116. Government Collapse: Why Trump Will Win This

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Welcome to the Rest is Politics U.S.

I'm Catty, Kay, in Washington.

Where are you, Anthony?

That's me, Anthony Scaramucci, in the heart of downtown Manhattan and here in New York City.

You're not in London on stage?

No, Caddy.

I made it back safely from London.

Did you have a nice time in London on stage?

Caddy, I feel like I'm getting painted into the corner because I was out with Emily Maitlis.

You were out with Emily Maitlis, as in going out with Emily Maitlis.

Oh, my God.

Yeah, I mean, I did a speech with her.

I did a speech with her.

No, it's a cardinal goal hanger rule.

What is it?

Alastair Campbell calls it.

What does he call it?

He calls it podultery.

Podultery.

There we go.

Okay, well, it's lovely to have you back.

We haven't changed the locks, so that's good.

Somehow I feel when I'm on vacation, you're going to end up getting Daniel Craig or somebody to replace me to really hurt my feelings.

But go ahead.

Okay, quick message to Daniel.

Daniel, dear, should you ever feel like replacing Antony Scaramucci, you are welcome.

Anytime he doesn't have to be on vacation, we will put him on vacation.

Yeah, they'll be permanently on vacation after that replacement for sure.

Only condition is that it's all done in studio together.

Huge Daniel Craig fan here.

Oh, my God.

Okay.

Okay.

James Bond would not have let the government collapse and the U.S.

government shut down.

We are in day two of the American government being shut for business.

Thousands of federal workers are either being furloughed, which means they've kind of been laid off for the moment.

They should get back pay and they will come back again.

But there's a big question mark about that.

They're working without pay anyway.

They could also be fired.

That's another option.

We're going to talk about that.

But it's okay because what we lack for in governance in America, we make up for in ultra-male warriors with no beards and great bodies.

So we're also going to talk about that.

First of all, though, let's quickly catch you up on where we are on this government shutdown.

We're on day two and we are in a position where both sides, the Democrats and the Republicans, are trying to see how they can make political gain out of this and both sides are trying to blame the other side for being responsible for the fact that federal workers aren't going to work.

And things like, so what does it mean, it means that things like post office aren't working, national parks might be shut,

it might be slower to get through airports because some of the security workers are not working, people are not going into the Environmental Protection Agency, they're not going into the Department of Defence, they're not going into the Department of Education in the numbers we would expect them to do.

So everything kind of grinds to a halt here.

And both sides hope that they can make political gain out of this.

And the Republicans' argument that they are honing in on in the last kind of 24 hours, Antony, seems to be that the Democrats are at fault for shutting down the government because they would not agree to a budget that includes cuts of healthcare funding to people who are in the country illegally.

And they are honing in on this idea that the Democrats are shutting down your government because they want to give health care to undocumented people in the country.

And the Democrats are pushing back and saying, hold on a second, it's more complicated than that.

But my feeling slightly is that that more complicated message is getting a little bit lost.

What are you thinking?

Well, let's go to the arguments.

So what's true and what isn't?

Is it true?

So it's not true that all people who are in the country who have not got documented status can get access to healthcare.

In fact, if you are in the country illegally, you do not have access to Medicaid, which is the healthcare system for the poorest Americans.

But there are some caveats.

If you are in the country seeking asylum and you are allowed to be here while your asylum claim, for example, is being processed, then you can access healthcare.

In the past, you could access healthcare.

If you are a dreamer, the child of somebody

who was brought to America by undocumented parents, but but was brought here as a child, has lived here your whole life, you can also, under the old system, have health care.

And what the Republicans have done in their last budget is they've stripped away those kind of caveats, if you like.

They've made it so that anyone who's in the country, unless you have a green card, you're not allowed to access Medicaid.

And the Democrats are saying, hold on a second, that's unfair because you've got people here who are in the system.

The government knows they're in the system.

They're waiting for their green cards or they're waiting to be approved for asylum and they should be allowed to have access to health care.

So, that's the reality of the situation.

Of course, the Republicans are just saying, globbing on to the idea of illegal immigrants getting health care.

They're spinning this in a way that is not true, no.

But there is a kind of obviously a more complicated picture than the one they're painting.

