135. Has the Military Turned on Trump?

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Preso y participación

Hello, and welcome to the Rest is Politics U.S. I'm Anthony Scarabucci.
And I'm Katie Kaye.

And today, Anthony, we are going to talk about Tennessee's seventh congressional district, which is not something, let's face it, that most people around the world will have thought about, but it is actually a pretty important indicator of where the Republican Party is right now, which I would say is feeling a little bit nervous.

They had a midterm election, congressional election this week. The Republicans won it, but they won it by one heck of a lot less than they won it in 2024 for Donald Trump.

So we're going to talk about that and see if we think that this is an indicator, a little bit of a canary in the coal mine for the Republicans.

Then after the break, this is something that I wanted to ask you about because I can't help but have noticed that crypto is not doing as well as it was a couple of months ago.

And I want to find out what's going on there, particularly the politics of it, given how much the Trump family seems to be invested in crypto.

Fair enough. And I'm looking forward to that.

Can I just say before we get to that conversation, because I need to get it off my chest quickly, quickly, because then we can move on and be friends again.

I, of course, invested in crypto at about the top of the market, which is when I started talking to you about it. But okay, that's fine.
That's good. Okay, now I've said it.

I mean, this is your opportunity to average in like all of us have done. You know, I have very high marks and low marks on my crypto investments.

But before we get into all of that, Caddy, we've got pre-sales going on right now. I'm talking about pre-sales for a live show on the 6th of September.
It's open now. So, members, listen up.

Check your inboxes for that ticket link. And if you're not signed up, you can still go to therestspoliticsus.com to become a founding member and get exclusive pre-sale access.

And for those of you who aren't members, general sales will happen on the 11th of December, Katie. It feels like a very good Christmas present to me.
What do you think? I think we need a trip U.S.

mug, by the way. I'm going to be talking to people about that as well.
Everybody's got a mug, Katie. You and I need a mug.
Okay, that's one of the other things that we need for Christmas.

But before we get into your menu, which you want to talk about, which is great, I got to give you some scuttlebutt and gossip if you don't mind, because I have been talking to people who are retired military and not in love with the whole Hegseth situation and Donald Trump.

And I know you've done your own reporting on this. I'm just going to say what I know and ask you to chime in if you agree or if this confirms some of the things that you've heard.

But the general sentiment is that Hegseth, they want him out of there. The military is super upset with him.

Some of it has to do with these strikes in the Caribbean and the second strike where he's now trying to totally disclaim himself and pass the buck.

But the real issue has to do with Senator Mark Kelly. Democrat of Arizona.
Yes, exactly.

And so Mark Kelly, and by the way, Caddy, this is one of the more brilliant things that the Democrats have done. And so let me set the scene for people.

Six congressional leaders got together on the Democratic side. They ran a video saying that the military should not obey illegal orders.
And that's their code of ethics. They should not do that.

and those six members just briefly were all either retired military or retired intelligence services exactly exactly and this is so important because usually trump baits them and then they go up like bottle rockets and they shoot up all over the place but they baited him they all trump had to say is hey i agree with those six senators i have never and pete hegseth has never given an illegal order nor would we ever moving on but they didn't do that caddy and and and a result of which they claim sedition.

And now you've got a tribunal going after Senator Kelly. And this is such a bro-code violation of the military ethos that the complaints are being registered in the Senate.

the House leadership, and even Donald Trump himself has, again, gone on his back foot on this. He doesn't like the pressure coming from these generals and these complaints.

Now, is that consistent with what you've heard?

Yeah, so a couple of things on that that I've heard recently. I also spoke to somebody who was a former senior person on the legal side in the Pentagon.

They told me that the other thing that members of the military don't like is the way that Admiral Horsley, who was kind of pushed into early retirement by Pete Hegseth and was the head of Southern Command, which oversees this Caribbean operation.

They don't like the way that he was treated.

I was also told that Admiral Bradley, who is the person that ordered that second strike that we spoke about on that Venezuelan alleged Narco boat, was eager to testify to try and set the record straight.

If you want to look at something about what Pete Hegseth himself believes about the need for members of the military to follow the rules of law,

There is a video going around from April of 2016.

