21. It’s Trump’s Race to Lose
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Hello and welcome to The Rest Is Politics U.S. with me, Cathy Kay. And I'm Anthony Scaramucci. How are you doing, by the way? Before we get to the news, how are you? I'm doing great. I mean, you know, I'm watching this seismic earthquake in Trump land.

The ground is rumbling. Trump is running around like a Shrek ogre. And I have to be candid with you. I'm sort of enjoying it because it's a lot more fun watching it from the outside than when I was privy to it on the inside. So, yes, I'm quite well. You? Good. I am good, too.

I'm good too. I was asking because we're going to do a bit of sort of political therapy in the second half of this program. Hair color looks good, by the way. I'm noticing you. Thank you. Must have had your hair colored recently. It looks quite good. I put a little bit of something called toner in my hair. Number eight, which I have recently discovered.

Well, I hope I'm scoring points for noticing these things. I like that. Yeah. Because you're doing better than my husband who just fails to notice these things. Well, he probably doesn't color his hair like I do. That's probably the reason why he doesn't notice this shit, but that's fine. He is not quite as metro and in touch with his inner female self as you are, Anthony. Femininity. Yeah, of course. Yes, it's good. I like it. I see myself as very feminine, by the way. I like that. Look, so today we're going to talk-

Today, we are going to talk about whether this is still Trump's election to lose. I mean, there's been a huge amount of enthusiasm on the Democratic side. Kamala Harris is starting to lead in several of the polls, but we know that it's a lot more complicated than winning just the popular vote. We're going to look at how far ahead she's going to need to be in those polls in order to win not just the popular vote, but to win the electoral college.

and whether Trump is setting the stage somehow, which I'm sort of starting to pick up from him and people around him about whether he's setting the stage for being able to say, actually, you see it was stolen once again if he loses in November. In the second half, and this is where the political therapy comes in, we're going to talk about what it means to be a Republican today. I know you are still a member of the Republican Party, always have been.

And we're going to talk about what that really means. Can conservatives still find a place for themselves

in a political climate where Donald Trump seems to be all that there is for republicanism at the moment. So we'll talk about that in the second half. But first, we both have a kind of bit of gossip that we've picked up. I've had a few meetings and lunches this week with people in the White House, people who are close to him and speak to him on a regular basis about the VP pick of Tim Walz, who came out as a bit, I was a little surprised. I think when we were having our discussions, you and I were throwing names like

Mark Kelly, the senator from Arizona, Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania. I think at one point we mentioned Pete Buttigieg, the secretary of transport. But neither of us, at least early on, were mentioning Tim Walz and he came out as a little bit of a dark horse. What are you hearing about how he managed to

beat Josh Shapiro to be the pick? A couple of things, but I think this is important because this is the dirty side of politics. And so the same way the alt-right and people like Steve Bannon are funding Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, and funding RFK Jr. because they want them on the ballot, they think they'll take votes away from the Democrats. And this is something that Ralph Nader did to Al Gore back in 2000 in that very closely contested election. So they were feeding Nader

negative information into the marketplace on Josh Shapiro. They were trying to rile up the left wing of the Democratic Party with Josh Shapiro's positions, and they were worried about Josh Shapiro. But what I learned, and I'm pretty sure this is true now because I verified it with three or four different people, she was probably going with Josh Shapiro. When she sat down with him or they had their phone call, he felt he was in a strong position. And so he was

pushing her. And he wanted to have more of a co-ish presidency role. I'm not going to say he was going to be co-president, but he wanted to have that role. And so just a touch of American history here, Ronald Reagan in 1980, 44 years ago, wanted Jerry Ford, who was the prior Republican president, to be his vice presidential selection. He thought that would seal the deal for him.

When he met with Ford, Ford said, yeah, as long as we're co-presidents, I'm willing to do that. And so he dropped him like a hot potato and he went for his adversary who was very critical of him, George Herbert Walker Bush. So what happened here is Shapiro pushed a little bit too hard.

hard. She needed somebody to play a backseat, and that's typically what a vice president has to do. Mike Pence did a good job of controlling his ego and doing that. And so that's why she went with Walsh, because he said to her, don't want to be president. I'm here to help you. Let's win the election.

Did you hear that? If you didn't hear that, push back on me. But that's what I heard. And I think it's important for people who were pushing for Shapiro. Why didn't he get it? There's always a backstory, Katty, to what happens in these situations. Yeah, I heard the same thing from somebody in the White House who had been kind of following all of these deliberations.

who said that Walls basically said to the vice president, look, I will walk through a brick wall for you if that's what you need. You asked me to do something, I'll do it. And by the way, he does look like he could walk through a brick wall. Yeah, Josh Shapiro looks too neat. I've interviewed him. He's too neat and tidy to walk through a brick wall. It wouldn't quite work out. But I think particularly for...

you know, what could be America's first female president to have a vice president who is very happy in the role of being vice president was particularly important to her. She didn't want somebody who would start kind of mansplaining or throwing his weight around. And I can see that it's important for any president. It's probably particularly important for the country's first female president if that's where she ends up.

