I listened to the whole thing yesterday, and he did say something to Gavin that's true.

You know, there's a lot of oligarchic power on the left and the right, not good for the country.

Some of the ideas, the Sanders ideas, the Bannon Trump ideas, interlock with each other.

And

they're actually Teddy Roosevelt ideas.

So let me read you the four pillars of Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, Caddy Kay, the father of progressivism.

The coinage of the word progressive in the United States came from Teddy Roosevelt End monopoly power, right?

When you bust monopolies, you lower prices, you increase more innovation.

Number two, protect the poor.

Make sure that there are things in place where there's landing grounds for the poor.

There's safety nets that people can fall into, God forbid, if there's trouble.

But there's also building codes and standards to make sure that the housing that they're in is safe.

This would also include an umbrella of health care.

And then the third thing, which is, I think, a very big pillar of all this,

making sure that the percentage of economic rent, that means the output in the society, at least 50% of it is going to labor.

It's off that mark right now, and that's why people are unhappy.

More economic rent is going to capital than labor.

If you go back to the 1990s, Clinton had it in equipoise, and the population was generally happy.

So this platform, you know, I don't understand why they can't put a coalition together to put that platform together.

If you're pro-American and you're pro-democracy and you're for democratic values and maintaining the Constitution that's worked for this country for two and a half centuries, if you're that person, why can't you break an impasse with AOC?

Why can't you settle on some ideas?

Why can't you all universally decide that, hey, you know, know, the DEI woke suffering has not worked?

Okay.

How about inclusion as opposed to woke?

How about aware?

How about if we're just aware of each other and aware of each other and sensitize each other's values as opposed to jamming the word woke down people's mouths and throats?

The counter argument to that, Anthony, obviously, is that woke has become a dirty word.

But for black Americans, and I'm sure you've spoken to many of them in the last couple of months, there is a real fear that the DEI stuff is a way, is actually the anti-DEI movement is basically

tacit racism.

Exactly.

And so people are being accused of DEI hires when actually it's just a black person who got hired or a woman who got hired.

And that it's an easy, lazy way of condemning the whole of the Democratic Party's agenda and saying that's what the Democrats are all about, when actually there has been an effort in the Democratic Party in the past and in the Republican Party.

I mean, let's talk about compassionate conservatism of George W.

Bush to do what you just said Teddy Roosevelt did and help the poor.

And many of those poor people historically have been

black Americans, Hispanic Americans, women who didn't have jobs as much.

And there's been an effort to try and bring those people up and to level the playing field against some of the discrepancies that those people felt.

And I think, phrased like that, many Americans are actually in favor of that.

It's just that you condemn the whole thing as woke and it becomes something that is, you know, a dirty word in American politics.

You're right.

It's well said.

Listen, you know, Paul Ryan once said to me, Anthony, we had a war on poverty.

Linda Johnson started the war on poverty.

We spent $100 trillion.

Right.

Poverty won.

Poverty won.

Yeah.

Okay.

So why did poverty win, Katie?

Well, because of, I mean, income inequality grew massively in the country, is part of the reason.

Working class wages stopped growing for the last, I mean, actually, they have started growing.

They've picked up in the last few years, but there were decades where working-class voters' wages stopped growing.

Unions,

labor got undermined.

That was actually during Bill Clinton's time, right?

Lost some power.

And I think all of that contributed.

Listen, one thing, and I wanted to get your reaction to this, and then we're going to take a break.

One of the things that Tim Ryan said to me that I thought was interesting is that Democrats are at their best, not when they mollycoddle people and, you know, and treat them softly in a way he said that was sort of slightly dismissive, but they're at their best as a party when they challenge people, when they

embody the spirit of Kennedy or FDR.

They don't just tell people what they want to hear, but they challenge people to help in the effort to rebuild the American economy.

How do we out-compete China with electric vehicles?

How do we become a very competitive country?

How do we get skilled up to do better, to be the best that they can?

I mean, his argument is, look, we shouldn't be saying to everybody, you should go to college and Americans will pay for it, America and the working class will pay for it.

You should go to the union, get a skill.

We need nurses.

We need people to work in the FAA.

And I think it was just, I mean, he has a bit your argument.

You know, we should cooperate with Bobby Kennedy on food and health and getting Americans healthier.

We should be encouraging Americans to eat better, exercise more,

and that Kennedy's kind of 100% right on that.