We played it on the show yesterday morning on Morning Joe, which shows Pete Hagseth saying that it is the ethos of the military for the members of the military not to follow illegal commands and illegal orders.

Just worth a little look. That was Pete Hagseth back in April of 2016 before Donald Trump became president.

I do watch you on that show, Caddy, and I watched that whole video that you played, and I was like, my God, there's a video for everything.

Everything. Isn't there a video for everything?

So there he is claiming that Barack Obama is giving out these illegal orders and we have to disavow them, but not Donald Trump.

Donald Trump can blow people up that are floating around in the Caribbean Sea. Not a problem.
All right, but so before we go to Tennessee, Catty, just answer this question, Catty, if you don't mind.

How did they successfully bait Donald Trump like that? I'm, again, surprised. He's off his game.
I'm just going to submit that to everybody.

Trump would have sought eight years ago, that would have come across Trump's field of vision. He said, oh, these sons of bitches are baiting me.

He probably would have put out a truth social or Twitter at that time and said, ah,

they're trying to bait me. Let me flip it back on them.
But he didn't. He fell right into the trap.
Why is that, Gattie?

This is a story that's actually been unfolding in front of us that perhaps we haven't paid enough attention to over the last couple of months, because you've got the incident itself in September.

You've got Admiral Horsley stepping down mid-October. You've got then this video that comes out a couple of weeks ago.

And I think you and I were thinking, why have they suddenly put this video out now? They don't say what the illegal commands are that they're referring to.

But is this because they had got wind of what had happened on September the 2nd?

And so that's when they put the video that's the kind of speculation here in Washington at the moment that that's what they were referring to. So has this rattled?

Even though the president in that cabinet meeting this week had Pete Hegseth sitting next to him and seemed to double down in support of Pete Hegseth,

are they all feeling a little rattled by Pete Hegseth and his position at the moment?

And remember, it was Pete Hegseth that came out and said, we're going to bring back Senator Kelly and potentially have him court-martialed.

And yet the president seems to be standing by Pete Hegseth for the moment. I think there is a lot of things that are not going very well for the White House right now.

in terms of legislation that they have tried to propose, in terms of the tariffs, in terms of what's happening in the Supreme Court, in terms of what's happening around the country.

And I think that's what brings us to this election in Tennessee, that they're feeling the heat. They had this first run of eight months where everything was going very well for them.

It was full of, you know,

Sturmendrum and, you know, non-stop action. And they seem to be getting away with an awful lot.
And the legal process moves slower than the political process. and the

fallout of what the president has done or not done, particularly in terms of prices, which I think gets us into Tennessee as well, all of that is starting to come back to affect the White House and the morale in the White House.

And I've been told by people who are pretty close to the White House that things are pretty chaotic in the White House right now. Susie Wiles seems to have been a little bit sidelined.

She was the chief of staff who kind of kept things running and the trains on the track. She's been a little bit sidelined.

Stephen Miller has not been sidelined, and yet they're watching the opinion polls showing that these ICE raids are not particularly popular.

So there's a lot of infighting and it's pretty public between Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance over Ukraine.

And I think that's, and the president then at the same time is waking up to headlines in the New York Times saying Donald Trump is falling asleep again in meetings and is off his game and is showing signs of being 79 years old.

And this man who seemed to have endless stamina is suddenly looking a little bit more frail. I think that some of that plays into what we're seeing.
What do you think? Okay. Okay.

Well, I do think all of that. And I do think that you're going to see a lot more activity January, February into March, or you're going to get the great pushback on Donald Trump and all things MAGA.

So

we'll see if we're right about that. But Tennessee.

Tennessee.

We'd be talking about Tennessee's 7th congressional district. Christmas red was purpling before our eyes, Caddy.
So what happened in Tennessee? Okay. And why does it matter?

So Tennessee's 7th congressional district, which includes part of

Nashville, Tennessee. Any of you who've been to Nashville, Tennessee have probably been to the music strip known as Bachelorette Party Central.

Nashville, a little bit more blue, like many cities around America, you get these blue islands of liberalism in red states in the country, and Nashville is definitely one of those.