What I don't know is whether it was because Josh Shapiro was so confident that he had the role that he could say these things, or whether, as one person has suggested to me, maybe Josh Shapiro didn't really want the role of vice president. And that's why, in a sense, by saying these things, he knew he was putting himself out of the running.

That I'm not sure about. The Republicans feared Josh Shapiro. They feared his speech giving. They feared his messaging. They also feared him helping Vice President Harris pivot to the center where this election is going to be won. Now, we'll have to see if Donald Trump is capable of that. Thus far in every public speech since she has become the presumptive nominee, he's railing. He's just attacking her. They're telling him,

behind closed doors. Hey, can we focus on the issues? He wants to say silly things about her and derogative things about her as opposed to getting back to the issues. But anyway, I think it's interesting what happened there. I like Waltz. I think he's doing well. I think he's gotten past the stolen valor argument. I don't know if you think he's done that, Gatti, but I think he has. And I think it'll be an interesting setup. The question is, is he going to be debating

JD Vance or not. And so I'm still in, I'm still in the position of,

that J.D. Vance is in trouble with Donald Trump. And I'm going to give him a pass for, you know, I mean, his hair color was slightly blonder than yours in one of the drag queen pictures that I saw of him. Giving him a college pass on that. I'm giving him a pass that he's changed his identity three times. I'm giving him a pass that he looks like he's wearing eyeliner. Apparently he isn't. We give him a pass on all those things. But what I won't give him a pass on is that he has negative approval ratings and Trump absolutely

absolutely hates that. He wanted this guy to take a deep back seat. And there's one thing that people are doing in the media that's driving Trump crazy about J.D. Vance, and they're praising him. So he came out of the Sunday shows and they're saying, well, J.D. Vance is on message and he's saying the right things about the issues and J.D. Vance is leading the charge for the campaign. You can't do that to J.D. Vance because he'll get blown up. He can't be the principled

Like Tim Woolse, he has to be happy being second. 100%. He'll get fired. So one cabinet official who remained nameless, but a very good friend of mine,

once said, if Trump says the following two things to you, you're in trouble. Okay. So the first thing is president. Oh, good morning, President Caddy K. Okay. Now you're in trouble. Okay. Because he's now thinks you're getting too much publicity. He did that to Steve Bannon when he was on Too Big for Your Boots. Now you're in trouble because you were on Time Magazine's cover, Steve Bannon. Good morning, President Steve Bannon. Okay. Not good. I remember that. Just letting you know.

Okay. Okay. Second thing he does, oh, good morning, Caddy K. You're getting more famous than me. The minute he says those two things, this one cabinet official said to me, who survived the administration, he once said to me, you're getting more famous than me. I took a two-week vacation. I booked myself to Antarctica. I think I was down in Patagonia for two weeks.

just so I could totally disappear from everybody. Okay, so you have to understand Trump. So now Vance is out there. Let me show you my Yale Law School chops, my intelligentsia. I'm a good student. I've studied the playbook. Let me go on CNN and articulate myself. But he's going to get complimented by the media. No bueno for Donald Trump and the way Donald Trump thinks. Yeah, no, I think that's

True. I mean, my understanding, I had spent some time this week with some people from the Trump world, and my understanding was that at the beginning, Trump was unhappy about

the cat lady comments and the amount of negative attention Vance was getting. Apparently recently, he's a little happier because he feels that Vance has been going out there as a very good defender of Trump. And maybe Vance is learning that lesson that you've just said and realizing that when he goes on television, he just needs to talk about Donald Trump.

and he's doing that a little better. And so the official line from the campaign at the moment is that Trump is happy with Vance. Let's see if he actually manages to last. I'm interested in, certainly the White House feels happier. My understanding is that Joe Biden is in a much happier place at the moment than he was two or three weeks ago. And part of that is that he is seeing how well Kamala Harris is doing in the polls and

And he has come to realize that he didn't have a chance to do as well as she is doing and that there was a lot of pent up enthusiasm for Democrats, but he couldn't harness it. And so in a way, if Kamala Harris had been doing badly, I think it would have made it more tricky for Joe Biden because Joe Biden is not Donald Trump. So in a way, it is not all about Joe Biden. He's happy to see the party doing well.

The person that I hear is still bears a real grudge is Jill Biden. Interestingly, that Joe Biden is able to let things go, but Jill Biden doesn't, which is why there's still a very frosty relationship between the Bidens and Nancy Pelosi, which is a shame because they, and actually Nancy Pelosi has said that she's losing sleep over this. They had been friends for a very long time.

