67. Trump’s War With Wall Street

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Hello, and welcome to the Reses Politics U.S.

I am Anthony Scaramucci.

And I am Katie Kay.

Where are you, by the way?

I am in Amsterdam right now.

I'm speaking at a conference.

It's a beautiful day outside, and I have some makeup on, Katy Kay.

I don't know if you noticed, but I'm...

I'm glossed up here.

It looks good.

Yeah, you look professional.

And the makeup artist said to me, do you want to take the makeup off?

And I looked at her and said, no, I'm a very vain person.

I want to wear the makeup.

There's a YouTube channel to consider in addition to the audio version of this podcast.

And now we have videos on Spotify too.

I know, you know, I thought how fantastic we can do podcasts.

And after being in television broadcasting for the last 25 years of my life, I thought this is going to be great.

I don't have to wear hair and makeup anymore.

How wrong I was, because actually I am vain too.

And the idea of getting on a recording with you, particularly at seven o'clock in the morning with no makeup on, was just not going to happen.

Somebody else is vain too that we might talk about later.

Yes, of course.

And just remember,

the word vain in pain, the word vain and pain rhyme for a reason for all the people out there that are vain, they can empathize with me.

So, Caddy, we want to talk about a few different things today.

Why don't you lay it out for us?

Because you flipped it on me.

We were going to talk about the State of the Union, but we think that's going to be day old fish by Friday.

What do you want to talk about first?

Yeah, we're recording this on Wednesday, full disclosure.

The State of the Union was last night, and obviously it's dominating news here in America today, but I have covered far too many State of the Unions

than is good for my health, and I do know they have a short shelf life.

And while there were interesting things about the State of the Union, I think we should start with what is the real news, which is the wave of tariffs that Donald Trump unleashed this week, slapping significant levies on imports from our closest neighbours, Canada and Mexico, increasing tariffs on China.

I think we need to look at the reasons behind this, the potential economic fallout.

A lot of people are worried, and that's not just people on Wall Street who are worried, but Donald Trump's voters are worried and why he does this, what it is about Donald Trump that is really wedded to a slightly kind of 1980s view of global economics.

And then after the break, we will talk about the longest ever State of the Union address in American history.

You were in Amsterdam, which saved you from having to stay up and listen to the whole thing, although you did text me at 4.30 in the morning your time, which was ridiculous.

You should have gone to bed.

It was not worth staying up for.

It's like watching a verbal car crash.

I had to get up for it and see what he was saying.

I'm going to be honest.

I listened to the first

45 minutes and then I realized he was going to go for another at least 45.

I didn't know that he was going to go for a full hundred minutes.

And then I went to bed and I just caught up with it this morning, which was just fine by me.

But we'll get into that later.

Okay, so let's talk about about the tariffs, Anthony.

And I'm conscious that I'm sort of hearing mutterings in Washington that these tariffs may be revoked, possibly, but I think it's still worth talking about why he's doing them and what they achieve.

Because in a way, even if they get revoked, I mean, as the Wall Street Journal has said, this is the dumbest trade war in history.

And reading the Wall Street Journal at the moment is like Resistance Central.

It's extraordinary.

They've got, in today's newspaper, they have their first opinion is attacking the tariffs, their second opinion is attacking J.D.

Vance,

and then they go on to praise Vladimir Zelensky.

So, look, if you are a Democrat looking for kind of some consolation somewhere, read the Wall Street Journal at the moment.

But

even if he revokes them, and in a way, especially if he revokes them, why piss off

your two closest allies and trading partners to the degree that Donald Trump has done by imposing these 25% tariffs.

I mean, almost worse if he then revokes them a day or two later, because I think the damage is done.

I listened to Justin Trudeau come out and, you know, play the angry Canadian, and who knew Canadians could get angry and mean.

But this has, you know, really united Canadians against America, hasn't it?

Yes, I think there are two reactions.

The president of Mexico delayed her response till Sunday.

So she's in your camp that Mr.

Trump is his own human, arbitrary and capricious policy instrument.

He puts things on, he takes things off, puts things on.

And so she's waiting to see if they actually stick.

Obviously, the markets are faltering, not only here in the United States, but around the world.

And so I appreciate what Prime Minister Trudeau said yesterday.

I think he's very honest about how he feels about it.

I think the sentiment...

towards the United States has turned.

And I think what people don't recognize, and they have to wake up to this, is that the soft power of the United States reinforced the primary economic leadership of the United States especially for the free world and so if you want to take away that soft power you're going to dismantle USAID you're going to start talking with great bellicosity of rhetoric towards our allies you're going to undermine our soft power and I guess my question back to you is you said the damage is done My question is, is it irreparable damage?