Might not like some of the other things he says, but cooperate with people where you can and don't be the party of comfort, be the party of challenge.

And I thought that was a really interesting way of phrasing what Democrats could do for America.

Don't be afraid, in a way, of challenging the country, because that is when you can get the best out of Americans and when you can actually be a party of leadership.

We don't know yet the person.

I mean, I keep asking every Democrat I speak to, who is the person that you see rising to the top?

And everyone says, Well, in 92, we didn't know it was going to be Bill Clinton, 2008, Barack Obama came pretty quickly.

I don't know in this world of social media where everybody knows everything and the information stream is so omnipresent that it's possible for somebody to be in the shadows still.

But of the people who are out there at the moment, I don't see that charismatic, driving figure who could overcome these kind of differences within the Democratic Party and challenge people in a way that they felt excited about voting for Democrats.

I don't see that figure yet.

I think Alyssa Slotkin did a very good job, but she was kind of

her speech barely got any attention because of what Al Greene did that night on the floor of the House.

And I don't know that she has that charisma.

I also don't know.

I asked Tim Ryan this: Do you think Democrats are going to nominate a woman?

And he kind of said, Well, it may be a while before we do that.

You know, you've mentioned Rahm, and we all know the names out there, but it'll be interesting to see.

I mean, maybe it's still just too early to see that name, and they will emerge in the next year or two.

And maybe they don't want to emerge quite yet because the longer you're out there, the more you get attacked.

So

it'll be interesting to see who the person is and whether they can find that figure who can define the party and excite the country to get behind the democratic message.

There's a book that was written in 2016 that Democrats should go back to.

And the title of the book is American Amnesia, How the War on Government, this is a big issue, Caddy, how the war on government let us forget how we became so prosperous.

We forget what made America prosper.

There was an integration between what the government was doing and what the private sector was doing.

And business leaders were mindful of lower income living standards.

You know, even racists like Henry Forbes were like, hey, I got to pay these workers enough money to afford the product that they are producing.

But in this book written by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pearson, which I read recently, I actually read it a long time ago.

I went back and looked at it.

There are elements of what we need, whether you're a Republican or a Democrat.

We do need the government.

And one thing Elon Musk is showing us is that, yeah, there is some fat in the government.

I'm not saying that there isn't, but the government is integrated into the

body politic and into the welfare of the people.

If you're going to mess with that, it's going to cause problems, Caddy Kaye.

And I think we need to remember that.

And I think the Democrats have got to get off of some of the pronoun usage, off of some of the screeching and the scolding and the canceling, and back to that fundamental formula that people like Franklin Roosevelt and people like LBJ understood.

The irony, of course, is that the one person who has really benefited from American government help, Elon Musk himself, right, in building Tesla.

How much did he benefit from government assistance?

You're not having a car dealership set up on the south portico of the White House

if Elon is not in trouble.

And we're going to talk a little bit about that, and I'm going to give Elon some advice because maybe the Potomac fever for Elon Musk is waning.

And just remember what I said about Potomac fever.

One of the symptoms, you don't know you have Potomac fever.

And of course, I am a person that has once had Potomac fever, Caddy K, so I'm well aware of the symptoms, and I'm also well aware of the withdrawal.

We need to talk about that as well.

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Okay, welcome back to The Rest is Politics US.

Anthony, before we started recording today, you told me, which I'm delighted to to hear, that you had some good news and you wanted to run through the things that you're feeling positive about, which actually I'm very happy about that.

Generally, when we think about Trump and the dystopian moves that he's making, there hasn't been a lot of rebuttal to him yet.

And there's some ideas that are now forming, and members of the House of Representatives, others are getting in there, locked in on the whole Doge issue.

But here are five things that I think people need to think about.

Number one, the tariffs are roundly unpopular, so much so that guys on CNBC that are broadcast journalists like Steve Leesman are like, hey, man, this is insanity, what you're doing.

Just stating it very obviously.

JP Morgan, CEO, Jamie Dimon, who I think is one of the smartest people in the world of finance, this is just ridiculously unpredictable.

He said it more softly than I'm saying, but I think the good news is the tariffs are really now getting on a very aggressive pushback from very, very smart people.

The sycophants inside of Trump's administration that know better won't push back, but the society is starting to push back and the business leaders are.

And I think you could see that in that CEO Business Council meeting in Washington this week.

Can I very quickly add something there?