So, let me tell you why they are both wrong, if you don't mind me being so blunt about it.

In the United States, since 1986, if you are here in the United States and you walk into an emergency room, you could be an American citizen, a non-American citizen, someone seeking asylum, an illegal alien in the United States.

It does not matter.

There is a fiduciary responsibility for the emergency medical staff to tend to your care.

It could be a sore throat, a broken leg, a heart attack.

It actually doesn't matter.

You've got to go there.

It's the most crazy expensive way to treat, by the way, a sore throat.

But anyway.

It is, Caddy.

But when you've got

a 12-month-old baby, you have no access to medical care, the mom is going to walk into the emergency room, and a $75 doctor visit is going to be $1,075.

As would you and I.

But I'm making the point

that they're both wrong, that the Mitt Romney point and the Barack Obama point is the most salient, most common sense point.

Put the umbrella in place to cover the most amount of people in order to protect the system

and in order to allocate the capital in the system in a way that's going to be the most propitious and efficient way to allocate the capital.

So, this is a war of words, but what is happening here is they want to dismantle Obamacare.

They don't want to tell you that, but the Republicans, they tried in 2017, let's dismantle Obamacare.

Look at me, look at me, thumb down.

John McCain said no.

Now they're like, we're not going to mention that we're dismantling Obamacare, but we're going to dismantle Obamacare.

And this is how we're going to do it.

But I'm going to make the point and love to hear what you think about it is, what the hell are the Democrats doing?

Because hello, hello.

Let me hear.

Can you hear me?

What are you doing?

Go to the podium and explain to the American people what is going on.

But they can't do that, Caddy, because they're shooting at each other.

And they still haven't been able to figure out Trump because when you put the 2028 hats in front of Hakeem Jefferies and Senator Schumer and you take the trolling picture, you're supposed to chattle Mark Carney and get your ass up out of the seat and say, I'm very, very sorry.

I'm not going to sit with you with these hats here.

You're a non-serious person in a very serious job.

We'll adjourn the meeting until we're going to have the meeting in a professional way, not a reality television trolling production.

Okay, what say you?

A couple of quick things.

One on the health care and one on the politics.

The one on the healthcare is that

although you're right, any American can walk into an emergency room and get treated and no emergency room is going to let them die on the emergency room floor because they don't have insurance.

What those people had before that they don't have now under

was if I was in the country waiting for my and I'd been told, yes, you've been cleared, but you're waiting for your green card.

I'm a young Afghan woman.

I came over in the Exodus.

I know a young Afghan woman who's exactly in this position.

She's been living with our family for three years.

She's been cleared.

She's been told she can stay.

She's waiting for her green card interview.

She's exactly in this position.

Zainab has access to Medicaid.

She can go for a regular, you know, yearly OBGYN checkup.

She can go to the dentist.

She can go to a doctor's office

to get her checkups, to get what she needs.

She can't get that anymore under the Republican proposal.

And that's what the Democrats are fighting against.

I think what they need to do politically is take a story like that, right?

Or take a dreamer, a young person who's been living in the country and say, Is this what you want?

Is this what Americans want?

Do they want these people not to be able to go for have their checkup?

And do they want them ending up in the emergency room which is going to cost an awful lot more but i keep listening to the democrats messaging and because it is a complicated issue they've got caught up in the details of it in the slight policy details of it and they're not hammering and i think this is what if i was a democratic strategist i'd be advising them you hammer home donald trump is hurting you job numbers are down Grocery prices have not come down.

They are still high.

There is a lot of chaos.

There is a lot of insecurity.

Jobs are being lost.

Donald Trump is hurting you.

This is Donald Trump's shutdown that is hurting you.

I was speaking to a Democratic strategist yesterday and to a Republican strategist this morning.

And they're both saying the same thing, which is that Democrats are losing an argument that actually should be winnable for them.

But somehow, neither Chuck Schumer nor Hakeem Jeffries in the House, the leader of the Democrats in the House, is managing to make the argument clear.

And maybe it's because, as we've just described,

it is a kind of a complicated argument.

Healthcare is a complicated policy issue.

But maybe they just need to be very bold and blazon in the way that the Republicans are being bold and blazon and say Donald Trump is hurting you.