And let me just give you the hypothetical and then respond to it.

If I'm a Canadian leader, or if I'm the secretary that runs NATO, or if I'm a prime minister of the UK, I'm saying, okay, there's something sinister afoot in the United States.

There's obviously the body politic is no longer well.

There's a group of people in the United States that are sponsoring Donald Trump.

They voted for him.

Maybe they don't understand the full ramifications of that vote, but there's enough of them that think Europe is freeloading.

There's enough of them that think that Canada is getting a $200 billion subsidy from the United States, which in fact they're not, but Donald Trump is saying that.

Americans just like buying stuff.

Yeah, but I'm wondering if there is irreparable damage, meaning now as a leader in another country, I have to recalculate my feelings towards the United States.

And just, you know, like I try to tell people, you want to take all the soft power away.

You want to reduce the aid.

You're going to make it less acceptable for the U.S.

to have the currency.

You're going to have the reserve currency the last hundred years has been the United States.

People are accepting of that because of the benevolence of the United States.

If you want to become a malevolent antagonist country, disavow our allies and do what Trudeau said, you're disavowing your closest friends and you are currying favor with dictators.

If that's the direction of the United States, and again, there are Republicans that won't speak out against this, against the Democrats.

I don't understand their articulation.

Maybe the Wall Street Journal,

maybe the new Democratic Party is the Wall Street Journal.

Maybe they should read the Wall Street Journal and say,

this is our platform, right?

So, Katie, is it irreparable?

So I do think a lot of the damage has been done.

And whatever happens to these tariffs in the next 24, 48 hours as we're recording this, the leaders of both Canada and Mexico are not going to have the same confidence in their country's alliance with the United States that they did a month ago.

It's like in a marriage, right?

Or a relationship.

You can't yell at your partner, then say, I'm terribly sorry for yelling, and think that that yell has just evaporated into thin air.

It hasn't.

It's now in the DNA of the relationship.

It's there.

Are you talking to Deirdre, my wife Deirdre, on the side?

I can't imagine you ever yell at Deirdre.

That's not something I think you would ever do.

Are you trying to send me a subliminal message?

No, I don't yell at her.

God forbid.

You're not a yeller, thank God, because I hate yellers.

No, you and I are both, as we've established, we're we're both don't like confrontations.

No, no, we don't like confrontation, and she believes in snippers, so we'll just leave it at that point.

The reason partly that I wanted to flip the running order of this show and do tariffs first is that I think we have two things happening in parallel, which mark an a seismic change in America's relationship with the world.

And just as we've focused over the last week, and we've talked about it a lot, about America pulling the rug out from under its transatlantic security alliance with Europe and NATO in the form of this Ukraine deal, whatever that deal may finally represent.

I think tariffs are part of that same story for Donald Trump.

I mean, the whole point after 1945 was to get a world that was more integrated, more peaceful.

had fewer conflicts and free trade between America's allies was an important part of that, just as the NATO Security Alliance Alliance was an important part of that.

The tariffs and Ukraine, NATO, and Europe, it's all part of the same story, that Donald Trump is rewriting the world order.

And that order has kept us, barring a few kind of, you know, problems in the Balkans and but minor steam releases, has kept the Western Hemisphere aligned and peaceful.

And the question is, what happens when you dismantle that order?

And I do think some of this, yes, yes, he could say, okay, I'm pulling the tariffs or I'm degrading the tariffs or whatever it is.

I mean, you know, he'll try and take a win.

And I've got the biggest, best border czar ever in Canada.

And three Mountain policemen went to the border and they found one illegal immigrant.

And it's unprecedented climb down from the Canadians.

He can say all of that, but the damage is done.

This is not a win for America.

Reconcile this for me as well.

Donald Trump on

October 2nd, 2019, praised himself on Twitter.

He said, we just renegotiated the NAFTA deal.

We're now calling it the USMCA

with Canada and Mexico.

This is a phenomenal deal.

That's the deal.

That's been the deal that's been in place.

The Biden administration adhered to it.

He said it was the greatest trade deal ever.

It's four, five years later.

He's now saying who negotiated this bad deal.

And he now wants to put tariffs on his own trade deal.

So reconcile that for me.

Be the trading czar.

Be his commerce secretary.

Be Peter Navarro.

Channel your Peter Navarro and tell the American people, the UK citizens, citizens of the world, why this is good for the United States, the plan that's afoot.

I think he always wanted to do tariffs.

He always has always believed in them.

You hear him talking in the 1980s and 1990s, and he clearly thinks tariffs are a good weapon.

He has always felt the countries that have a trade surplus with the United States are somehow abusing their privileges of having access to the American market.

