122. Is Trump Going to War with Venezuela?

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Welcome to The Rest is Politics, US.

I'm Catty Kaye.

And I'm Anthony Scaramucci, Catty.

We're both here in Prague.

We are both here in Prague, unfortunately, not in the same room, but there we go.

So we wanted this week, Anthony, we're going to talk about Trump's so-called war on drugs, his attacking boats off the coast of Venezuela and Colombia, the blow-up that is happening between the Trump administration and Venezuela and Colombia.

We didn't really get to it last week, but it has been hotting up.

I think it's worth people knowing because there are now concerns that this could lead to more of a kinetic war and possibly even the United States trying to launch regime change in Venezuela against Nicolas Maduro.

This has upset a lot of people, not just in Venezuela, it's actually upset people in the Republican Party.

And there's been some pretty outspoken Republicans on this issue, so we thought it was worth talking about.

And then in the second half, we want to get to the Democrats and

particularly look at this generational split.

The Democrats still flailing around trying to come up with ideas ahead of the midterms and the 2028 election, but I think it's very worth talking about this extraordinary split between younger Democrats and older Democrats that is emerging in the party and what that means and whether it's good or bad for the Democrats' chances of winning back the House and the Senate.

So first of all, let's get to Venezuela.

This has all been happening slightly below the radar.

It's been getting some attention in the US, but I think it's going to pick up.

So I thought it was worth everybody being up to speed on it and kind of keeping an eye on it.

Because since September the 2nd, the Trump administration has attacked seven different boats off the coast of Venezuela.

They've killed at least 32 people on the grounds that they were drug traffickers.

transporting contraband to the US.

The president is justifying this on the grounds of self-defense, claiming, although he doesn't have the evidence, that drugs from the region are are responsible for 300,000 deaths in the U.S.

last year.

But there are both political and legal questions being raised about this activity, which seems to belie the idea, Anthony, that this is a president who is just going to stay at home and be isolationist, because this is a pretty expansionist thing to be doing, right?

Well, I mean, first of all, it's probably not even legal.

I mean, he's probably violating international law.

He's violating the whole concept of due process in the free world.

And I think you and I both know it's about trying to control the whole region and force and flex.

But I think there's something else going on.

I just have to tell people what I think.

He's trying to anesthetize everybody

to random killing.

Because if you can randomly kill people off the coast of Venezuela or Colombian fishermen, and people are like, hey, that's fine.

Maybe you'll push it onto the mainland of the United States.

Maybe the narrative will be, well, that was an illegal alien, and we thought that they were dealing drugs.

And so we shot a cruise missile at them in their tenement home in some urban city.

You know, again,

with him, you don't know where he's going or what he's trying to do, but all those things are on the table.

By the way, Caddy, you ever been in one of those boats?

My dad had a 20-foot fishing boat.

It had 150-horsepower outboard engine.

You think you can go from Venezuela to Miami with a boat like that?

You think you can get there?

You can't get there, Caddy.

So, this nonsense that he's going after people

that are bringing the drugs into the country is absurd.

And this is why Rand Paul's going after him, you know?

And it's fentanyl in particular.

And what he's saying is this is all part of the war on fentanyl.

This was what helped get Trump elected in 2024, was going hard after fentanyl drugs

deaths in America.

Fentanyl deaths are actually coming down.

And Anthony, the fentanyl doesn't even come from the Caribbean.

The fentanyl tends to come over the border from Mexico, the majority of it brought over the border by American citizens.

It's not sitting in boats off the coast of Venezuela or the coast of Colombia.

I think...

What I've heard that's interesting is that behind this is Marco Rubio, who is of Cuban descent, came out, of course, under Fidel Castro's regime.

His was a family that was one of many that escaped from the Castro regime to Miami.

He's always had a very hard line on socialist governments in Central America because of his Cuban background.

And he is driving, my understanding is this policy in the White House.

This is one area you don't see much of Marco Rubio, right?