Because I've heard from a couple of people that on Monday, the White House's telephone exchange was just like jammed with calls from Trump donors, from CEOs, from people on Wall Street, from investment firms, and they were all saying the same thing, which is that your theory of the case doesn't work.

This tariff theory of economics that we can make America kind of insular economy again, it just is not working and please stop.

So I've heard the same thing that you're hearing.

Yeah, we're in a cohabitation.

We're in a cooperative environment, a co-op.

We're not in a landlord-tenant relationship with the rest of the world.

We're just not.

He may think we are, but we're not.

Maybe at one point we could have been, but that's just not the nature of Americans.

You know, Americans get here, they're risk-takers, they want to get along with other people and form a family, and they want to eat hot dogs and go to a baseball game and eat apple pie.

They don't want this nonsense.

Okay, I'm just telling you, that's my general feeling.

Okay, so the five that I have, and I'll be quick.

Number two is Musk.

I think we have to say that there's something going on there now.

I think the stress on him is overwhelming, and I think he's eventually going to pull out of this situation and go back to his businesses.

I don't think he wants to see his life's work destroyed.

And when you go into politics and they start boycotting your products and you've got debt on your business, Caddy, your cash flow drops significantly.

You're forced into a really bad situation with your debt holders.

Mr.

Musk was there in 2008.

And by the way, we've all been there as entrepreneurs.

I've struggled.

I've got 20 years in the Skybridge, but I've struggled with my ups and downs as well.

He was there in 2008.

There's no reason for him to go back to that type of stress in his businesses.

And so I do predict that he will find an exit door, and that will cause less stress in the general society.

Okay.

And I think people realize what you and I once said several months back that Doge sounds good, but like Simpson Bowles, like the Grace Commission and all these other things,

they just never work out.

Okay.

So number three, the EU leaders and Starmer and others have entered into the Trump preparedness program.

You have different types of programs with Trump.

One is a recovery program.

That's like me and Esper and Kelly are in the Trump recovery program.

We sit around and have council meetings together.

But this is the preparedness program.

They come in now more cautious.

They come in now, let Trump rant and rave and do his thing.

Let me get out of there without being damaged.

And the Alistair Campbell idea, which I share, and I've said this to Alistair many times, of ignoring Donald Trump is the right thing thing to do.

Just let him blather like the crazy uncle at the lunch table, but get your political career away from his so that he doesn't damage you.

And I thought the Prime Minister of Ireland did a good job of that yesterday.

So people are more prepared in terms of dealing with him.

Doge is coming to an end, Caddy.

Okay,

my buddy Scott Galloway says it's 30 days away.

I don't see it that close as some stubbornness.

But I would tell you, by midsummer, I think Doge is gone.

They'll declare victory.

There won't be very little of a victory, if you will, but they'll declare it.

I think that's a positive.

And then my last one, number five, Trump is unpopular again.

So, you know, if you don't like Donald Trump, you could have a blue hat, maybe a green hat.

You know, Trump says, make America great again.

Trump made himself unpopular again.

And go look at the numbers.

The numbers are falling.

The numbers on his handling of the economy are now down to 44%.

This weakens his ability to do the nonsense that he wants to do to the society.

So those are five things that I came up with this week that people need to cogitate upon and say, okay, it actually is going to be okay

because they're organized, but they have Donald Trump at the top steering, who's very disorganized and becoming more unpopular again.

Yeah, all of those are...

Great points.

I'm going to add one more.

I was talking to Senator Peter Welch.

You're allowed to, by the way, you're allowed to add one more.

That's so kind of, but I promise you it'll be my one last thing.

Senator Welch from Vermont, who is, of course, Bernie Sanders' partner is a senator from Vermont, but he's a Democrat.

He had a virtual town hall recently and 34,000 Vermonters dialed into it.

They had never seen numbers like that.

And why is that good news?

Anytime people, Republicans or Democrats, are exercised, energetic, involved in politics is good for the country.

And he was blown away by how many people they had.

And yes, a lot of them have concerns.

They have concerns about their social security payments.

They have concerns about their benefits.

They have concerns about Doge.

The point is, people are active at the moment.

And I think that's a great thing.

That's good for democracy.

When people are engaged, it's good for democracy.

And by the way, I've gone around and said to people, you think Trump is going to try to cancel the election?

You think he's going to try to assert martial law?