So this is really Trump unfettered compared to Trump 1.0.

And in Trump 1.0, he had enough of your type of Republicans around him who were saying, no, you can't do big tariffs.

This is going to hit the American consumer.

These are our allies.

And now those people aren't there anymore.

And the argument he would make and the argument he made in the State of the Union is, and he has said, he's admitted, look, there may be a little bit of pain, but we are going to have a massive rebirth of manufacturing in the United States.

So the farmers who have been hit already by the counter-tariffs from Canada, they are actually going to end up loving this.

And

the car makers are going to end up loving this because everything will pull back.

Let me give you one example that was given to me by Angus King, who's a senator from Maine, and obviously Maine has a big lobster industry.

It's pretty much their biggest industry.

And Senator King last weekend had gone to a meeting with Maine lobster farmers, and he explained to me that what happens to a lobster that is caught in Maine that ends up in your restaurant in New York City, it's caught in Maine, it's sent across the border to Canada to be processed, and then it's sent back to the United States to be sold in your restaurant, to sold to an American consumer.

Well, now that one little lobster, lobster Joey, he's going to get 25% tariffs on him as he goes into Canada to get processed.

He comes back to your New York restaurant with another 25% tariffs.

He's had 50% of the value has increased on that one little lobster.

What's that going to do that to lobster farmers?

It's going to decimate lobster farmers.

So Donald Trump may say, you're going to love this.

Trump then tweeted at Trudeau after his speech and said, well,

we're going to dump another 25 on top of the 25.

So I don't know.

Does that mean you're gonna have 50% tariffs?

That lobster is becoming like caviar.

And maybe think I'm being bougie for citing lobsters.

If you have been to Maine, lobsters are not bougie.

That is chicken.

That is everybody's lifeblood in that state.

It's what they depend on.

And they won't survive a 75% price hike.

on their lobsters, whatever Donald Trump is saying.

But his argument is that basically it's going to be made in America, produced in America, bought in America, sold in America, eaten in America.

And it's a kind of rather, I don't know, I don't know which century it is.

You're the historian, is it a sort of 1800s for you?

1890.

Exactly.

It's McKinley.

Protectionism.

We're going to protect our markets from

doing it in a global world.

So the biggest problem, and this is the thing that they never are able to reconcile.

So if you have somebody that's offering the dissenting opinion of the tariffs, we have a holistic economy.

We have a holistic political machinery attached to the economy.

So the American geopolitical footprint is conjoined with American capitalism and conjoined with the American economy.

So, ladies and gentlemen, we created the security umbrella for the free world to protect those markets so we could sell into those markets.

Ladies and gentlemen, we accepted some uneven tariffs so that we could raise living standards in those markets, which would fortify their democracies, fortify the freedom, and create a bigger market for American goods and services.

So,

we flag tankers coming out of the Arabian or Persian Gulf, and we have the U.S.

Navy guarding those ships from pirates and potential adversaries so that we can have free-flowing oil.

for the world and for our own country.

And so now the notion that we're not going to do that anymore, and it's America first, and everybody is free-loaded off us.

And Trump has maintained his position, you said from the 80s, and that's correct.

He put in 1987

an advertisement in the New York Times derailing our free trade policies.

Now, the president at that time, Caddy, was Ronald Reagan.

There's a great meme going around on TikTok, which I share with everybody.

Is Reagan discussing the ramifications of protectionism and Reagan also saying that he was old enough, he lived in the 1930s, and he remembered the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Acts, and he remembered the crippling level of economic stagnation that protectionism creates in the global society.

And so as president in the 1980s, he was promoting free trade, but he was also accepting that because of the size of the American economy, we have to be somewhat lenient with certain trading partners related to politics.

So it's a holistic approach.

Our political system is conjoined to the economy.

And this is the danger of what the Trump people are doing.

They think they can pull one string here, Caddy, and then that the whole house doesn't collapse.

But I think it's very, very dangerous to do what they're doing.

And you have reports that they may not do this, right?

You've told me before we started the show that...

That they may pull them soon.

They may pull them.

The markets.

I say that.

That's reporting I've heard.

We had the Commerce Secretary actually went on Fox News and kind of sort of hinted at that.

It just is the confusion level, right?

That doesn't help very much people feel reassured that there is a clear plan.

And there could be, you know, let's that we'll have to partly, as Donald Trump will be doing, and I'm sure everyone in your business will be doing, is watching Wall Street and see how the markets responded.

And the feeling is that, you know, the markets didn't love what they saw with these tariffs actually going into action.

And if they carry on falling,

then that could have an impact.

Before, I want to talk about how American consumers are feeling because they're not.

feeling perhaps as buoyant as they were.