Donald Trump is shutting down the government.

Donald Trump is shutting down the government.

And by the way, there is polling in the Washington Post this morning that makes people think that is who is shutting down the government.

But my question to you is, how long does the polling that suggests that the Democrats are on the right side of this and more people blame Donald Trump and the Republicans than blame the Democrats?

If this goes on and people start being fired and people start having their services taken away, at what point does the public opinion switch against the Democrats?

Well, I mean, there's a lot there.

So I'll say that.

Is that your very polite way of saying I went on a little long?

I think it is, isn't it?

No, I think it just

there's a lot there.

No.

There's a lot there sort of code for.

You could have spoken a bit shorter.

That's not fair to me.

I'm listening very carefully and I want to go through each of the points.

So I was saying there's a lot there because I'm thinking.

I got my thinking cap on.

You got your thinking hat on.

Yes, my thinking cap is on, which is probably why my hair is turning gray.

It's burning a lot of fossil fuel in my brain.

But anyway, all right, well, we've sidetracked, but here's the issue.

One,

I think the Democrats are going to fold.

I just disbelieve that because they're going to get eventually tarred for it.

It's one thing to, you know, it's like if you're in a fight and you, you know, you're a kid and you're fighting with your sister, ultimately, you may be right in the fight, but your mom's going to get upset and eventually blame both of you.

And that's what's going to happen with the American people with this.

And the Democrats, believe it or not, I don't understand why they are, but they're in a weaker position than Donald Trump because they don't understand how to control the narrative the way Trump does.

I do think they'll eventually get in trouble.

Second piece of this is this is the irony here, because I always try to call balls and strikes on Trump.

He is less,

and I want to repeat this, he is less adamant at relinquishing the health care for these people.

He is a spending sort of a guy,

and he doesn't like it.

Okay.

And so the hard right likes it.

And for some reason, and maybe you can explain it to me, because I still can't understand it, why the hard right would like to take 22 million people off the insurance rolls when all that's going to do is increase everybody's insurance premiums and drive the whole healthcare system up the wall.

But for some reason, the hard right wants to do that to these people.

Someone will have to explain it to me.

But Trump is not there, Caddy.

Trump likes spending money.

And I've told you this before, and I'll say it again here.

Trump has told me, hey, buddy, my base is socially conservative and fiscally liberal.

They want the benefits.

That was his ultimate genius in 2016.

People actually want the social welfare net.

They don't want their government programs cut.

He does.

He once looked at me, he said, said, yeah, you're a dummy.

I said, I know I'm a dummy, but why am I a dummy?

He said, well, you're a Wall Street guy.

You're socially liberal and you're fiscally conservative.

My base is the opposite.

Yes.

And you don't understand that.

Wake up.

And so

he himself is going to go very frustrated with this.

And the last, last point,

economy is not doing well.

And I'm going to tell you, Trump is no dummy.

He's going to look around and say, wow, the economy is really not doing well.

I'm going to get blamed for this.

No bueno.

That's not good for him.

And so this is why the polymarkets have this thing ending.

Ready for this?

In 11 days.

Now, I don't know.

Other things have ended in 11 days, but this is polymarket's prediction.

So, wow, it's going to last just longer than a Scaramucci.

Yes, exactly.

So there you go.

I mean, I think this is over in 11 days.

You and I will be on to something else.

And then the question is, 11 days, and does ultimately, does it hurt or hinder the Democrats or the Republicans?

Probably by the time we get to the midterms nobody remembers because as we know on this program a gazillion things happen every week and people's attention span is short and they will have moved on unless during that 11 days russ voort who runs the omb who is the architect of project 2025 manages to use this government shutdown to fire another 100 000 federal workers permanently

in which case obviously those poor people will be looking for jobs can i ask you a question given that and I think it's so smart, Anthony, what you just reminded us of.

Basically, Trump has realized that Republican voters, particularly Republican working-class voters, are not like establishment deficit hawks, and they don't want to have their social services cut.

So why is he listening to Russ Vought on this?

Why is he allowing Russ Vought to do this?

Why is he allowing the hawks in his White House to put the Republicans in a position where they could go into the midterm elections next year with a whole load of people thrown off Medicaid.