And I think the general consensus is no.

I'm not saying he doesn't want to do that.

Okay.

But the general consensus is he's just, people are ready and they're not going to let him do that.

They do love the system more than they love this nonsense.

There's a handful of people that are into that, you know, Curtis Jarvin monarchist crowd, but it's just not enough of them, Caddy.

So oh, the Bronze Aged pervert, people should go and look him up.

He's kind of fun, too.

People are not there.

This is not, I agree with you.

It's not going to happen.

There will be another election.

I still believe the American democratic system will hold, and I think it's because people are so.

You are really an incredible British person you're an incredible British person I'm such an optimist you mentioned the Bronze Age pervert and then you keep talking

who's the Bronze Age pervert okay

I mean you're just an incredible we're gonna do well go ahead I'm serious this is a guy who on the right has a good following he gets mentioned by people like JD Vance and Curtis Yarvin so we will do an episode I promise you guys on this person called the Bronze Age pervert I want our listeners to know that they thought that I would say the word pervert on this podcast before you, but I just want to let you know that she got ahead of me on the word pervert.

I'm just citing political theory at the moment.

Right, now we're going to take a couple of your questions.

This is not quite as like selling Teslas outside the White House, but this is something we do every weekend for our founding members.

If you'd like to become one of them, it is therestispoliticsus.com to sign up and become a founder member.

And this is from one of our founding members this question about, and I think it relates to systems, from Olivia Fern.

Can the Trump administration really revoke the green card of activists like Mahmoud Khalil?

Trump has warned that the arrest is the first of many in a crackdown on what he calls un-American activity.

What does this mean, and who is he appealing to?

This is interesting because this is a guy who has a green card.

He has an American wife, she happens to be eight months pregnant.

He was a Columbia University grad student who was very involved in the anti-Israel protests last year, year, and he was picked up by immigration and customs agents and sent to a detention facility in Louisiana.

And the Trump administration wants to deport him.

There are legal challenges to that because he has a green card.

The Trump administration in the White House, the press secretary says, listen, we have the right to revoke people's green cards.

As Marco Rubio said, it's not a right to have a green card.

It's not like citizenship.

It allows you to stay in America.

But green card holders like myself are not allowed to vote.

And the green card can be taken away if the Secretary of State decides that your activities are not in line with America's priorities or are a threat to the United States.

He's trying to say this is not a freedom of speech issue.

Now, it's a very grey area in the law, and I'm going to be very interested to see how this pans out, because you've got freedom of speech on one side.

This guy did not actually commit any kind of crime in the United States.

He was not violent.

He didn't beat anybody up.

He did not commit any act of terrorism.

So is it a freedom of speech issue?

Or does the Secretary of State under law have the right to say it is our America's policy around the world to defeat anti-Semitism and therefore we can revoke Mr.

Khalil's green card and we will carry on doing so and anyone else who has a green card who's in a similar position should be careful.

I mean, I think it's part of the sort of chilling effect that this administration is trying to have on dissent, but it's also another of those things that I think a bit like cancelling USAID, where the administration knows that this is going to get liberals upset.

They want a liberal outcry against this.

They believe that that kind of outrage on the left against something like this, against the cancelling of USAID, against putting Mr.

Khalil into detention and deporting him, is they want that outrage because they believe that

shores up support of Americans across the country.

What do you make of it?

Do you think this is a big legal issue or not?

And they want protests in the streets.

They want protests

and they think this helps them.

I don't know the legal,

I'm not sure, I'm not a constitutional lawyer and I think we'd need a constitutional lawyer because I don't think this has been done before.

You know, listen, I mean, this is a terrible thing for me to say, but I just want to remind people that in 1985, back to the future,

the antagonists were the Libyan terrorists.

Do you remember that?

Uh-huh.

Probably don't remember that, but I have to.

They were the Libyan terrorists.

And of course, the terrorists were from the Arab world that attacked the World Trade Center.

And so there is an Arab xenophobia in this country.

You walk around in London, I think the Americans made a very big mistake with this.

I've said this for 25 years.

It was a very strong Arab CEO community pre-9-11 that I used to be in contact with here in New York and so forth.

Post-9-11, most of those people moved to London or started interacting with people in London or other parts of the world.

Dubai has become a big center now, but New York has been left out.

And so this sort of xenophobia is very dangerous.

I think Trump is right, however.