Can I flip this on you to give the case for this strategy?

I mean, I tried to mount one, but I fear I wasn't doing a very good acting job to mount a solid case for tariffs.

What would you say is the best case for this trade strategy?

I would say that this is an electric shock therapy for the economy.

This is a repudiation of a strategy that started really with the World Trade Organization in 1999.

This is a protect America strategy.

And the idea, if you put on these massive amounts of tariffs, you're going to incentivize car companies to return to America.

You're going to incentivize manufacturing to return to America so that they can participate in this American market.

And so this is going to be tough, and people are not going to like it in the short term.

But in the long term, it's going to create this massive amount of capital migration into manufacturing back in the American market.

The problem with that, though, unfortunately, that's like citing Classics Illustrated, which is a comic book at the Supreme Court.

It's a faulty comment because you're dealing in a new world.

You're not dealing, you can't rewind the VHS Betamax tape and go back to 1890.

You can't do that.

The Americans made a 50-year decision to be where they are.

And so what ends up happening is the system gets gamed.

You know, the Chinese will produce something up to 49%.

They'll ship it to Vietnam where they have their people there and they have their factories there.

Exactly what happened last time.

Yeah, they complete the process of Vietnam.

They ship it to the United States unfettered by the tariffs.

And then they're snickering and laughing at the Americans as the Americans are trying to get their products into China heave-hoed with the tariffs.

So the problem with everything that they're doing is that they actually know that it's wrong, but they've drinking the Navarro Trump Kool-Aid.

You know, Howard Howard Luttnick was on Wolf Blitzer's show this week, and I rewound it four times.

I know Howard forever.

Howard and I are friends in New York, and I wish Howard well as the commerce secretary, but he has drank Trump aid.

It's an orange-flavored substance.

It turns your whole face orange.

And

he's on the news saying, can you believe that the Ukrainians want all the land?

And Wolf Blitzer's looking at him saying it's their land.

I mean, it's their sovereign territory.

And he's wild with the tariffs.

And he's saying that the tariffs are not inflationary and that China has no inflation.

If anything, China has deflation.

But nobody rebutted Howard.

I would have said, Mr.

Secretary, China has deflation because these tariffs have crippled the internal mechanisms of their economy.

No one's spending any money, so the prices are going down.

You get the inflation first.

Then you get the slowdown in the economy, Caddy.

Then you get the deflation and the sclerosis.

Okay, remember something about our society.

We can't handle deflation.

Just a quick economic word.

If I've borrowed money and this is a debt-laden society, and now we have deflation, which means the money is worth more, I can't pay back the debt.

Let's say I borrow, say I'm making $70,000 like the average American.

I have a $250,000 mortgage, and now you have deflation, so my salary drops.

Okay, because that's what happens.

Prices of goods and services services go down, and now my salary is dropped.

I'm trying to pay back the debt with dollars that are worth more than the dollars that I borrowed.

You can't have deflation in our country in this amount of a debt-laden society.

And so, Mr.

Luttnick, Mr.

Secretary, what the hell are you talking about?

This does not make sense for the free world.

It does not make sense for America.

And whether you like it or not, there's other ways to get manufacturing back in America through tax policy and through coordinated capital commitment from the American government, not through tariffs.

It's interesting how a couple of people who work on Wall Street, who you probably know, have said to me in the last week how concerned Wall Street people are that people who went into the administration and they mentioned Howard Luttnick and they mentioned Scott Besant, who they thought were going to be the kind of grown-ups steering the American economy in a reasonable, healthy direction.

How quickly those two people in particular are sounding like they've drunk the orange Kool-Aid.

And that's really worrying people in the finance world because they're thinking, wow, if the grown-ups have already given up, either genuinely believe this or been co-opted into believing it, there is nobody around the president in this administration.

And that's the difference between the Trump administration this time around and the Trump administration the first time around.

There were people around Donald Trump the first time who said, look, you've got to modify these tariffs.

And that's not happening at the moment, which is why you have consumer sentiment as we are speaking falling in this country.

American consumers are not stupid.

They are reading the news.

They are seeing that there is a risk of inflation and they're already starting to stop spending.

I mean, they are anticipating inflation, which which may be a problem in and of itself.

And so they're already cutting back on their sofas and chairs and lobsters and cars.

There's one person, and he probably doesn't listen to our podcast.

He's probably going to be mad at me for outing him, but I'm going to out him on the podcast, is Steve Schwartzman.

He should be listening to our podcast.

Well, hopefully someone in his staff is listening, and then Steve will call me and yell at me for outing him.

But I think he talks to Trump all the time.

And I sort of know that.

And I know on the weekends when Trump is alone in that big mansion, because he does live by himself now, no one's there, he's calling all of his friends.