I don't see how that makes sense to me.

I'm going to answer the question because he is a great cultural warrior.

They've sat him down and they said, listen, you're the alpha male.

You know, Jane Goodall said that he was the primary ape, you know, banging his chest and running up and down the mountain playing king of the mountain.

And they're saying that you

are going to win.

The Schumers and the Hakeem Jeffries are going to fold, and this will be another big notch in your rifle in the culture war.

And so Trump says, yeah, I want that.

And then the second thing they're saying to Trump is that this is going to be really good for our base as we go to them and tell them that we're getting rid of all of this dentritis and sclerosis in the American government.

And Trump's saying, yeah, I want that.

So now You know this and I know this.

The Democrats are saying we're going to hold the line on this.

We're principled.

We don't want Obamacare to end.

But they're going to get nervous, Caddy.

They're going to get nervous because

they don't want to go in in the midterms with what happens to you and your sister when you're fighting, and your mother gets mad at both of you.

And that's what's going to happen to these people.

So they're all going to fold, and Trump's going to win this.

I'm sorry to tell people this, but Trump's going to win this in the following way.

He's going to compromise, and maybe 22 million people won't be off the Medicare, but maybe 10 million will be or 12 million.

And Trump will declare a conservative victory.

But my question, and someone please help me with this, is why, Caddy?

What is the be in the bonnet of the hard right

to want to hurt the underprivileged like this?

That is something I cannot understand

for the life of me.

It doesn't even make economic sense to do it.

Plus, if you end up treating people in emergency rooms, it costs a lot.

America's healthcare bill goes up, that explodes the deficit even further, puts more pressure on America's fiscal situation.

I mean, none of that in the end is good.

It's a short-term victory.

Politics is very short-term at the moment.

There's no real long-term thinking, and maybe they're right.

Trump likes to say that he wants to win every day's news cycle.

He doesn't care about next month's news cycle or six months' news cycle.

He just wants to win today's news cycle.

And if, as you say, he manages to walk away from this painting it as a victory whatever happens my prediction is he paints it as a victory um and his base probably believes him because they see the news outlets that he wants them to see then then it will have been worth it for him and he likes a fight Trump does better when he has an adversary I've noticed that recently when he went through a period about a month or two ago where he wasn't fighting anybody and he was kind of lackluster So he needs a fight.

He likes fighting.

This gives him a fight.

I think you're right.

The longest shutdown in American history was actually back in 2018, and that was 35 days.

I think this is probably going to be a couple of weeks.

And then we'll see whether Russ Vought manages to enact the kind of things that he wanted to enact.

I mean, the kind of Machiavellian theory is that this was all part of a plan.

Russ Vought spent those four years with Stephen Miller out of office.

They came up with a plan, including a plan in which they would manage to fire hundreds of thousands of federal workers, and they realized they could do that during a government shutdown and they realized they could push Democrats to a position of getting them to a government shutdown.

One question I have for you is how long does Chuck Schumer last after this?

Because I heard something interesting yesterday from a Democratic strategist which is that there's a lot of speculation that Chuck Schumer doesn't make it much beyond the midterms as leader.

He's up for re-election in 2028.

The chances are he gets challenged by AOC.

He does represent the kind of older brand of the Democratic Party.

He's not on the hard left.

And you've got these figures like AOC and Mamdani who are itching to take control from these older guys.

And if this government shutdown process is seen as not playing out well for the Democrats, I think the pressure will be on Chuck Schumer and his leadership role.

So let's see how long it lasts.

If he isn't leader, by the way, the name to watch is Brian Schatz, who is the senator from Hawaii, is what I'm being told, who is kind of positioning himself at the moment.

Listen, I mean, who's ever going to be the leader?

I mean, the bloom is off the Chuck Schumer rose.

Yes.

And he's lost the plot.

I never really saw Chuck Schumer as a rose.

I'm going to have to say, he doesn't give me rose vibes.

It was a bad metaphor.

Okay.

All right.

All right.

I got to regroup here.

We're going to take a break.

We're going to take a break.

Rocky Balbo is going back into his corner.

He's going to regroup here.

He's going to do some push-ups, shave off his beard, and get ready for the war on woke.