But Nancy Pelosi was really the one that orchestrated the ousting of Joe Biden, so much so that Obama's people, Valerie Jarrett, who's very close to Obama and was an advisor to Obama,

now that we're in this sort of little bits of gossip stage, has called people in the White House to say, can you start setting the record straight? It was not Barack Obama who organized Joe Biden to be booted out. It was Nancy Pelosi. That's all the kind of the behind the scenes gossip on what's happening there. But he does feel they're doing well. And certainly she is doing well. I mean, we look at the money. We look at the poll numbers. She's now ahead in several polls. She's ahead in several swing states.

She's even inched up by one point in one poll in North Carolina, which was not in our kind of original bucket of swing states. It was on the periphery. So everything is moving in her direction. And yet I still think it's his race to lose. If I had to handicap this at the moment,

and one person who speaks to Trump regularly said this to me, that he had thought that the polling when it was against Joe Biden, he reckoned they had a 70% chance of winning. He now reckons they have a 55% chance of winning. I think that's probably about right that just because of the structure of the electoral college against the popular vote, but also the question is whether young voters, which is where you're seeing a ton of the enthusiasm around Kamala Harris. I mean, she's

a TikTok phenomenon. Her laugh is on TikTok. There's all these videos. She's sort of an internet sensation with young voters. My kids are laughing the whole time at funny videos, but laughing in a way that they like, not laughing at her.

But do those people turn out and vote? Are they going to be the ones that actually decide the election? So I think there's a lot of enthusiasm, but I can still see structural problems for her. What do you think? Okay. Well, let me react to a couple of things. Nancy Pelosi is not losing sleep. She's probably telling people that. But Nancy Pelosi's pulse rate is like 51. Okay. She's got ice water in her veins. Okay.

And I told my mom, I'm really sorry. You are my favorite Italian American, unless it's election season and we're going up against Donald Trump. And so now Nancy Pelosi, if she's out there listening, you are my favorite Italian American. Okay. Democrats are saying she saved the country. Once again, she saved the country. Because she gets it. Okay. There is a scene where she's Speaker of the House. It's 08.

Henry Paulson, Hank Paulson, Secretary of Treasury goes to her and says, we're in a lot of trouble. We got to pass the TARP bill. I know it's a Republican bill, but we've got to flood the banks with capital. Otherwise, we're going to have an economic collapse like the depression. She gets it. Okay. And she got the deal done.

She saw what was happening and she has the chops and she has the gravitas to get the deal done. So she's not losing sleep. I think Joe Biden's happy because she didn't shoot her up at the toll booth like Sonny Corleone in Godfather 1. All she did was say, hey, step out or look out. Step out or look out. I'm sure the conversation is a lot more gentle and diplomatic than that. But I have a huge amount of respect for her as a politician and as a human being.

So that's number one, she's not losing sleep. Number two, I misspoke last week and I just want to thank viewers and listeners that brought this up to me. And I just want to make a few clarifications. I said there were 144 million people that weren't voting. It's actually 104 million. So I misspoke. That's meaningful because it's 40 more million people that don't exist. The second thing I said was about Generation X versus Generation Z. I meant to say Generation Z is rising to the polls. And so why is that important, Katty K? Because

if she can chip off 5 million people who have not voted, but they're young people watching on our TikTok, they're women that want reproductive freedom, they're people that want to see an African-American, South Asian woman become the president of the United States, the whole thing changes. Now, up against that, okay, up against that, and the political class in Washington doesn't get this, and they may be right and I may be wrong,

is there are about 40, 50 million people that own cryptocurrency in the country, and the Democrats are making a mistake, in my opinion, not supporting it. Now, last night, I was on a call with Chuck Schumer, Senator Gillibrand, and others in the Democratic Party. It was Crypto for Harris. Mark

Cuban and I and several others were on the call with them. And Schumer said last night that he is going to support a pro-crypto legislation. He's going to try to get it done by the end of the year. Maybe he means a lame duck session. I'm bringing this up for a reason because Donald Trump, like him or dislike him, he's got very good instincts. He becomes pro-crypto before the Democrats.