And I think Schwartzman is a very calming, very soothing sort of a capitalist.

And I think he tries to coach the president away from some of the worst instincts in the president's personality.

And so that's why sometimes you see the pullback.

You know, okay, we're going to delay the tariffs.

We got a bigger, remember, we were going to put these tariffs on a month ago, and then we delayed them.

And then inside the White House, you've got Navarro.

And Navarro has decided, and I had to go back and read some of Navarro's writings from about 15 years ago.

And I will say this about Peter.

Certain things he is right about.

We needed to recalibrate and right-size and make the WTO agreements with China more fair to the American workers.

But now we're taking what could have been a scalpel, a surgical scalpel.

We've got the proverbial chainsaw out, and we want to operate on the body with a chainsaw.

And when you do that, you damage the economic body that you're trying to heal.

And so, listen, there's still a tug going on with Trump's personality, and there's still people that are trying to reach him.

They don't work in the administration anymore, but they are what I would call the friends of Donald Trump.

Doesn't really have friends, we'll say associates, that have given him money that the White House operator calls on the weekend because the president's lonely and he needs to talk to some people.

We're going to take a break.

Let me just leave you with three quick little data points before we do that.

American tariffs are now the highest tariffs against other countries since the Second World War.

After the 2024 election, Republican consumer confidence in America shot up.

It's now flattened.

They're no longer feeling so confident.

And the people who will be hit by these tariffs overwhelmingly are the bottom 10 and 20 percent of the american population in terms of wealth and that's probably why the wall street journal this morning's opinion main opinion headline is trump's tariffs whack trump voters and then they've put whatever happened to gop concern for the working class um i think kind of the wall street journal is is giving the message at the moment to the rest of america something the democrats need to start reading okay we're going to take a break and come back and look at the state of the union that was not actually a state of the union.

We'll explain why and why on earth was it so long.

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Welcome back to The Rest is Politics US with me, Katie Kay.

And I'm Miazadis Karamucci.

And we are going to talk about that wonderful event on Tuesday evening.

A bit like we had the Oscars on Sunday night.

And Washington, D.C., very meanly is always called Hollywood for Ugly People.

I think that's so unkind.

But anyway.

I actually think it's generous.

I mean, you think it's unkind.

I think it's generous.

I mean, I mean, these are sour-pussed, angry people who are politically vicious, as opposed to like Ozempified people in Hollywood that are all

all cleaned up, Caddy K.

And suntans.

Anyway, all of those people turned out to Capitol Hill on Tuesday night for the annual State of the Union, which in a president's first term is called a joint address to Congress.

It's not known as joint session of Congress.

It's not known as a State of the Union.

I don't know why.

That seems like kind of a weird parliamentary anomaly.

And Donald Trump was meant to start at 9 o'clock.

He started speaking at 9.30, by which time I was already making my cocoa and wondering how long I had to stay awake.

Do you make your own cocoa?

I do.

Well,

I occasionally do if it's like, you know, going to be a long night.

And I had got up at four in the morning that day for TV.

So by, you know, by nine, I was nodding off a bit.

9.30, he starts.

All the members of Congress there, as ever.

It's always the theatrics, I think, that are worth watching on State of the Union rather than what's actually said.

But we can get into what's actually said in a minute.

But to set the scene, the Democrats are all seated.

The Republicans are all standing.

The president comes in down the aisle.

Now, generally speaking, some of those members of Congress will have been sitting for hours beforehand in order to get a seat as close to the aisle as possible so that they get a chance to shake hands with the president as he walks in.

Last night, the president, and this is pretty unusual, only shook hands with Republicans.

He didn't even look at the Democrats who were lined up.

And then halfway down, as he's walking through the aisle, there's a woman, a Democratic Congresswoman, who puts up a sign saying this is not normal, which gets caught on television.

The Democrats had wondered how to approach their dissent.

They didn't stand, obviously, and applaud, except for a couple of the sad stories from the guests who were singled out, but they held up these weird little kind of bingo paddles saying this is false or liar or not true or Elon Musk isn't elected.

I don't know if that was very effective, but they were kind of left in this position of being dissenters.

While for a hundred minutes, have I said that enough, Donald Trump extolled the immense early achievements and said said at one point, I have accomplished more in 43 days than most administrations accomplished in four years or eight years.

And then went on to say he is the most effective president since George Washington.

So he has in his mind, do you remember he used to compare himself to Abraham Lincoln?

Yeah, he's better than Abraham Lincoln.

He was better than Abraham Lincoln.

Now he does admit he is second only to George Washington.

That was early on in the streets.

I mean, it's difficult.