We'll be back in a second.

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Welcome back to The Rest is Politics US.

We didn't have a chance in our last episode to talk about the absolutely fantastic meeting at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia, where the Secretary of War, Peter Hagseth, summoned some 800 generals from their positions around the country and around the world.

They all had to fly in.

Two, three, four-star generals sat in this huge Marine Corps base for a rousing speech by the Secretary of Defense and then another rousing speech by the President, at which they applauded wildly with enthusiasm because they loved what they were hearing so much.

And it had been a huge mystery.

That, by the way, was a joke.

They didn't applaud at all.

They sat there stone-faced.

And it was a little bit of a mystery as to why this meeting was being called.

Was there a major change in American strategic policy?

Were we changing our approach to Taiwan and China?

Was something happening with Ukraine?

Was there a new

offensive on cyber issues?

Was the kind of defense strategic initiative going to come up with something radical and different?

And was it all of such a nature that you really needed to have all of these generals in the same room?

And what was the answer, Anthony, to why these generals were summoned from their forward bases around the world to come back to Virginia?

A culture war.

We're fighting a culture war.

It's Culture War II.

Culture War I was a medium war, didn't go full kinetic.

But me and Pete Hegseth are now fighting Culture War II.

And we're going to bring all of you guys in, and we're going to tell you you're lazy and fat, which is just unbelievable because, you know, Trump has the potbelly of potbellies.

But the one thing that Trump did, which I just want to point out to everybody, because I know the SOB and I know how he projects.

So let me tell you what Trump did, okay?

And you'll appreciate this, Caddy.

He knows he's out of shape.

He knows he's getting old.

He's giving this rambling 45-minute speech, and he pops in on Barack Obama, and he says about Barack Obama, he says, I dislike the guy, I have no respect for him, but man, he rumbled down the steps.

And

it was,

yeah, and it was such projection.

Okay, you're laughing, but Trump is signaling to the generals: guys, I'm fat and old.

I'm an aging queen wearing orange makeup, and I'm going to be up here lecturing you about getting into shape.

And so it was just beautiful for me because I know Trump's complex personality, and he was literally projecting the hypocrisy with the outtake on Barack Obama.

So that's number one.

Number two, Pete Hekseth,

who is in good shape, by the way, and admire that about Pete Heckseth, but there's very few other things to admire about him because his intellectual depth is less than a half an inch in terms of the lake that he's swimming in.

And the other issue for Pete Heckseth, and this is the big one, is he reeks of insecurity.

When you look at him and you look at his public speaking style and you look at his mannerisms and his gesticulations, he lacks knowledge of what he's doing and he's wildly over his skis.

And so those poor guys sitting there, mostly guys, some women, are looking around saying, do I call this out

and get fired and lose my pension?

Or do I keep my mouth shut and ride this thing out and go back to my post?

But I'll tell you, it was a terrible day for the American military.

I felt very bad for them.

And the last point, if you polled those generals and you said, who among you likes the name change from the Department of Defense to the Department of War, I'm telling you, you're going to go 99 to 1.

99% of them would be, no, I don't like that because that's not our culture and that's not how we've represented our people.

the people of the United States and the defense forces of the American military.

That's not how we represented them to the rest of the world.

So a disaster to me, but a victory for Donald Trump and Pete Hexa.

They got on the phone with each other and said, oh, Pete, yes, Mr.

Brown, that was fantastic.

We're winning the culture war.

Orange makeup, girdle.

Could you pass me the orange makeup and the girdle?

Pete, we're doing so well here.

I mean, and that's what happened.

One thing, I don't know, because I was joking when I said at the beginning there was applause.

Really, watch the video.

They sit there in total professional, by the way, stony silence, because these are senior figures in the U.S.

military who are not meant to show or reveal their political allegiance, who are not there having sworn an allegiance to Donald Trump, they're having sworn an allegiance to the U.S.

Constitution.

And he was basically giving them a kind of political speech in which he's bashing Joe Biden and bashing Barack Obama.

And there's one point at which Donald Trump says, wow, wow, this is the most, you know, silent room.

I usually get more applause than this.

Well, okay, if you don't want to applaud, you can leave and then you'll be fired.