It's like we're looking for the Secretary of State, and I don't know, I can't find him very much when it comes to Ukraine and Gaza.

But on this issue, Marco Rubio takes this very personally, and he's got Stephen Miller behind him, my understanding is, and the two of them are going hard after Maduro.

They think that this is going to help them, perhaps, with Venezuelan voters.

Maybe it mitigates against some of the stuff that they've done of sending Venezuelans off to that prison in El Salvador.

It just doesn't quite fit for me.

Maybe what you're saying is right, because this doesn't fit with a president who came in on America first and initially was trying to do deals with the Venezuelans to get them to take the illegal deportees.

They had Rick Grinnell, their ambassador, Rick Grinnell.

They sent him down to Caracas to negotiate.

So there's been this back and forth.

And now I just think it's extraordinary how hard he is going after this.

With, yeah, you've got a couple of people pushing back, but he seems to be getting away with just these extrajudicial killings.

Okay, well, I rendered my opinion.

I told you why I think it's ridiculous, and I'm siding with Rand Paul.

But let me push back for a second and give the Trump administration opinion and get you to react to it.

So, the three things that the Trump- What character are you playing, by the way?

Are you Caroline Levitt?

No,

I see myself more as a Pam Bondi, actually.

We can talk about that after the show's over, but yeah, I don't see myself as a Panama.

We may need a bit of therapy on that one, but okay.

Yeah, no, I see myself more as a Pam Bondi because, you know,

she's my age and she's moisturizing.

Let's put it that way.

She looks good for her age.

Okay, so here we go.

Ready?

National defense argument.

That's number one.

Okay, this is in our interest, national defense.

There's a national security threat.

These are criminal terrorists,

and therefore they are enemy unlawful combatants.

And so if you're enemy unlawful combatants, then we can use the military against you.

Okay, and this is how they're justifying military force in international waters.

Number two, okay, they're going to say that this is inside the existing legal framework of the United States, that as commander-in-chief, the president can conduct these.

You know, it's under that Emergency Powers Act that he's veiled under tariffs, everything else that he's doing.

And then the last thing, and this is the thing that

Trump would say, and he would say it quietly.

He wouldn't say it to you, Caddy.

He definitely wouldn't say it to me, but he's saying it internally.

This is not a drug war.

This is a culture war.

Okay, always look at Trump through the culture war.

My

white

living and breathing on the Bible Belt people, those people, yeah, these are bad people.

They're black and brown.

They are bringing drugs in.

We hate drugs.

Trump's our guy.

Blow them up.

Blow them up.

And then again, you know, I don't get it because in our country, I guess we we don't learn this anymore, but there's an entitlement to innocence.

There's a presumption of innocence.

And there's also due process.

You have to have some type of process before you start indiscriminately shooting at people.

Ms.

Bondi, Ms.

Bondi, may I ask a question?

The question everybody's asking here is, is America formally at war with Venezuela?

I have no idea why I said Miss Bondi, by the way.

I'm in trouble now.

I'm sort of loving it.

Is the United States at war with Venezuela?

The United States is at war with the enemy combatants that are emanating from Venezuela.

We're not at war with the sovereign sovereign state, but we're at war with this stateless, amorphous,

what we would define as a terrorist organization.

So that's why the Defense Department has moved 10,000 troops into the region, eight American warships and a submarine now in the Caribbean, to go after a few people in fishing boats who may or may not be carrying drugs because we haven't actually had any access to the intelligence that the Defense Department had before firing on these people.

How does that fit in international law, Ms.

Bondi?

Okay, well, well, this is consistent with what America has been doing in the region for the last 200 years.

You know, we're controlling the maritime shipping lanes.

There was a guy by the name of James Monroe who said that we have to make sure that we have hedge of money in the Western hemisphere of the world.

I mean, I got to break character here for a second, though, because you've got me and I'm like painted into the corner.

And what I want to whisper to you, because I'm under oath as Bam Bondi now, what I want to whisper to you, I want to lean in and say, hey, Caddy, you know this is really effed up.