It's hard.

It's so hard to listen to this nonsense.

But

when I got up, I got up at 4.30 and I turned it on and I watched it to the end.

So I did miss that part.

But there was a couple of things that I want you to react to.

One of them was what he said about Rubio.

And so he literally hit Rubio with a ray gun.

And he basically said, well, here's Marco Rubio and our great Secretary of State.

And of course, if things go wrong, we'll know who to blame.

And then he said, ha,

but he got 100% of the senators to vote for him on his confirmation, which irritated Trump that that happened, by the way, because I know his personality.

But I know the body language.

I know the verbal language of Donald Trump.

And Rubio is complaining to people that he's been isolated out of some policy decisions, some diplomacy.

He's also had some diplomacy hijacked by J.D.

Vance, who's gaffing left and right.

He said that

these European countries like the UK and France, et cetera, have not been involved in any type of war-making over the last 30 or 40 years.

In the meantime, they were in Afghanistan and Iraq with us.

Thousands of servicemen perished in those countries, fighting alongside of us after the invocation of Article 5 of NATO.

So, what's your reaction to all of that?

Yeah, I mean, briefly on the J.D.

Vance stuff, which is the second headline in the Wall Street Journal this morning, J.D.

Vance's forgotten wars.

That has caused an enormous amount of disquiet, obviously, upset, fury is probably the better word, among America's allies.

475 Brits died in Afghanistan, 179 died in Iraq.

France didn't send troops to Iraq, but it sent 70,000 troops to Afghanistan.

But the glib way with which J.D.

Vance, who is not a stupid person, dismissed European involvement and then tried to clean it up by saying, I didn't actually say France and Britain, but that's irrelevant because the only forces that have said that they are going to go to put boots on the ground in Ukraine Ukraine are French and British forces.

He's,

if JD, this kind of lack of statesmanliness there, but it puts Rubio in this very difficult position because Marco Rubio is not somebody who is actually as inclined inherently to jump in and be full MAGA.

I mean, I was thinking back to the 2016 election when Marco Rubio, in the last weeks of that election, that was when you were on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, kind of decided to go fool Trump.

Do you remember that?

It was a really awkward period, and he kind of started heckling Trump on the debate stages in the way that Trump had been heckling the others.

So he called him names and he tried to kind of bully him a bit and he tried to dismiss him verbally.

And it just didn't work because it wasn't inherent in him.

And I think what everyone is seeing play out at the moment is the fact that Marco Rubio might go on television and say, I'm so grateful to Donald Trump for standing up for America and making America strong again.

And Vladimir La Zelensky was terribly disrespectful and should have come, you know, on bended knee.

But you sort of just know he doesn't believe it.

I mean,

it doesn't work.

And therefore, that's why he gets the ray gun treatment.

He can't go on television enough and say, Donald Trump is great and Zelensky behaved poorly because somehow his body language in that Oval Office meeting when he was with Zelensky, as you said last week, made it look like he wanted to disappear into the sofa.

Yeah, I mean, everything you're saying, I'm shaking my head at because principle versus personal power decision now.

You have to marry your principles to your personal power and go forward if they're congruent.

But if they're incongruent, which they are right now, it's so blatantly obvious that they are.

And it's not going to work out well for Marco Rubio.

I just give him a news flash.

He likely doesn't listen to us, but if he did listen to us, I would say, Senator or Secretary Rubio, you're getting isolated by Musk and Vance, and you're getting isolated by the supercharged MAGA people.

They're cutting you out because they don't see you as ideologically pure to them.

So all your past statements are actually hurting you inside the administration.

Moreover, Trump just took a big shot at you.

Okay.

And everything that Trump says in quote-unquote jest, he means.

And so he's like, hey, man, we're going to blame everything that goes bad on you.

Also, they put him in these weird positions.

They sent him down to Panama.

He has a Latin American heritage, and he's down in Panama talking to the president of Panama.

And they're obviously now, BlackRock is buying the two ports from the Hong Kong company that has been overseeing those ports.

That's, I guess, a piece of good news in Trump world.

I was surprised that didn't come up in the State of the Union, actually.

Yeah,

marginally it did.

He said marginally that stuff is returning to American hands.

And it was an implication that it was Panama.

But my point is, Marco, I'm not your advisor, but if I were your advisor, you're finished anyway.

You're the Kevin McCarthy of Secretaries of State.

You're the Kevin McCarthy of Marco Rubios.

You're going to be out of a job soon.

You're either going to be isolated by the puritanical MAGA, or you're going to be out of a job because you're not going to be able to stomach it.

It's one or the other.

So what are you doing exactly?

And you could be part of the resistance story in the Republican Party.