But Tennessee's 7th District is not just Nashville, it's a whole load of rural Tennessee as well, and suburban Tennessee as well. So, actually, an area that Donald Trump won by 22 points in 2024.

So, a true red bit of the country.

A congressional election was held there this week, a a special kind of off-year election like we've seen in Virginia, like we've seen in New Jersey, we've seen a couple in other places too.

And Democrats started to realize that actually maybe they had a chance to win this election. So they pour $2 million into the election.

But this is beaten by the Republicans who pour in a whopping $3 million to try and defend this seat because they don't want to lose it in Congress.

And they also realize that it would be unbelievably embarrassing to President Trump if suddenly a Democrat won a seat that the president had won by 22 points.

The election comes along, 180,000 people vote in this election, which I think sounds like not very many people for $5 million worth of spending, but there you go.

That's politics in America these days. And the Republicans actually managed to hold on to it, but their majority goes, their lead goes from 22 points in 2024

to just 13 points this week. And it's seen as, so although the Democrats lost, in a way they won, Anthony, because it shows that this is part of a trend, right?

We've seen it in New Jersey, we've seen it in Virginia, this shift towards the Democrats.

And the big issue, the big voting issue in Tennessee this week, of course, was around prices and affordability. That's what people were interested in.
The Democrats ran a

surprisingly, I think, progressive candidate for what is is a kind of red-purple district, somebody who in the past had talked about defunding the police, who had called herself a radical.

She still managed to do pretty well. But during this campaign, what was the issue that she ran on? She ran on the issue of affordability.

I don't know how much of a bellwether you see this as, but I can tell you that there are a whole load of nervous Republicans, members of Congress, waking up after that election thinking, oh, what was my margin in in 2024?

Because if their margin was 13 points or less, they're going to be feeling pretty nervous right now. Fortunately or unfortunately, I've been doing this a very long time as a political fundraiser.

They're panicked. Let's just not pretend because money matters, Caddy, but sentiment matters more than money, right? Hillary Clinton outspent Donald Trump.
Yeah. Right.
She outmanned him.

She had more staff than him. Didn't matter.
He won. Okay.
Some could argue that the Harris team had more money than Trump.

It's hard to really, when I look through the numbers, I want to call it a tie.

But the point being is, you could get the money because you're an incumbent or you're sitting there waiving the money, Citizens United, write me hundreds, some tens of millions of dollars of checks for congressional race.

But if you don't have the sentiment, Caddy, you're going to lose the election.

And so the plot is going to thicken as we get into the midterms because, Caddy, if I tell you prices are lower and you're going to the supermarket and the prices are higher and you're buying stuff and you're like, what is this guy saying?

The prices are lower. The prices are not lower.
If I tell you that the tariffs are not a tax and then you get something in the mail from FedEx and you open it up and it's a bill.

It's a charge for the tariffs. They say, oh, by the way, you owe us this.
And since your credit card's on file, if you don't send us a check, we're going to deduct it from your credit. What is it?

It's a tax. The tariff is a tax.
Scott Bassett said something yesterday. He was up here in New York yesterday, and I just marvel at the guy because literally

when he opens his mouth now, the tongue is so severely twisted. It's like an Aunt Annie's pretzel, or it's like a bow tie coming out of his mouth.
Okay, I'm just dying. I'm joking.

You're choking on the prices, Caddy, or you're choking on my... I'm just choking on the wisdom of what you're saying.

The wisdom. Yeah.
All right, we're going to have to get you CPR because I'm going to keep being wise, Caddy.

It's going to continue. The wisdom is going to continue till the morale improves.
Okay. But anyway, he's out there talking like the tariffs are not a tax.

And he was making this big syllogism and this logical argument that was out of control. And I was looking at him like, is he really going to say and do this? He wrote an investment letter.

His last investment letter at Keybridge was about the tariffs being inflationary. And guess what? The tariffs are inflationary.

And he's trying to tell people that it's not a tax and it's not inflationary because he works for Donald Trump.

So when you have Alice in Wonderland going on in the government and people want to pretend things are not happening that actually are, it may work in an authoritarian regime where they control all the media and they control the election and the tabulations of the election.

But in a country like this, it doesn't work. And they're going to feel the heat, Caddy.
And this is a very important signal to what's about to come in the midterms.