And you know, we're trying to knock Maduro out of office with all this bellicosity and all of these threats.

And by the way, that's really bad for us because it makes us look like jackasses and a banana republic.

But let's go back into character.

Okay, ready?

So that's it.

It's the Monroe Doctrine, Miss Kay.

It's the Monroe Doctrine.

Okay, let's get back to the politics of this for a moment because I think the whole legal issue is dubious.

And that's why you've got Rand Paul standing up and saying, in an unusual, outspoken moment against the president, saying, Hey, this does not work.

You can't just go attacking people willy-nilly without some kind of authorization going through Congress or having some kind of look at the legality of this.

But let's talk about the politics because, in a way, I think Trump.

Before you go to the politics, I just want to say something because I'm now channeling Trump.

Rand Paul, no chicken fingers and french fries for you on what was once the beautiful Jackie Kennedy rose garden.

I've paved that rose garden over with white paving stones, and we are serving chicken McNuggets, and we're serving french fries and ketchup, and none for you.

And by the way, he was the only Republican senator that didn't show up.

yesterday.

He was supposed to be there with all the other Republicans beating the drum about why the Democrats are to blame for the closing of the government.

So no chicken nuggets for you.

I am the chicken nugget Nazi, and there's no chicken nuggets for you.

Okay, keep going, Gaddy.

Sorry.

Rampo has a long history of being a very much a non-military interventionist.

He didn't support the wars in the Middle East.

He was an outspoken against, he was a thorn in the side of George W.

Bush over this, and he's going to be a thorn in the side of Donald Trump if Donald Trump decides to have regime change in Venezuela, I suspect.

But he is not going to get those chicken nuggets in the lovely paved patio.

He may not even get invited to the ballroom, which is being built at the moment.

I don't know if you've seen the photos.

We are going to get to the politics of this, but that ballroom, I'm sorry, we can't let this go.

Blowing up half of the White House, not half of the White House, I'm exaggerating, a bit of the East Wing to create this massive gold ballroom.

I'm going to be the contrarian for a second, okay?

You think it's nice to have a ballroom?

I do think the White House needs a ballroom.

I don't like that he knocked down half of the East Wing.

And just for

everybody knows, that wasn't part of the original building.

It was added to the building by FDR in 1940.

I think you've walked through there.

I've walked through there.

It's quite beautiful.

It's a reception area, you know, beautiful portraits and pictures in the area.

He knocked down a good portion of it to open up that area for this ballroom.

But if you were asking me, and Trump went to Obama 10 years ago, and said, we're having these state dinners on the lawn in tents.

And, you know, it's the American government.

It's the American president.

We should have a ballroom.

And Trump said he would raise the money to build the ballroom.

Of course, Obama rebuffed him.

Obama built a basketball court.

Well, he built a basketball court.

They all do something.

You know, Jimmy Carter put solar panels on.

Reagan took them off.

You had a swimming pool for Kennedy and Roosevelt.

You know,

some people were very mad at Richard Nixon.

The Brady press room, where I actually gave my one infamous press conference there, is on top of the swimming pool.

And if you go down the steps, Caddy, you can still see the tile from the swing pool that was built in the 1930s for the polio-ridden Roosevelt to get his exercise in.

So I get the fact that we're going to make changes, but smashing into the building and like destroying part of the building, I think is really bad.

And it's just bad form.

Well, I think destroying some of the history of the building, you could have added on a ballroom.

I've been to state dinners in the tents.

I thought they were kind of lovely.

And I've been to big parties, which held hundreds of of people in some of those big reception rooms.

Those are lovely too.

I would have thought they were enough, but you could always add them on.

I don't know that you needed to blow up a section of a historic building.

I'm with you on it.

Okay, the politics of the Venezuelans, which is interesting.

Trump was kind of masterful.

In his first term, Trump reached out to the opposition.

against Maduro in Venezuela, was a big supporter of Juan Guaido, who was the opposition leader.