They're chasing him. Donald Trump, no tax on tips. Yeah. And now look, Kamala Harris, no taxes on tips. So he's got very good political instincts. You can hate the guy. You can say whatever the hell you want about the guy. But what's interesting now is they're moving pro-crypto. They're moving no tax on tips. What else is in store? Now they're about to announce, there's reporting on this, that they're about to announce a pro...

price gouging legislation, I guess, to put a cap on prices. Okay. Now I can tell you as a capitalist and I can tell you as a free market person, someone that's been on Wall Street for 35 years, that will be a disaster. Okay. It didn't work for Richard Nixon when he made an imposition of price controls. It didn't work for Jack Kennedy when he went after US steel for raising steel prices on them in 1962. I just don't understand who's offering that economic...

policy idea. And that's something that she's willing to do. Because I can tell you right now, Donald Trump would never do that. He's got too good of political instincts. His weakness is

He plays the victim. His weakness is he wants you to feel that a bunch of imbeciles are running the country and only he can save it. So his weakness is the megalomania, but it's not in political instincts. He has good political instincts. I thought it was interesting this week, actually, that economic speech he gave down in Asheville, North Carolina. I mean, it's interesting that he is campaigning in North Carolina, which should be safely in the bag for the Republicans.

Barack Obama won North Carolina in 2008, but a Democrat hasn't won it since. Always watch where the campaign goes because that's where they think they need to go in order to shore up support. The fact that he's in North Carolina giving that economic speech, but the economic speech was rambling and

And a lot of it was kind of ad hominem attacks, again, about Kamala Harris's laugh. Cackle. Her cackling. Cackle, cackle. Yeah, her cackle. That's not good, Min. That doesn't work, okay? I'm just telling you, cackle, you're going to get the 5 million people that are not voting to come in and vote. Yeah, that doesn't help him. He doesn't like talking about policy. Policy ties him down. He's not that interested in policy. And I think that came across in that speech. Why doesn't he like talking about policy, Katty?

A, he's not very interested in policy. He doesn't read about policy that much, but also it ties him down. He's not a lake, Katty Kay. He's not a swimming pool. Okay. He's a contact lens. Okay. He's a contact lens. A puddle. His depth of policy is what you can fit the saline solution into a contact lens. That's why he's wanting to talk about policy. If you push them on policy, if you had a debate with this man and you push them on policy, economic history, US history, the constitution...

he would go crazy and he would be spinning like a top and trying to find a way to bully you.

which is what he has successfully done for 50 plus years. He is a contact lens worth of depth on policy. For his team, that's frustrating. What they want him to do is go out there and talk exclusively about the border, about the economy, about crime. And any time spent not talking about that, in their view, is kind of time wasted. But he's just not going to talk about that because what he wants to talk about is personal things. Okay, back to those young voters, because I do want to look at whether

I don't want to give the suggestion that we are thinking, I'm not thinking at the moment, this is in the bag for the Democrats, because I still think this is going to be a close race. If she turns into a transformational candidate, a Barack Obama style candidate, then none of the attacks that Republicans levy against her on the border, on the economy, on crime, none of that's going to matter.

It won't stick in the way that any attacks against Barack Obama didn't stick in 2008. I think it's too soon to say that she's going to be a transformational candidate. I don't think she is Barack Obama because we haven't seen her yet in an unscripted moment. Barack Obama was really good when he was giving interviews, when he was in debates.

Kamala Harris still, I was chatting to somebody who had been in a meeting of 12 people. She was one of them about 10 months ago. And I asked whether she was impressive. And he said, you know what? On a whole load of issues, she spoke gibberish. And that was the word he used. She was talking gibberish. It's not that she's not smart, he said. It's that she's kind of mentally undisciplined

And she talks too much. She's not a very clear thinker. So on things like he said, Ukraine, the economy, she just doesn't come across very well. On some issues like abortion, I think, and crime, she's good on that. She will be fine. But if they get into a debate, which they will do in September,

and she comes across as speaking gibberish and not being able to hold her own on some policy issues, then I think there are still moments in this campaign where the Democrats can lose it. Or do you think it's in the bag? You think they've got it and that it's race over? No, no, no. I'm with you. I still think it's Trump's election to lose. Me too. If you look at the real clear politic numbers in the swing states, what I'm saying, what you're saying is true.

If you look at Rasmussen, even though that's a conservative polling place, it's fairly accurate. They have Trump ahead in some of these swing states. And she, I can just tell you what they think and what Donald Trump thinks because, you know, people talk to me, they want me to get their narrative on our podcast, right? So let me just say some of this because I do think it's true. What Trump is thinking is she's going to crack. Right.

Okay, because she's in a glass bubble right now. Whether it's in an interview or a debate or an unscripted moment, she'll crack. She's protected by the mainstream media, the narrative. They went from she was vacuous to now she's this Obama-like savior. The narrative is forming. The concrete is forming about that narrative. But she is going to crack. She's going to crack with impact with the media, impact face-to-face with Donald Trump, impact with issues. Okay.

That's what they think. And so they're very quote unquote confident about that. But here's something I would say if I was on her campaign. Do not let her have an interview. Do not. And I repeat, do not let her have an interview until she gets the nomination. Now, let me explain why.