I think the other thing I took away from the Tennessee election that I think is why it's worth talking about is that there's a message here as well to Democrats on the kind of candidates they need to be running because they did run this candidate who, as I said, is progressive.

Actually, the most dumb thing she said in an election campaign in Nashville was to say that she hates Nashville.

and worse than that, she hates country music, which is what she told a podcast a while ago.

So perhaps don't run a candidate who says they hate the city that they're running in and that they don't like the industry of the city that they're running in.

But the message I think to Democrats is they need to choose their candidates carefully. They do have this opportunity.
They had this big swing. People, as you say, are fed up about affordability.

Donald Trump is not helping himself.

He's sitting there in the cabinet meeting in the White House on television saying that affordability, this this word that suddenly seems to have been invented, is a Democratic hoax.

I mean, he's literally calling it a hoax.

I mean,

they've got this chance, but they also need to think who are they running in which districts they're running. They can run Mamdani in New York City.
I think this is really confirmation of that.

AOC did a virtual rally with the candidate down in Tennessee just on the eve of the election, but they can't run radicals everywhere. You've got to choose your candidates.

And I think for the progressive wing, this has actually been a great week for centrist Democrats because it gives them the ammunition to turn to the progressive and say, fine, go with Mamdani in New York City, but we need to find the candidates.

If we're going to take this opportunity to defeat these vulnerable Republicans, and the idea that a Republican who won by 13 points is vulnerable suddenly is wild in and of itself, given where we were a couple of months ago and we thought that the Democratic Party had died an early death.

But clearly, the 35 House Republicans who won by 13 points or fewer are going to be feeling pretty vulnerable about 2026. But the Democrats have the wind behind them.
They've suddenly got energized.

They've found a message, which is affordability, affordability, affordability. As James Carvel said, it is still the economy stupid, but you have to run the right candidates for the right districts.

Okay, and I know we're going to take a break, but

I'm just going to chime in for 30 seconds and say this is a special election, and I don't want to overly read into it either. Of course, because sometimes special elections don't play out, but

there have been several of them now, right? We're seeing a pattern. And just to remind people, outside the United States, the structural realities of these districts, Caddy, are always in play.

And so there's going to be a big fight over the next six months over the gerrymandering of these districts. And the Republicans may win that.
And it may make it harder for the Democrats to win.

So, I don't want people to get complacent and think, oh, this is great. There's going to be a great blue wave coming in the midterms.
It's going to be still a challenge. Yeah.
And also,

you still have to raise the money.

I mean, it's not great for the Republicans because if you're spending money in Tennessee, which is a red state, that's money you then have to raise in order to still spend money in Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania, which are actually swing states.

So, a lot of this is about money, too. Where you're spending money in one place, that means you'll have less to spend in another place.

But I agree, it's still a year away to the midterms, and the president has the opportunity to do things about prices.

He's going to get a new Fed chair in in the spring of next year, which would give him the opportunity to have somebody who lowers interest rates. That could help with prices.

He can revise his tariff policy, that could also help with prices.

They are proposing several measures to give money directly into the hands of voters. That can also help voters feel better about the economy.

So, there are several policy options the president still has to do something about the economy. It's not always easy for a president to bring down prices and address this issue of affordability.

But I think the very first thing that the president could do is start sounding a little bit more empathetic about it rather than say that it's a hoax.

Okay,

we're going to take a quick break and come back and, talking of prices, talk about the price of Bitcoin.

Welcome back to the rest is politics US.

This is going to be a little bit different because it's basically going to be me asking for answers from Mr. Scaramucci.

Actually, no, not Mr. Scaramucci, Professor Scaramucci for the purposes of this half, but only this half of this one episode.

Professor. It's like there's such mocking and a little bit of derision in the Professor Scaramucci stuff.
Hey, look at the smile.

Can't help yourself. All right.
Go ahead. Go ahead.
Okay. Okay, prof.

So Bitcoin, which I know that you are a great champion of, and this is what I want you to explain to me,

it has come down about 30% from its all-time high in early October.

When Donald Trump came into office, there was a lot of speculation that his enthusiasm, particularly the enthusiasm of his sons and his family for Bitcoin, was going to push cryptocurrencies ever higher because they were juicing the market so much.