He invited him to one of his State of the Union addresses, and he was a guest of honor at the State of the Union address.

This had the kind of instant effect of turning Venezuelan voters in Florida, which at that point was a swing state, into instant Trump supporters.

And they voted for Donald Trump in 2020, helped turn Florida red, and have been strong supporters of the president ever since.

And they're not an insubstantial voting bloc.

But here's the problem for Donald Trump.

He's been losing support amongst Venezuelans because Venezuelans have been particularly targeted in the ice crackdowns.

A whole bunch of them have been sent to that prison seacot in El Salvador.

And his support amongst Venezuelans in polls has dropped pretty dramatically.

Now, I don't know if targeting these boats is part of a drive also to drive up support domestically at home amongst Venezuelan voters, but it wouldn't hurt him to get his support numbers back up amongst that.

But, Caddy,

he's at 37%, though.

He's at 37%.

So it's not working, right?

Job approval rating, you mean?

Yeah, his job.

So he's at 37%.

He's not polling well with these Venezuelans now in Miami.

He's not polling well with the farmers in Iowa who all voted for him.

Not one soybean has been purchased by the Chinese.

He's giving all these different people grief.

This is random.

It's not necessarily a poll, but there's several Dominicans I know in New York.

They work in the various car garages.

They all voted for Donald Trump.

Now their family members are faced with ICE rates and they would like to pull their vote back.

So

why is he doing this?

And how is it

working for him?

Tell me, is there something that he's doing with this that I don't see?

Or maybe he's just preparing us for martial law?

Is that what he's doing?

I think that there is an element of Trump's policy which is unusual in this second term, which is the degree to which he has actually been interventionist and he has been spending a lot of money around the world.

Yes, he cut the USAI budget and he pulled back from conventional ways of spending.

But if you look at this White House, he's not unafraid to spend either money or defense capability in hitting his enemies and shoring up his friends, particularly in Latin America.

So he's gone after Venezuela.

He's going after Nicolas Maduro.

He admitted in public that he's got CIA operatives working in the country.

Who knows whether he's now going to try and go for regime change in Venezuela?

It wouldn't be a stretch to think so.

And certainly Venezuelans that I've spoken to think that that's going to happen, which is why, by the way, Venezuelan bonds have gone up in price because people think there could be regime change there.

He's gone after the Colombians.

He hit a fishing boat off the coast of Colombia and the Colombian president, a left-winger Petro, said that this was a direct threat to national sovereignty.

He accused him of murdering a Colombian fisherman who had absolutely nothing to do with the drug trade.

Trump then hit back by saying, okay, we're cutting off aid to Colombia.

Paradoxically, this could actually help Petro.

Somebody in Bogota texted me this morning who follows Colombian politics, said this could rally people around the left-wing president.

But the pattern is that Trump is using the power that he has, whether it's money or defense capacity, to go after left-wing governments.

in areas of Latin America and to support MAGA governments.

So he's offered Millé 20 billion and then offered to give him more billions.

It's an expensive process, but the pattern is I'm going to use power and money to help you if you're MAGA, and I'm going to use power and money to hurt you if you're a socialist and I think it's going to help me domestically at home.

So I think that's what's happening.

I think that's the pattern.

And what's unusual is that for a president who came in saying we're not going to get involved abroad, he is involved all over the place abroad at the moment.

But again, it's not working because his approval rating, he has a net negative number worse than Joe Biden.

Even the worst number that Joe Biden could come up with in the four years that he was president, Donald Trump's number right now is lower than that.

So what's afoot?

Is it something else?

I guess my question to you is

maybe it's not about popularity.

Maybe it's about strengthening his base and then seeing if he can condition people to him ignominiously breaking the law.

If I can do it in the Caribbean waters, I can do it at home too.

Yeah, and but by the way, in blue cities, in blue states, not in red states where the murder rates per capita are higher than New York and California, but in blue states.

So this is good for my base.

And let's see these guys, are they going to even respond?