Because if she flubs something, and I'm not saying she will or she won't, but it's so tenuous the way she got into this position. See it from her side for a moment. I'm the vice president supporting Joe Biden. He gets knocked out of the race. He endorses me. We now set up this blocking mechanism to make me the nominee. I'm a good candidate.

disciplined scrambler of caucusing votes. I get the votes for myself, the delegates. But if I flub something or something goes wrong, I don't want to get Nancy Pelosi. Okay. And I don't want to get Nancy Pelosi this close to securing the nomination. So who's ever in her ear or her political agency saying, hey, it's another week. Everybody calm down.

Let the media jibber about you not doing interviews. The American public does not care. Katty, let me tell you something about the American public. They're out water skiing right now. Okay. They're eating hot dogs. It's August. Way too many. Yeah. They're eating way too many hot dogs. Sweet corn and watermelon. Way too much kernel corn, candy corn, all that sort of stuff. Okay. And they don't care. Okay. And so the only people that care are the gibbering political class. Okay. And now you're a gibbering political classmate of mine. I'm also a gibbering. I'm a gibbering political class person. Okay.

But I'm telling you as a strategist, stay away from the microphone, stay on discipline. You're giving good speeches. I'm going to say one other thing where she really impressed me. And you have to forgive me because I don't remember the exact moment.

But she was at a UAW meeting. I believe it was in Michigan. She was off the prompter. I mean, she was on mic, but off the prompter. She was talking about unity. She was talking about the spirit of America and all of us coming together to help each other. I looked at that. I said, that's going to win her the election. If she stays on that message, she's going to win the election because the American people down deep- That's the Barack Obama message. We're not red states or blue states. We're purple states. Right.

Right. We're red, white, and blue, right? Or something like that, he said. And that's the message. Okay. So she may be a little talkative. She may not get all the soundbites right on policy, but she's got the vibe right. She has got the vibe right.

It looks like one of those blow up things where they're trying to get you to buy an appliance somewhere and the hands are flapping. That's the Donald Trump dance. She's got the vibe right. She's got youth on her side. She's got energy. The focus groups are all saying she's energetic. That helps. Just take a chill, get yourself the nomination, give a beautiful speech.

and then you go on 60 minutes or have Katty K interview you. Everybody take a chill. Okay, but I wouldn't be doing anything between now and then. You wait, yeah. We haven't had one for a while, Anthony, so it is time. We're going to do two things. We're going to have a little pop quiz. It's an easy one. Don't worry. No, don't look sad. Don't look sad. It lowers my self-esteem when you do these pop quizzes. It hurts me. And then we're going to take a

question from Charles Cummings, who's one of my favorite spy novelists. Okay. So the question is, what percentage of 18 to 29 year olds voted in 2020? Oh, man, I got to do it. It's just like the price is right. I'm just going to throw out a guess because I absolutely have no idea.

I'll say 24%. 50%. 50% is a lot more than I thought. Young voters actually pushed Joe Biden across the line in the 2020 election. And that was up 11 points from 2016. So the question for Kamala Harris is, all those TikTokers, are they actually going to turn into voters? Because if she can keep them at 50%, that's going to help her. Okay, here is the question. It comes from Charles Cummings, who, as I said, is one of my very favorite UK spy novelists.

And I think you've downloaded one of his books. I looked it up. I think it was Box 88 or something like that. Yes, that's the new one. I just downloaded that book. So the question that Charles DM'd me on X as well was, if Harris wins, what chance is there in the future of the Electoral College being reformed so that it more fairly reflects

the will of the people. Just to explain for international listeners, actually for American listeners too, because a lot of people don't understand what the electoral college is. It works by assigning a set number of electoral votes to each state, which is roughly in line with the size of that state's population. And then the candidate who wins the majority of the

the votes in that state, so it's a winner-take-all, also wins all of that state's electoral college votes. You have to get 270 electoral college votes

There are a total of 538 to become president and the national popular vote doesn't really matter. So it's all about winning those 270 electoral college votes, which are got by winning the majority of votes in any individual state.

California, for example, has 55 electoral college votes. If you win the majority of the votes in California, you get all of those 55 electoral college votes. It's a really good question. I mean, everyone seems to think that the electoral college is there and it's immutable. There have been at least 700 proposed amendments to modify or abolish the electoral college.

The last attempt, serious attempt, was in 2004. But really, since the late 1960s, there hasn't been enough bipartisan support to try and get this done. LBJ wanted to reform it. Nixon actually agreed with proposals to reform it.