And he says it with that kind of weird Donald Trump sort of smirk.

This is all a joke and we're in on the joke.

But it's so kind of wildly inappropriate.

And there are these generals who are super well trained who are sitting there without displaying any kind of emotion.

And Pete Hakeseth winds up his kind of pep talk by saying, because we are the Department of War.

And you could have heard a pin drop.

And he's standing there like a Fox News host thinking, okay, this is the moment.

If I was talking at Turning Points USA, this is the moment where I'd get loads of applause.

And he doesn't.

And it's kind of awkward.

I thought it was actually kind of cringe-making.

And I wonder whether Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth didn't come away from it thinking, maybe we, you know, that was actually not something we want to repeat because we don't like not being applauded, either of us.

One thing that did strike me is that Pete Hegseth has a huge kind of nostalgia around him.

All of these references back to the Second World War, on the kind of seriousness of this, that he's trying to kind of, he kept talking about recreating a military as it used to be, kind of in simpler times when we just had guys doing push-ups.

And actually, of course, today's U.S.

military is far more complicated.

It's as much around cyber issues and intel issues and tech issues as it is around push-ups.

And he's kind of harkening back to a kind of time when, you know, there were troops doing push-ups and wielding bayonets.

And that's what the US military was.

But that's not actually what the fighting machine, uniquely, the fighting machine of today needs to be.

And I think also you had that in some of his, you know, he left, he was a junior officer when he left the US military.

And there he is talking to these generals, two, three, four-star generals, who each of them run, they're like CEOs, right?

I mean, they're running incredibly kind of complex personnel and strategic and security operations wherever they are around the world.

And he's telling them to do more push-ups and do more physical training.

I mean, he's talking to them as if they were of the rank that he was when he left the military.

He's talking to them as if they are kind of grunts.

He's not talking to them about this is the new strategy.

America needs to be ready to take on China in this way.

We need to focus on submarines now or we need to focus on our nuclear technology or whatever it is.

There was no mention of that.

The kinds of things that actually those generals are at the level that they should be dealing with,

he was talking down to them, making them the kinds of figures he was when he left the military.

I think it was pretty tone-deaf in that respect.

It revealed his lack of strategic thinking.

Like you say, I mean, maybe he's not the best person for the job.

No depth, no personality for that

real job.

You know, it's interesting.

Steve Feinberg, who was the CEO of Cerberus, who's the deputy defense secretary, does have the personality for that job.

He's just more of an introverted guy, and he's doing the work, the operational work that's required.

But, you know, there was something else that happened.

I just have to point this out to everybody.

The clean-shaven stuff,

that's an attack on the blacks.

And people don't realize that, but I'm just going to tell people why that's an attack on the blacks.

Because you sometimes, when you're in a combat position, and because of the way an African-American male's beard will grow, he can get folliculitis during a combat mission if he's not in a clean-shaven environment and shaves it a certain way without getting those razor bumps.

And it's almost an attack on black soldiers.

I know people say, oh, you're being ridiculous, Anthony, blah, blah, blah.

But no, I'm not being ridiculous.

The military looks like America now.

Thank God that it does.

Okay.

And you would want that.

Same thing you would want from your police force to look like the beautiful, colorful mosaic of America, and that you can have a cookie cutter approach to people.

And so again, what Hegseth is saying acts intellectual depth.

And I guess maybe he wants to take the military back before 1947, when Harry Truman

insisted that he integrated, fully integrated.

Yes, the African-American soldiers were fighting since the Civil War, but they were always segregated out.

And so we're talking about some weird stuff coming from them.

But again, this is the stuff they do at Fox News.

This is a television production for Trump, television production for Hegseth, and what is the messaging?

Do you know, Caddy, we're not allowed to say Merry Christmas in our country.

We have to say happy holidays.

There's a war on Christmas, Caddy.

You've been here.

They set up strawberries.

You've been here for 30 years.

And maybe you didn't know this, but

there's a war on Christmas.

If I walk into your house, I'm mandated by the hard left to say happy holidays.

And so this nonsense is pervading now into the military.

Very bad for morale, very bad for the culture of the military.

And

I don't know where we go from here.

What are we going to do, Caddy?

We're going to get a Democrat in now.