You know, they're admitting to people openly that they're out of ideas in terms of how to respond to him.

I mean, they're flat-footed, you know?

Okay, that's really good.

We are going to talk about that more after the break when we come back and look at the Democratic Party, whether they're out of ideas and this generational split that is emerging and is going to get only bigger.

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Welcome back to the Rest is Politics US with me, Anthony Scaramucci, aka Pambondi.

Oh, man, I'm not going to live that down.

Maybe I got to go back to the color of Scouti, and

I'll bleach it up top.

But before I do that, I want to talk to you about the Democrats and the fighting that's going on.

And there is, as you pointed out, a demographic split in the Democrats.

The older Democrats, I guess they're a little out to lunch.

The newer Democrats are like, hey, your policies are not working.

And a lot of these guys are lurching further to the left.

But they feel like they're in disarray.

And I'll start this conversation with a conversation that I had with a gentleman in the Congress, a Democrat in the Congress yesterday.

He's there, I guess he's there seven terms, 14 years.

So an older Democrat or not necessarily.

Older, older,

youngish, youngish, older.

Youngish by ourselves.

He says he's 50.

He's not 85 like Nancy Pelosi, but he's saying, we're out of ideas.

And I'm like, you're out of ideas.

What do you mean you're out of ideas?

Well, you know, the founders didn't contemplate this and the founders didn't contemplate that.

And the founders didn't contemplate that the whole Republican Party or one side of the

partisan politics would just capitulate to somebody like Donald Trump.

So I don't know.

Are they out of ideas?

I mean, can you believe that they're out of ideas, Caddy?

And then if they're out of ideas, what ideas could we present to them?

I mean, I have a couple, but I'm interested in what you have to say.

Well, I think that being out of ideas is partly why you see the kind of biggest generational split that I've seen in the Democratic Party for a long time.

You now have 20 Democrats under the age of 40 who have thrown their hat in the ring for the 2026 midterms.

You've only had one Republican so far in that age group who's thrown their hat.

into the ring.

So from California to Massachusetts to Maine to DC,

you've got young Democrats everywhere saying those old guys are now synonymous with Joe Biden.

Joe Biden lost.

He gave us out-of-control inflation.

That means that we younger people can't afford our rent, we can't afford groceries, we can't afford our college debts, and we need to have a real change in the party.

And it's not just, I think, a change about age.

Okay, here you go.

Of the 52 House lawmakers who have served more than 10 terms, 70% of them are Democrats.

Since 2022,

the party has also seen eight members of Congress die while they were in office.

Six of them were aged 70.

I mean,

this age issue for the Democratic Party has been around for a long time, but Joe Biden blew the gasket on it.

He blew the lid off it.

Because now you've got younger Democrats, I think, feeling emboldened, saying, look what the old generation gave us.

They lost.

And so anyone who is older in the Democratic Party is now synonymous with Joe Biden and therefore synonymous with losing.

And I think that all of those ideas that came from the older generation of we play by the rules, we, you know, focus group people, we bring in older people who have a track record of already winning in politics.

You know, we

get the committees to decide who has done enough of their their time and then we promote them.

That's what's gone out the window.

I mean, they've just, I think this younger group are saying to hell with that way of finding candidates.

We don't care because your model doesn't work anymore.

The model of your ideas doesn't work.

And the models of the way you do politics, the way you find candidates doesn't work anymore.

So that's what you're seeing from younger Democrats.

Are they right?

I think that is the $100 million

question.

So in the case of Mamdani,

they were right in that they found a candidate who had mastered the communications methods of this generation, not the communications methods of Nancy Pelosi's generation, in order to win a primary and become the next mayor of New York.

But I think New York is a little different from the rest of the country.

And so can these younger candidates who are in their 20s, early 30s, who are challenging people in their 70s and 80s, can they win?

Well, the old guard would say it's all very well having these people who are fantastic whizzes on social media and who catch, seem to catch fire super fast because that's the way social media works and who raise a lot of money very quickly because that's also the way that social media works.