You could be like, hey, you know, I looked at this, not up for it.

And we have to go back to the principles that make us American.

I'm here in Amsterdam, and somebody said to me, what is the most un-American thing that President Trump has done?

in the seven weeks since he was president.

And I said it was the rebuking and the berating of President Zelensky in the Oval Office.

And, Caddy, just hear this example for 30 seconds.

I am living in a mansion, and you are part of the Homeowners Association.

You have a smaller house than me.

I'm in the mansion.

We have an arson that sets fire to your house.

This is actually probably accurate.

Can we just say that given our relative income?

Oh, I knew you were going to say that.

You were going to try to make me out to be more posh than you.

But everybody on YouTube can see your background in this splendid house, and I am here in this lowly hotel room.

Poor Anthony, well, there's no swimming pool and fountain like there was in the Cayman Islands last week.

No, no,

there's nobody.

Could somebody turn off that fountain in the back, please?

Okay, but Caddy, just go with this analogy for a second.

You'll get where I'm going.

I'm in the mansion.

You call me.

There's an arsonist setting fire to your house.

And now there's a fear that the arsonist is going to set fire to other houses in the neighborhood.

And I invite you into my living room.

And I, rather than helping you, you know, I've got my garden hose out there trying to help you, but I'm rebuking you in the living room.

You see, and it's so un-American.

It's so against the principles.

He's referencing himself as George Washington.

Let's remind people when Adams was having trouble with the British militia in Massachusetts, Washington sent his militia from Virginia.

And everybody was surprised.

And Washington said, we're in it together.

We are in this together.

That's been an American idea for freedom since the beginning.

And so that to me was so un-American.

And Rubio then puts out a tweet about how great it was and how tough America is, but it's not.

It has sent shockwaves and reverberation

through the global society and certainly the free world.

So I just, I think Rubio's toast, to be totally candid, and it's just a matter of time.

And it's sad to see.

I'm going to be counting in Scaramucci's the departure of Marco Rubio.

I will say one thing that I think we have to distinguish between what Trump is doing that is popular with his base and what Trump is doing that is unpopular with his base.

Because Trump's approval ratings are down since he took office.

They're lower than where Joe Biden's were at this point in taking office, but they haven't cratered.

And all of the reporting that I see from around the country is that you can kind of divide it into two buckets.

It's a bit like the first part of this program, the second part of this program.

The things that Donald Trump are doing on the

economy, people aren't liking.

So his approval ratings amongst Republicans is declining because he is not doing enough to dress prices.

And many people voted for Donald Trump because they love Donald Trump, but many people voted for him to bring down the famous price of eggs.

But there are definitely things that Donald Trump is doing that the Republican base is very happy with, and not just the base, that the Republican swing voters who voted for him are happy.

They are happy that border crossings have slowed to almost zero.

They are happy, actually, to see America pull back from Ukraine.

That argument was never made particularly well by Ukraine supporters here in Washington, either Democrats or Republicans.

I was struck when I was traveling around the country for the midterm elections in 2022 and I was doing a documentary on Donald Trump and I would was asking people about Trump and whether he was going to come back again.

And I was struck by how many Democrats, without me asking them, said, why are we spending $40 billion in Ukraine when we've got so much inflation here and we've got so many problems here?

The documentary wasn't about Ukraine.

I wasn't asking about Ukraine.

But this was Democrats as well as Republicans talking about Ukraine.

So I think actually that is still popular.

I think the Doge stuff that Donald Trump spent a lot of time talking about in the State of the Union address, he ran through a whole list of things that the government is reportedly spending money on, including $8 million on transgender treatment for mice.

Everything that Donald Trump tags like that, I want to actually check out to see what the real story is.

But you can see why $8 million on transgender treatment for mice would probably cause a lot of people around the country to say, you know, what the fuck?

I mean,

we have a massive deficit.

We're massively overspending.

The government is bloated.

And it was quite a clever moment, I thought,

in the State of the Union speech where he spent about four or five minutes just going through all the crazy stuff that they say they found in government spending.

And that has wide support amongst the American people.

They don't perhaps love the way it's being done.

They don't like the chaos and they don't necessarily like the cruelty.

And I think you're hearing from Republicans to Elon Musk and the White House.

Can you dial that down?

But Donald Trump still has an enormous amount of support.

And when he stood up there in Congress, you know, the chance of USA, USA and the kind of cheers and the Republican confidence in this new president and in the agenda was on full display.

This is not a party on its back foot.

I think it's a very insightful analysis.

I would just add something that there was great symbolism in that speech.

If you are a MAGA person, now,

I don't understand the Democrats why they don't stand for an African-American young man who has brain cancer and they're giving him an honorary Secret Service badge.