But it's always been protected by Southern senators because it was an inbuilt mechanism for giving white voters in the South more clout. And in the late 1960s, when it came up for vote in Congress, it was the Senate that killed it, led by conservative white senators who wanted to keep their superiority in the voting bloc. I mean, I think it is a system that needs to be reformed because it's

We keep having situations where one candidate, usually the Democrat, will win the popular vote and not win the electoral college vote. And it deprives millions of Americans in large states like California and Texas and New York of their voice. I think it does need to be reformed. What do you think, Anthony? Okay, so I'm going to take the other side of this and I'm going to explain why, because...

These men, and frankly, it was mostly men, so I'm going to use that pronoun. When they sat down to construct this government, they looked over thousands of years of history and they said, okay, what would work? What would create the freest, flattest society? And what creates that is a decentralized government where there's so many checks and balances in the system, there's absolutely no power.

And if you're a history buff on this stuff, go to the Jack Kennedy interview. Huntley and Brinkley are interviewing him one year after he is in office. He's sitting on the rocking chair. They say, you know, Mr. President, how's it going? He said, ah, I ran for the House of Representatives. My father told me there'd be a lot of power. I got there. There was no power. He said, the power must be in the Senate.

So I went and ran for the Senate. I won. I'm in the Senate. There's no power. I said, oh my God, the power's got to be down Pennsylvania. It's got to be in the presidency. Let me go run for the presidency. And he says, guys, I'm sitting here rocking in the chair. There's no power here either. Okay. I love that. And he said it in this level of genius observation of the system. He liked the fact that he didn't have the power because-

It meant that the people are freer when you don't have an autocrat or a tyrant at the top of the system. It's very, very important for the Americans. The second thing was very important is that they embedded a republic into the system. It wasn't just going to be a representative democracy. And there's writings on this. You can go to the

The papers, the Federalist Papers, you can go to other writings, you can go to Franklin's writings. Franklin has a very famous line, it's a republic if you can keep it. Why did they want a republic? They did not want mob rule. They did not want the popular vote to rule. Why did they not want that? Because they wanted to protect minorities in the system.

I'm not talking about black or brown people, Gatti. I'm talking about people that didn't win the election. They always wanted there to be a balance of representation. That's what a republic does. If you read the writings of Cicero or you read the writings of Cato, the republic was designed to protect people that were not in power.

That's why the Senate, each of these states has two representatives, whether they're the state of California or a tiny state like Rhode Island or the Dakotas. And so the electoral college was part of that system. You would have the coastal cities.

and you would have the presidential candidates leaning into the coastal cities that just work off the popular vote. And I wouldn't want that. And I know it's a little messy right now, but what the Electoral College provides is representation for these flyover states in a presidential election. And I think it's worked. I think it's been meaningful. And I personally don't want to change it. So what about the alternative point of view, which is the Electoral College was basically set up

in a way to give Southern states, which had large non-voting slave populations and would have had less clout under a popular vote system because they had a whole load of slaves who couldn't vote. So the electoral college was set up to give them more clout than they deserve. So historically, it was sort of not representative of America today, but that at some point you just get out of whack. If you keep having Democrats

as happened in 2016, as happened in 2000, winning the popular vote but not winning the electoral college, at some point, it's a cause of enormous friction. And I get what you're saying about not wanting urban coastal elites to dominate the whole country, but...

Take a state like California. 34% of Californians voted for Donald Trump in 2020, but they got none of that state's 55 electoral college votes. I mean, in a way, it doesn't represent Republicans' votes. So if you are in California or in Texas or in New York, your vote is sort of worthless.

That's not democratic either. And I think at some point, if the pattern keeps being repeated, that you get a candidate like Donald Trump, as he did in 2016, managing to squeak through the electoral college, but not win the popular vote. If that happens time and again, every time a Republican is elected to the White House, it

it will undermine people's faith in the democratic system. So I think something, I don't know that you need to do away with the electoral college. Maybe you need to have some form of PR within state, proportional representation within states, or maybe you need to have some reassessment of the number of electoral college votes per state. I don't know what it is, but I don't know that it's sustainable when the discrepancy is this broad. There was a Pew poll in 2023 that suggested two thirds of American adults voted.

would like the Electoral College to be reformed and that they say the president should be elected to reflect the winner of the popular vote nationwide. It would take 66 votes in the Senate. By the way, the reason this is probably not going to happen is that to make an amendment of this sort would take 66 votes for one party in the Senate and the chances of either Democrats or Republicans having a 66 vote vote

majority in the Senate is very, very slim in the times we're living in. But you don't think there has to be something, you're not worried about this disconnect between the popular vote and the electoral college vote becoming sort of more and more pronounced with each election? What I am worried about is our short-sightedness. What I'm worried about is not taking a step back and

and looking at the 250-year history of the United States and why this has worked. Everything that you said is legitimate, and these are all legitimate arguments for reform. And so if they go with the reform, it's completely understandable. But this is a piece of time, and it's a slice of time that is too short for somebody like me

to want to make a reform like that, right? We're going to talk about being a Republican and being a conservative. What conservativism is about actually is there certain things about the society that you want to conserve or preserve. Okay, so for me,

I don't think we have enough data. Everything you just said is valid. I get it. But I'm going to tell you what, Florida was a purple state. It's become a red state. You could have a situation where New York, now a blue state, who the hell knows? We could get a reform Republican governor. He starts building this whole system. Next thing you know, it's a red state. I just want to be careful. The biggest mistakes I've made as an investor is...