But when it comes to actually vetting these people, that's when you start getting into trouble.

I mean, the person that everybody's talking about this week is Graham Plattner, who's this oyster farmer, ex-marine in Maine, who's 44 years old, old, who is taking on the 77-year-old who is running for the same Senate seat on the Democratic side.

He literally, in the space of a few weeks, he had national profiles.

When I was up in Maine a couple of weeks ago, tons of people turned out in the local village to hear him speak.

But now it comes out the opposition has all of this research on him of all these texts that are coming out that he says he's mortified by.

He's got a tattoo, which is a, some people say is a Nazi symbol.

He says he's going to get it removed.

So you can get these people who come out fast and don't come up the traditional way, but you can have problems, right?

It can blow up in your face.

And that's what the old guard would say.

If you don't vet people, you can't win.

I'm going to say something that

probably will upset my Republican friends, but if I were Mondami and I won the race, I would call myself a democratic socialist, but I would run the city the way Mike Bloomberg did, where there was a tinge of social progressivism and there was a tinge of good business policies and good business practices coming from City Hall that enabled businesses to feel comfortable moving back to New York and growing jobs.

Do you think that's possible?

Do you think he runs as more of a centrist than he's campaigned as?

I think it is possible.

Well, I don't know if it is or it isn't, Kenny, but hear me out for a second.

Could you imagine the brilliance of that?

Because he is a great messenger.

He's a TikToker.

He's got the mojo.

Or as the younger people say, he's got the Riz.

Okay.

And could you imagine?

Yeah, he's got the Riz, as my kids say, okay, which is short for charisma.

So just think about this.

If he were actually to say he's a democratic socialist, but then ran the city in the middle and gave Mike Bloomberg a call and Jamie Dimon a call and said, hey.

Anthony Scaramucci, a call.

Yeah, he's not going to call me.

I've been shellacking him on Twitter.

He's not going to call me.

Because, you know, I have a PhD, a self-declared PhD in pissing off politicians with my randiness caddy.

So I'm sure he's not going to call me the

what?

Randiness.

You know, I'm Randy.

You know, I'm sassy, you know.

You know what that means in English?

Oh,

I don't think you think that's what it means.

It means horniness.

I probably should cut that then from the podcast.

I didn't mean that.

You may have to just do that little bit of translation for you.

If you do the...

Randiness in the American dictionary, it's like you're a wise ass.

That's what it means.

Yeah.

We have sort of a Randy Pam Bondi on the podcast today.

I'm driving my tank right now.

I've got three gears, but they're all in reverse.

Even I'm blushing.

Here's the thing, though.

Like,

you're not going to swear the representative in from Arizona.

Think of what the Democrats could really do with that.

That should be a galvanizing national incident.

It's not.

There's a little bit of grandstanding going on from the Attorney General in Arizona going to sue Mike Johnson and the House of Representatives to sit the representative from their state.

But just imagine if these guys had it together and they all got together and said, look at these guys.

Look at what they're doing.

And what if they got the no-kings protests and they expanded on it?

See, Ted Cruz said something this week.

The Republicans are not listening to him, but they should.

But he said, hey, I would be worried about this.

This feels like a Tea Party movement for the left.

And the demography is a little older.

But what if he got the younger people involved?

What if he went to Mondami and AOC and some of these younger charismatics on the left and said, whoa, why don't we make this one of the hills that we're all going to die on?

Right?

And forget Schumer and Pelosi and these people.

They're so far past their sell-by date.

You just have to promise me when I'm past my sell-by date,

Fiona, if you listen, if I'm past myself, just knock on my forehead.

Don't worry.

Yeah, just tell me.

Do you think we won't?

No, I'm pretty confident that you will, but Schumer is completely out the lunch, okay?

And by the way, Hakeem Jeffries,

and he's getting a lot of criticism, obviously, and there's a potential leadership challenge, as we both know.

He does not have the Riz, Caddy.

He's a younger guy.