I don't understand why they would not stand for something like that.

I don't get the full-on hatred either.

I think they've lost the plot.

I think that this is a very low point

for them, meaning

very low.

And how do I mean like so low that it's like 1984 after the Ronald Reagan landslide of Mondel?

They've lost the plot.

They're disorganized.

They have no leader that you can turn to to say, okay, we're going to organize the descent.

There's no bold strategy.

Whatever.

You hate Donald Trump.

He's a bold guy.

He's coming up with bold ideas and he's galvanized the group of people behind him.

And

Kenny, you look through the numbers.

You know, everyone on the Democratic side says, well, it was a marginal victory.

1.5% of the popular vote.

Stop for a second.

89 counties shifted to the right.

Seven out of seven so-called swing states went to the Republicans.

This is a momentum game.

This is a rate of change differential game.

You are on the other side of this, fellas.

Okay, so you probably should stand up when there's an African-American kid who has brain cancer getting an honorary Secret Service pass.

You probably should clap at the Doge cuts.

Okay, he derisively called Senator Warren Pocahontas.

She was out of sorts.

She was clapping.

She didn't know why she was clapping.

And then she said, after the State of the Union, I was clapping because we're giving aid to the Ukraine.

But she wasn't.

She was caught flat-footed by Donald Trump.

Guys, you're supposed to be pros.

Get in a a room together.

The arrogance on the side of the Democrats, the arrogance of leaving Biden in place, the arrogance of not having a primary process and selecting Vice President Harris.

I mean, worse, it's that you can't really discuss it.

There is a kind of illiberal liberalism at the moment, where you can't discuss what are complex issues, which are nuanced issues, which we ought to be able to have an open discussion about.

And I think what's happened over the last few years is that discussion in in the Democratic Party has got shut down.

I mean, there's a lot of criticism of Donald Trump at the moment for saying things like kids who protest on American campuses should be expelled from universities.

I don't know if that's even legal and if they're protesting peacefully, they have a right to protest peacefully.

And that is illiberal.

But there's been illiberalism on the left as well.

Democrats that I'm hearing from are sort of starting to see signs that

they point to things like the Consumer Confidence Index going down,

the fear that Medicaid, which is the

social health program for poor Americans, could be cut and that there could be some kind of a recession or a stock market correction.

They point to all of that as signs that there could be Trump overreach, but they're kind of ceding it to Donald Trump to make mistakes seems to be their biggest hope at the moment, rather than thinking, okay, what are we proactively going to do?

I know they're talking about a lot.

I know they're coming up with strategies.

I'm going to meet somebody after this recording who's been doing a lot of work getting Democrats together to see if there is a plan that they can come up with.

But at the moment, they just seem to be thinking, well, let's, as James Carville has suggested, let's sit back and play possum and let them screw this up.

I don't know if they're going to screw it up.

That seems to be a risky strategy if I was a Democrat.

We're going to wrap it up.

Do you have any more to say?

Have you not got one last thing, Anthony?

Is that like a, I mean, you got me with the pool pump.

You got me with the fact that I was in the mansion and you weren't in the mansion.

Am I being a little unkind today?

No, no.

Unfortunately, we're talking about polling and focus groups.

When you are going after me, it polls very well, Katie K.

Okay.

Your popularity rises when you slam me around on this little lovely podcast of ours.

So no, I don't have anything else to say other than I know that we'll be back

before long because there'll be another crazy twisting-turning event that happens.

And so you guys are going to be stuck with us again quite shortly because just a guarantee.

That's the only thing I'll say before we end.

We're sorry.

We apologize.

And also, do if you want to get us back even sooner, of course, we'll be back on Sunday with our founding members question and answer session just for founding members.

Do sign up if you'd like to listen to that at the restispoliticsus.com.

And we also at the moment are running a live Monday Q ⁇ A.

And we do take your questions.

We keep an eye on all those questions that come in on that YouTube live, also for founding members that then comes out on Tuesday.

But if you can't wait for Tuesday, sign up because you'll get it Monday.

Think of that.

You can have Katie Kay and Anthony Scaramucci on Sunday and then again on Monday.

Wow, poor people.

I mean, there's a Wall Street career.

There's also like an infomercial host in there too.

I mean, it's like a lot of things, a lot of things you're displaying, a lot of prowess you're displaying.

I think we're going to get, you know, we're going to move swiftly into kind of career coaching from Anthony to me.

Thanks very much for listening, everybody.

Thank you guys.

We'll see you next week.

Mike and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other.

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

When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.

Oh, come on.

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

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

Whatever.

You were made to outdo your holidays.

We were made to help organize the competition.

Expedia, made to travel.