They were putting so much money into it. They were coming up with the kind of regulation that the crypto industry wanted to see around cryptocurrencies.

And so many people were getting into it that this was going to be something that we're just going to have to carry on rising in this particular political atmosphere.

And yet we've seen it come down a huge amount in a very short period of time. I know you are, you've written a couple of books on, three books, I think now, on cryptocurrencies.

You are invested in them heavily yourself. You are a great believer in them.

I know that you think there is always going to be volatility around cryptocurrency, but I'm particularly interested in this intersection of this new technology and the Trump family and

Republican and Democratic politics and the kind of generational shift between older voters and younger voters when it comes to cryptocurrency. What's going on? All right.
So

there's a lot there, and I don't want to overcomplicate it for our viewers and listeners. So I'm going to stipulate a few things.
So

to understand the blockchain, Caddy, simply, it means that I can transfer value to you without permission from a third party.

And if you go back 5,000 years, when we transact with each other, we typically use use a third party. If I'm going to buy your house, you give me your wiring instructions.

I send my money from my corresponding bank to your corresponding bank. Those are two parties, but technically a third party.

And then we transact for the house. We've created technology now where we can transfer value to each other without the intermediary.
So let's say you go to a restaurant and you want to pay the bill.

We have the technology now where you could have money on your phone, digital money, that you transfer to the waiter or transfer to the restaurant owner, and you could avoid the 3.5%

charge from MasterCard, Visa, or American Express. And I can give lots of examples of this, but this technology has been stalled.
during the regulating process or the regulatory processes.

Go back to Uber as an example. When that ride-sharing technology came into being, the taxicab commission said, NFW, we don't want that.

The mayor said, We don't want that. But you know who wanted it? The people actually wanted it, and we ended up getting it.
And so, what's happened here is very similar to that.

We now have this technology. There's property on the internet.
One of the pieces of property is Bitcoin. This is sort of a value-based token that we can transfer back and forth to each other.

And there's utility being developed for this and other cryptocurrencies. But the regulation during the Biden administration had stalled this.
Some European regulation has stalled this.

But now Donald Trump has come to power, and he was heavily influenced by the crypto lobby. And Donald Trump, who was a naysayer on crypto in 2018, became a positive force on it.

But the real person that is really behind this is Paul Atkins. Now, who's Paul Atkins? He's the acting SEC chair.

He's current SEC chair, personal friend of mine, and is somebody that has been pro-crypto for the last five years. He thinks this is going to be the future of

financial transactions. They're going to move more quickly and they're going to be at lower costs.
And

I'm going to get to the politics in a second, but it's important to understand all this. Caddy, we spend $4 trillion globally verifying transactions.
You can go to ChatGBT and verify that.

So that's credit card fees, wire transfers, wire transfers internationally, which have lots of different charges and an admin fees.

When we sell houses, we have lawyers that are baked into that. And so, if we can start avoiding that, we can unleash a lot more economic innovation.

So, this is why somebody like me that studied this is a bull on this technology. However, most technologies like this are quite volatile.
Let's use Amazon as an example.

If you were smart enough to buy Amazon on the public offering and you put $10,000 into Amazon in May of 1997, and then you were successful in writing out seven or eight 50% downdrafts, and one big one in March of 2000, where it went down 90%.

Today, you'd have about $35 million worth of Amazon. Now, only one group of people did that.
That was the Bezos family and his trust. Everybody else circulated out of it.

And so, what's happening in Bitcoin right now, there's a lot of circulation. The original investors are leaving.

Institutional investors are coming in to replace them through these ETFs and these other things that are going on. And it's creating a lot of volatility.

When the Trump family came in, well, let's say Donald Trump himself, Bitcoin was like 65,000, 70,000, ratcheted up to 100,000 and closed the year at 93,000 in December of 2024.

Yeah, Bitcoin climbed, what, 40% in a matter of weeks after Donald Trump was elected. 40%.
So now everybody got along Bitcoin. Short-term investors said, ah, Donald Trump is the guy.

He's going to carry us to 200,000. He called himself the first crypto president.