He's going to reverse all the Trump's policies.

Then we're going to get a Republican in.

They're going to reverse all the Democrats' policies.

And we're just going to play ping-pong with each other while this thing's going on.

This is something I was dying to say in the first half, so I'll say it now in the second half.

Let's go back to my buddy Elon Musk, because Elon was speaking at an event a few weeks ago, and he said in his little sidebar Odyssey into the American government, what did he discover?

And I quote, it's basically unfixable.

It's basically unfixable.

And my response to Elon is, yes, if you're going to take a business approach to this, it's completely unfixable because they have a good immunological system.

Well, they will reject the Elon Musks.

But if you take a guardrails approach and you start setting up benchmarks and you start saying this is as far as we're going to, because of human nature and our tendency to overspend, or a tendency to sometimes get dummies like Pete Hegseth into the mix, we're going to go back to the Federalist papers and create more structure to protect ourselves from our own demons, from our own worst tendencies.

And you can set that up, and then you can actually fix the government.

But you're not going to be able to fix the government with Pete Hexeth bashing our generals or Elon Musk taking a chainsaw to our budget.

It's just not going to happen.

And we'll wait, Caddy.

We'll wait to see if America can transfer from this period into something more sublime and something more beneficial to the American people.

One person in the Pentagon said to me this week that the speculation in the Pentagon is that Hexeth doesn't last very long beyond the new year.

So let's see whether that actually pans out.

We've had Chuck Schuman not lasting very long and Pete Hegseth not lasting very long.

Let's put our bets on who lasts longer.

But perhaps that was not the best way to prove that you're up to the job, the display that we had this week.

Oh, and by the way, you mentioned black generals and black soldiers serving and the issue of beards.

There was also in the war on woke, if you like, there was also the subtle attack on, not so subtle attack on women, saying that everything has to be to male standards and it shouldn't make any difference whether you're a woman or a man.

I get that.

There have been some concerns actually that I have heard over the last few years in the Pentagon about whether some of the physical fitness standards have been declining.

But I've also had generals say to me, I've interviewed generals who have said they've got women serving in the frontline positions who are totally up to the job, and that the way that the American military is transforming and the nature of warfare is transforming, you've actually got women who are doing a very good job in other areas as well.

But it's that chill, right, that we've spoken about before, that Pete Hagseth wants it to look a certain way, which kind of harks back to the kind of 1950s, 60s, or that simpler form, that nostalgia for a simpler, whiter, more male America.

I think that is what I took away from that meeting.

Anyway, I don't know how many push-ups you've done since then.

I have not done very many push-ups since then.

But if you want to go to push-ups now, I am.

I am doing push-ups, yeah, but not enough for Pete Hayek, not enough to compete with those guys.

Those generals, they look pretty ripped too.

I thought.

I thought they looked in good shape.

I didn't see any fat generals sitting there, actually.

I don't know what he's talking about.

The fattest person in the room.

The star was Donald Trump, yes.

Fattest person.

And by the way, you know, I'm holding onto the rail super tight because I'm very old and I may fall.

And if I fall, to quote Trump, I only have to fall once and it's a catastrophe.

So there he is, projecting again, projecting the massive insecurities that is the.

So here we are, Caddy.

We'll wait for another day for America.

The earth will revolve around the sun and we will wait for better leadership in America, smarter Democrats that are more threaded to each other and are more conjoined to each other with the very best narrative.

And we'll wait for Trump to leave the stage and all of that trolling nonsense to end and see if we can come up with a better way to govern this country.

While we're waiting for that, if you would like to become a founding member and get extra content and ask us your questions and get some of our miniseries, you can sign up at therestispoliticsus.com because we may have a little time to wait before we get to Anthony's utopia.

And during that time, we'll be happy to carry on explaining it to you.

So do become a founding member.

And if you become a founding member, you also have access to our exclusive mini-series on Ronald Reagan, which this week we have the final episode where we look at the death of Ronald Reagan, the impact of Reaganism, and of course, the impact of Reagan on American conservatism and the birth of the Donald Trump movement.

Do sign up to listen at therestispoliticsus.com and we will see you next Monday.

See you next Monday.

Thanks guys.

Have a great weekend.

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