His instincts are right that because of the way Americans think about the stereotyping, he's right, that the first impulse will be throw him out, throw him out of the country.

The underlying impulse is the one that I think will hopefully prevail, because we do have a pretty consistent judicial system here.

The underlying impulse was, okay, he hasn't fomented violence.

He did exercise his First Amendment right.

He's entitled to those rights as a green card holder.

He's also entitled to a pathway to citizenship as a result of the fact that he married an American citizen.

It'll be interesting to see how this unfolds, but my guess is that the kid is going to quietly win that case.

That's my guess, Caddy.

Yeah, and I don't think they will care whether actually he wins the case or he doesn't.

I think this is another of those flood the zone.

They've already got what they wanted, which is the political outrage.

100%.

Okay, this is from Jake.

What is the GOP's real plan around Ukraine?

It all seems a little haphazard.

I think haphazard is the right word.

Uncertain is another word.

Unrealistic might be another word.

Because as we're recording this, Antony, we're getting the news that Russia has rejected

the American peace plan that Marco Rubio had presented to Zelensky and that Ukraine had accepted that would have involved a temporary ceasefire in Ukraine.

The Russians are now saying

that they want a long-term peace settlement that will take into account Russia's interests and concerns.

That's, I guess, the giveaway was Putin, right, turning up dressed in military fatigues,

showing that he was actually a war leader, not a peacetime negotiator.

I thought it was a bad look for him.

You know, I'm not his image consultant.

You prefer the half-naked on horseback look for Vladimir Putin?

Yeah, but I think that's over.

I mean, that's a 15-year-old look.

I thought he looked terrible.

I thought he looked older.

And I thought he looked worn out in that fatigue.

And

camo is not a good color on him.

Okay, just letting you know, I thought he looked terrible, but I think you're right.

That was symbolism that he wasn't going to accept the ceasefire.

But the question now, though, for you, Caddy, is what happens to Mr.

Hyper Masculine?

I'm going to impose sanctions on Russia if Russia is not going to do the will of the United States and Donald J.

Trump.

So what is he going to do now?

Is he going to throw more sanctions on them?

He's not going to do anything to them.

He attacks our allies, not our adversaries.

And he saber-rattles that he's going to do something, but he never does because he's got this like weird love affair of Putin.

Nobody can figure out Trump.

What are you doing with Putin?

And even was the suggested ceasefire, was that a ruse?

And what's the ruse underneath it?

You obviously want what Putin wants.

And so are you just trying to figure out how to get to what Putin wants by boiling the frog slowly?

What's your thought on that?

Because he said, hey, if Putin doesn't give me what I want, I'm going to sanction, sanction, sanction.

Is he doing that?

He's not doing that.

No, I mean, look, at the same time that they're having these negotiations, Russia says it's retaken the town of Kursk that the Ukrainians had taken back.

I think this is all, this is delaying Russia's willingness to negotiate.

Russia is reading the White House correctly, reading that Donald Trump is asking Ukraine to make all of the concessions is unlikely to put any pressure on Russia.

So why on earth would Putin agree to a ceasefire when he thinks he has all the cards at the moment?

I mean, maybe I do think that Donald Trump liked the idea of being the deal maker.

I think he would like that Nobel Peace Prize that Barack Obama got in his first term in office.

And I think he's thinking, listen, if I can get a deal on Ukraine, then I can be the guy that can take the Nobel Peace Prize.

But what he's finding is that the reality is much more complicated than he had expected.

We are way past that.

Do you remember in the campaign, I'm the guy that's going to stop the war in 24 hours.

We're way past that 24 hours.

And what he's finding is that it's a lot more complicated because the Russians want to keep going.

and take as much territory as they can.

And the Ukrainians are not going to accept any kind of peace plan that involves total capitulation that is foisted on them.

They've shown they have a real strong willingness to fight.

So this is harder than this is reality.

This is Donald Trump's view of what he can do hitting up, crashing up against the reality of a very complicated situation.

And the deal is not as easy as he thought it was going to be.

Incredibly well said.

I don't have anything else to say, so we'll see what happens.

But I'm just laughing.

Next week, you and I will be talking about the non-sanctions and the non-punitive things that Donald Trump is going to do to Flatterer Putin, which is nothing.

Caddy K, nothing.

Okay, let's leave it there.

That's it for The Rest is Politics U.S.

this week.

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See you soon, guys.

See you next week.