So let's get long Bitcoin. But Trump being Trump, you get good Trump and bad Trump.
I do like the crypto regulation coming from Paul Atkins.

But Trump being Trump, he launches two meme coins on the eve of the election. One for him and one for Melania, right? Yeah, so meme coins, again, just are like gambling tokens.

They have have very little value. I mean, let's just pause for a second there and remind ourselves of how wild it is that

the future president of the United States on the eve of the inauguration is issuing effectively gambling tokens in the name of him and his wife. Right.
So he's done this.

These meme coins go up in value. He takes five or six hundred million dollars out for himself and his family.
And these meme coins over the last seven or eight months have crashed in value.

How much of a surprise was that to you that they would crash?

Well, not only was it not a surprise, I spoke at the World Economic Forum with Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, one of the larger cryptocurrency brokerage companies in the U.S., if not the largest.

And he can't say this because he's running a publicly traded company, but I'm not. And I said it.
It's just going to be a huge problem for the industry because

if you have a president that's running a self-interested meme coin, which is a worthless token, He's susceptible to grift and graft.

He's susceptible to people buying the token and then, you know, trying to influence him. And lo and behold, Trump says, yeah, go buy my token or make a $5 million

donation to me and I'll meet you crypto people at my Virginia country club. You remember when he did that, right? And so what this did actually is it soured the industry.
It had the opposite effect.

It had the opposite. Well, I know, because I remember you at the time saying, this is not great.
I don't love this meme coin.

It makes it look like this is a sort of bunch of scammers and we're trying to be a serious industry here.

And there's so much crazy stuff has happened that sometimes we forget this. And then he does this dinner at his

dinner at the Virginia place for some of his investors, which again also looks a little odd, perhaps, for a president.

It's certainly not, I don't think, what the founding fathers had in mind when they were thinking of how presidents should operate.

But since then, crypto has carried on rising. It went up to 126,000, which was a record on October the 6th.

So there just seems to be the industry is watching the politics of this and, on the one hand, saying we don't like what the president is doing in some ways, but we also like the fact that the Trump family is clearly invested in it.

So which is it? How is the industry responding to the Trump family over this?

So these are all great questions. And so the industry is like, well, this is still better than

the Biden-Harris team that were anti-crypto all the way.

We have favorable cryptocurrency regulation, but we would really not prefer the self-dealing because what happens when you have a president that's operating with self-dealing, you're turning off his political adversaries.

So his political adversaries at the end of 2024, if you said to me the following question, could you get pro-crypto legislation passed in the House and said it in a bipartisan way?

I would have said, Caddy, I think the time is is now that we can get that done. Trump launches this meme coin.
His political adversaries on the side of the Democrats said, Whoa, this is salacious.

This is ridiculous. And they've slowed down that legislation.
Okay, and then what happened was people got very, very excited. When they get excited, you see these markets, you know, go crazy.

People borrow money to buy things, which is the worst thing you could do, by the way.

I would tell anybody listening to this, we're not giving you investment advice, but I am telling you, please please don't borrow money to buy things that are this volatile.

And so people borrowed money.

The Bitcoin went up to 126,000. Trump put out a tweet on October 10th that said he was going to be fighting with the Chinese on rare earth minerals, and he was going to put 100% tariff on the Chinese.

It caught the entire industry off guard and it caused a cascade of selling. and pushed the prices from $126,000 to $80,000.

And today, as you and I are are talking, they're back up to where they were at the beginning of the year. They're basically at 93,000 where Bitcoin is.
But he has put pressure in the system.

And I think this segment is really about if you have politicians in a liberal democracy that are operating in this level of bald-faced self-interest,

you're going to slow down the regulatory positions of doing what's right or wrong for the industry. It's either going to be hard left or hard right.

And this is something, if you ask me, what I would like to avoid, this gentleman, David Sachs, that works in the administration, has said over and over again, we want to have transformational regulation that is nonpartisan.

We want to make it what's good for the consumer, what's good for innovation, what's good for cost savings, as opposed to this sort of self-interested stuff. And so listen, I'm a long-term holder.

I will tell people publicly I bought Bitcoin the last couple of weeks at these lower prices.

I do believe that the fundamentals are intact for that story, but I do think that there are uncertain regulatory headwinds.