I look at my accounts, Caddy. Do you know that the dead people at Charles Schwab do better than the living people from an investment perspective? Because they don't look at their accounts. They can't manage the account from a Ouija board.

And what I don't want to do is make a big change on something because we're looking at it. We're staring at it too closely. Warren Buffett tells people his best decisions are when he does nothing. Sometimes you need to do that in a society on certain things. The template is we have representation. You get to vote. You have a house of representatives.

The Senate is a check on the majority rule, and the Electoral College is one of those checks too. And I don't want mob rule in this country on either side. And I think Franklin understood that. Even Hamilton and Jefferson, who used to go off on each other 250 years ago, both agreed to that. I think that's...

That's very fair and that there is not enough data. And I'm certainly not suggesting this with a view to thinking this would help Democrats stay in power or help Republicans stay in power. I'm suggesting it with a view to shoring up the strength and the health of the democratic process and giving people as much faith in the democratic process as possible from either side.

of the ledger. And it's quite possible that one day, California goes red or New York goes red or Texas goes blue. These states can flip. You just have to ensure that people have so little faith in institutions and in democracy. And at a time where I think there is a sort of bit of a power struggle going on between autocracies and democracies in the world, whatever we can do to make democracy as healthy and strong and believable

as untrustable as possible. Let's start with gerrymandering. Yes, which we've spoken about, yeah. So quickly, there was a guy named Gary. He was a representative in the town of Swampscott, Massachusetts.

And so he redistrict. And when you step back and you looked at the map, it looked like a salamander, looked like a salamander. So the people in the town said, this looks like a gerrymander, a gerrymander, because he redistricted in a way when you step back. I didn't know that. Yeah, that's the origin of gerrymandering because it looked like a salamander. Okay. That is something we should reform.

That has ruined the proportionality that's gamed the system. I submit to you rhetorically, I thought the voters were supposed to pick the politicians. Now the politicians pick the voters through gerrymandering. Let's start there. I'd like to reform that. I'd like to break that fever on the United States. Okay, we're going to take a quick break. And then after that, in the second half of the program, we're going to talk about what it means to be

a Republican in today's America. We'll be back in a minute.

Why is it that with sparkling water, I'm always playing guessing games with what flavor I'm drinking? Is it citrus? Is it aluminum can flavored? Not sure. Sparkling ice though, they really mean flavor. Like in your face flavor. Orange mango, black raspberry. Don't even get me started on the strawberry lemonade. Kiwi Strawberry slid right into my taste buds DMs last night and let them know who's boss. No subtleties there and no sugar either. But it does have vitamins and antioxidants. Find sparkling ice at a major grocery store or club retailer near you. Sparkling ice, anything but subtle.

Welcome back to The Rest Is Politics US with me, Cathy Kay. And I'm Anthony Scaramucci. In this half, we want to talk about what it means to be a Republican in America today in a party where Donald Trump...

so dominates the Republican Party. Anthony, this is a discussion I've wanted to have with you for a while, because I know you are a member of the Republican Party. You have been for many years. You've voted for many Republican politicians. And I know also clearly that you don't like Donald Trump, who is the head of the Republican Party, and you don't want him to be elected.

But what does it mean to you today to be a Republican in terms of ideology as opposed to being a Democrat? Because I don't think you're a Democrat either. No, I'm definitely not a Democrat and I'm not a Republican in Donald Trump's Republican Party. So he shifted the party.

it's almost as if Huey Long and Charles Lindbergh had a baby and the baby was raised by Roy Cohn and that baby was Donald Trump. And so if you understand our history, we've had America first movements, we've had isolationist movements,

We've had ruthless people that have been on both sides of the political spectrum, but that's the Republican movement. It's isolationist. It's American atavism. It's American nativism. It's us first, everyone else last. Don't let anybody else into the country. I don't like newcomers. I only like the people that are here already. And that's Donald Trump's party today. And it upsets me because I grew up in a union family. My dad was a member of a union.

He was a crane operator out here on Long Island. And it was an obscure thing in Nassau County, but the Republican Party controlled the union. And so my father was adamant about all of us registering as Republicans and voting in those town councilmen that were helping him with his wages.