But he does not have the Riz.

And that's what's interesting about this is it's not just age because the the candidate who declared this week seth moulton is 44 he's seen as that kind of generation of people he's taking on a 79 year old challenge at ed markey in massachusetts but he's somebody who does i think is seth moulton actually kind of military background has some of that charisma and particularly these really much younger ones these 20s and 30s it's not just the fact that they're young it's that they communicate in a different way they have an appeal now whether they can withstand the vetting process long term, I don't know.

But you're right that Ted Cruz is smart to say, let's be concerned about this, because young people helped Donald Trump win the election in 2024.

And now it's young people who are leaving Donald Trump in droves.

There was a poll out saying 94% of Trump voters under the age of 35 approved of Trump back in February.

Now it's only 69%.

That's a big drop.

He can't afford to lose young Trump voters like that.

So if young voters who voted for Trump are not happy and they find people with charisma in the Democratic Party who are not old geriatrics, who do not represent them or their issues or the questions of affordability or how to meet rent, then I think these, maybe these younger candidates are onto something.

I mean, they're not traditional.

There could be problems like

Graham Plattner up in Maine, who had all these things come out about him.

And they do need vetting because that stuff will come out.

It's all there on social media.

Everybody has a social media account.

But they're on to something about a genuine split in the party and genuine split on a range of, not just style, but I mean, take the issue of Gaza, right?

There's an extraordinary split, a Democratic pollster told me yesterday, on the issue of Gaza, with a quarter of younger voters saying that it's a make-or-break deal.

It's a deal-breaker for them in a candidate.

So they're changing their politics and they're changing their style.

And the old guard of the Democratic Party has to get out of the way.

I think they just have to get out of the way, right?

If the Democrats want to carry on winning the midterms and winning congressional races.

Listen, I don't get it.

I would be breaking every mold.

I'd be breaking all the China in the China shop.

I would be trying everything.

And I would say, okay, wait a minute.

If these guys have the mojo and they have the messaging mojo, is there any way?

Because what is good politics, Caddy?

Good politics is you say one thing and you do another.

You do something slightly different than what you say.

You know, my buddy

Andrew Sorkin just wrote a great book called 1929.

I read it.

It's good.

Talking about FDR coming off the gold standard.

If you remember, Senator Glass, who was the progenitor of the Glass-Steagall legislation to separate the banks from the investment banks, did not want to come off the gold standard.

He campaigned on not coming off the gold standard.

But he came off the gold standard because he wanted the power and he wanted the flexibility of the liquidity to see if that would be one of the elements to resolve the crisis.

And so what does a good politician do?

They say one thing.

and they do another.

So I'm just wondering if the Democrats could get together with some of the people on the hard left that know how to message and say, okay, guys, I get it.

You're great with the messaging, but you can't really implement what you're talking about.

The country's not there, Caddy.

The country is, by and large, center-right

as it relates to religion and as it relates to that orthodoxy.

And it's center-left as it relates to social programs.

That's really where the country is.

Move yourself into that

quadrant, if you will, and we'll control the card table.

Trump is a very unpopular guy.

He said differently, 63% of the people polled dislike him.

They disapprove of him.

And you guys mean to tell me you can't get it together and

you can't get 90% of those 63%

that have 54% majority?

What are you guys doing?

But I'm going to push back a bit on the idea that all of the young candidates on the Democratic side represent the far left or a left that is out of step with America.

You've got this young guy, James Tallarico,

who's 36, who flipped a Texas House seat when he was just 29 down in Texas.

Obama gave him a shout out this week.

He is

studying for seminary.

He wears his faith on his sleeve.

He doesn't represent that kind of AOC Mamdani wing of the Democratic Party, which might be why he's suddenly the hot new flavor of the party.

I mean, I think one problem slightly for the Democrats is they're so desperate for a new JFK or a new Barack Obama that they just like fall head over heels in love.