And it's a broader meta, it's a broader macro issue, Caddy, because the president is so self-dealing and so self-interested.

He's causing a problem in the Middle East because he wants hotels and he wants them to give him money. He's causing a problem in the diplomatic corps.
Okay, and I get it.

There's patronage everywhere, but he's gone so far outside of the norms now.

He's creating a lot of cynicism and he's creating a slowdown in what I would suggest is economic progress or what's in direct benefit of the American citizens.

So I read, I don't know if you read Katie Martin in the Financial Times. I always read her column in the weekend FT.
I like that newspaper a lot, and I like her column a lot.

And she writes in a way that is kind of accessible to people who are not in finance. And she is obviously a crypto skeptic.

I think the FT tends to be, and the economist actually both tend to be more crypto sceptical than you are. And she wrote a funny column last weekend.

I don't know if you read it, where she said, oh, finally, I've found a use for cryptocurrencies. And she compared it to her 17-year-old son who'd finally cooked a dinner, done something useful.

And that is that they've actually, the only use for crypto is to predict what is going to happen in the broader stock market.

And the big sell-off in crypto, she's saying, is really just presaging the kind of market correction that everybody has been talking about because the markets are so hot and frothy and so dependent on these tech stocks at the moment.

She says this is crypto is just doing that.

She didn't tie it necessarily to the Trump family.

I was interested to see Eric Trump doubling down this week and saying, yep, this is a great buying opportunity, a bit like what you've said, this has been a buying opportunity for you.

My instinct had been the Trump family weighing in so hard on crypto is going to make this a good asset for people to buy because they're not going to let it collapse.

But what you seem to be saying on this program is it would actually be better if Eric Trump and Donald Trump dialed it back a bit and were not so out front and public and calling themselves the crypto presidency.

Yeah, again, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. are entitled to have businesses.
You know, I always thought that Hunter Biden was entitled to have businesses.

He should have been a bit more judicious about which businesses he had, but anyway. Yes,

and I agree with that. But I'm just saying, you know, these people have got so much pressure and they're in a fishbowl and they're getting destroyed publicly.

They should be allowed to have businesses.

And I don't want bureaucrats and academics and lawyers running Washington. Sorry, there is also a line.

I have to point out, there is a line between having a business as the son of a president and having a business interest that your father who is president or your, if you're a daughter, can influence the outcome of your business, obviously.

That is not, the founding fathers were very conscious of that. They didn't like the idea of nepotism.

And I think we're seeing quite a lot of questions now about whether the Trump family is benefiting from their father being president, which compromises potentially the politics.

We don't disagree, but this segments theme, and I think it's important, and The reason why Caddy and I wanted to bring it up today is this segment's theme is about the doctrine of unintended consequences when you push societal norms so far outside of the mainstream that you cause all of this activity in the marketplace and all this activity

in the economy that I think has a negative ripple effect, Caddy. And you brought up a potential market crash and what Katie is saying in the Financial Times.

Correction, not not crash, I think is what people are talking about. I understand.
Or correction, but I'm going to push back on it.

I'm going to explain to you why, because Trump is looking at this, and he's like, I am going to flood the capital markets with money in January.

I'm going to get Kevin Hassert or somebody Fed-friendly to lower interest rates, jam them down, and I'm going to flood the capital markets because I want the economy booming going into the midterms.

Number one, I got to win these midterms because I don't want investigations related to my my self-dealing by the Democrats. Republicans are too chicken shit to investigate me.

And number two, I've got to make sure that my family is protected from these investigations. I know how Trump thinks.
So I'm telling you, that's what's going to happen. And that will slow down the

potential lending crisis in the country. It'll slow down the potential stock market correction

because those are the maneuvers that he's planning. But again, this is about,

is this good for the country or bad for the country? Good for the world, bad for the world. I submit to people, this is very, very bad policy.
And we will likely survive Donald Trump.

I predict that we will. But we better get people in the room after this debacle is over and say, okay, how are we going to protect ourselves from future debacles like this?

I think we're going to leave it there. Thank you very much, Professor Scaramucci, for that.
I will go away and do my homework right now. And thank you all for listening.
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