You know, when you're like desperate to get married or you're desperate to hook up with somebody and you just fall straight in love and it's way too quick and you haven't done your vetting first, that's a bit like the Democratic Party at the moment.

They're like, please give me somebody I can marry tomorrow.

And they just need to do a little bit more of their vetting.

Okay, well, that's a good segue, Katie, because that actually sounds randy.

And just so you know, I did look up the definition of Randy and the Scottish archaic definition, and I quote, is to have a rude and aggressive manner.

And so when I was saying I was Randy towards these politicians, I have a tendency towards rude and aggressive.

You go ahead and carry on telling people that you're Randy, and we'll see how that does for you on your next trip to Britain.

This will be the last time that I use the word Randy in a sentence, but I'm just letting you know I wanted to defend myself before we ended the podcast.

Okay, so we are definitely going to leave it there for today, but tomorrow we're asking Anthony to clear up something else he has to answer for, and that's if he knew what Trump was really like before he was president.

This is something that I have been attacked for, by the way.

I've had people come to me, well, you know, Trump is a terrible person.

Everybody in New York knew he was a terrible person, this, that, and the other thing.

And I have never taken that position with people.

I don't judge people by their press clippings.

I don't judge people by their media media persona or even their interviews on television because they're always coming at you from a different lens or aperture than the person themselves.

And by the way, I think people have done that to me.

And so I look at that and say, well, you don't really know me, so you shouldn't do that.

So therefore, I don't do that to others.

So in Trump's case, I knew him.

I had a good rapport with him.

I'm not describing myself as a friend.

We socialized together.

We knew each other in the city.

We did some charity events together, two fundraisers at his Triplex apartment at Trump Tower for Mitt Romney.

We had a relationship.

We had a rapport.

And while I found him a little prickly and while I found him a little bit braggadocious, he wasn't to me this dangerous.

I did not see him going completely off the rails.

By the way, on the evening of the electoral success, I think I told you this, he was white as a ghost.

And on the Wednesday, Thursday of November 9th and 10th, 2016, Caddy, he was listening.

He was locked in, listening, taking calls.

He was like,

People are not going to believe this.

I'm never tweeting again.

Don't worry about me.

I'm going to be not tweeting.

Think of me as Abe Lincoln.

He wanted to be a real president, right?

In that first term.

He wanted to be respected by the establishment.

And that's what's changed.

Now he doesn't give a damn about the establishment.

So, so did I see this in his personality?

I didn't.

Could you be be accusing me of saying, well, you should have?

Okay, I'll accept that.

I'll plead guilty to that.

But I think this is extreme, Caddy.

And by the way, this is the thing where you use the word mystify.

He's the American president.

It's the august institution of the presidency.

We have a proclivity in our minds.

If you get there, it means there's something about you that's worthy of getting there.

If you want to hear the full episode, just head to therestispoliticsus.com and sign up to become a founding member.

Goodbye.

Thanks, guys.

We'll see you soon.

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Hello, I'm Gordon Carrera, national security journalist.

And And I'm David McCloskey, former CIA analyst, turned spy novelist.

And together, we're the hosts of another goalhanger show called The Rest is Classified, where we bring you the best stories from the world of secrets and spas.

That's right, Gordon, and our new six-part series tells the story of John F.

Kennedy, the CIA, and Cuba.

It's a covert war of botched invasions, mafia deals, and CIA plots to kill Fidel Castro.

The CIA has a secret army, the mob has a vendetta, and Kennedy is caught in the middle.

So what if the answer to the 20th century's most infamous assassination is found not on the streets of Dallas, but 90 miles off the coast of Florida?

And for our declassified club members, oh, you're in for a treat because we've gone even further.

We have an exclusive three-part miniseries that digs deep into these conspiracies.

We've also got as part of that a jaw-dropping episode with Anthony Scaramucci, the mooch himself, who says he has insider evidence that ties the mob directly to Lee Harvey Oswald.

All this sounds good to you.

You can listen to the rest is classified wherever you get your podcast.

If you think you know who killed JFK, think again.