So I became a Republican by accident. Then I went to school. When I was at school, Ronald Reagan was president of the United States. And so I'm going to just tick off a few things about, for me, what it means to be Republican. Reagan, optimistic. Reagan, aspirational.

Reagan, we're going to make sure that the government has fair regulation for business. We're going to lower your taxes so that you too can be a part of the American dream. Aspirational, an aspirational laboratory for America. Muscular, we're going to have a good, sound national defense policy. Ronald Reagan said, peace through strength. I'm

I'm going to keep us out of wars by strengthening our military. And oh, by the way, we're a benevolent country. And so therefore, we're going to have peacekeeping operations around the world. I'm not interested in wars. Remember, he pulled us out of Lebanon after the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks.

Reagan, I'm going to be tough on the Soviet Union, but if they want peace, I'll have a rapprochement with them. And he went in his last year of the presidency to meet Gorbachev in Moscow. Reagan, by the way, on the way to that summit, he stopped and met with all the Jewish refuseniks in Moscow before he got to the Kremlin. That's Reagan. I'm for peace. I'm for liberty. I'm for this aspirational opportunity. So that's how I grew up in the Republican Party.

party. When George Herbert Walker Bush took the leadership, it was an obelisk oblige. He was more of an aristocrat than Ronald Reagan, but he believed in the rules-based society and the post-World War II economy and the post-World War II structure.

That's the party that I grew up in. That's the party of Eisenhower. That's the party of Reagan. This party dates back to Abraham Lincoln, who was the first Republican presidential candidate. The Whig party dissolved over the fight over slavery. Lincoln said that we had to get rid of it. They formed a new party called the Republicans. He won the presidency with only 43% of the vote. So that's the party I'm part of. That's the party of Mitt Romney. That's the party of John McCain.

In 2012, we sat down as a party, and I've discussed this on our podcast, and said, okay, we've got a lot of things wrong here. What the Republicans did in the 1960s and 70s after the Civil Rights Act, they went with something called the Southern Strategy. So they were blowing racist dog whistles to try to secure the Southern Sunbelt states. And we got a little off.

kilter. And what we said in 2012, we probably need to be more embracing of this beautiful, colorful mosaic of the American people. Which by the way, George W. Bush had been compassionate conservatism.

Yes, he was trying to do that. He was trying to do that. We were trying to fix all of this. When Romney lost in 2012, we said, okay, we got to have a new message. And then in came Donald Trump with his 15 million celebrity apprentice viewers. In came Donald Trump with his 100% name ID. Remember, the number one thing you need to be president in the United States is name recognition. That's the number one thing. Money is second. People know who you are when they look at the

Oh, I know that guy. I'm going to vote for him. A lot of low information voters, they vote at the last minute. They're not as tied into politics as you and me. So to just finish up this thought, Mr. Trump came in, he big footed the establishment, and then he did something that no politician does. He said controversial things.

politicians get to a microphone like this and they say, blah, blah, blah. And they try to get out of the room without offending anybody. Trump came in as like an orange wrecking ball, smashing into things. And he saw something that I'm embarrassed to tell you, Katty K, I did not see. Okay. And this is my mistake and I have to own this for the rest of my life, but I grew up in a blue collar neighborhood, but I ended up going to Tufts and Harvard and

And then I started hanging out with hedge fund people and going to Davos, Switzerland, and I got the confirmed biases of the elites. So what I didn't see is that the people I grew up with who were blue collar aspirational, they became blue collar economically desperational over a 35 year period of time due to various bipartisan policies.

Trump saw it. He went into those areas. I was there with him. 71 Campaign stops with him. And he was talking directly to those people. And they looked at him and said, okay, this guy gets it. I'm suffering here. My children are going to do worse than I did. That's very un-American from our American idealism.

But Trump represents a demolition of the current status quo of the political environment. So, yes, he can shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue. I don't care. I'm voting for him come hell or high water. And so what he did, Caddy, is he perverted the Republican Party.

And he turned it into Joe McCarthy's party, Charles Lindbergh's party, Huey Long's party, Father Coughlin. These are all the ancient nativists in the country. And by the way, classically, Lincoln would be rolling in his grave because Lincoln wanted inclusion and Lincoln wanted a fairer society for people. I went through the list of kind of things that you talked about. Optimistic, that's not really where the Republican Party under Trump is. Aspirational, no. Muscular, no.

No, tough on Soviet Union. No, not at the moment. But there are a couple of things that maybe you still have in common with the Republican Party under Donald Trump. And that's, you described it as a fair regulation. A lot of people would describe it as deregulation.

and low taxes. And Donald Trump in his economic speech this week also suggested that there are going to be lower taxes for Americans. So are there policy issues? Take out the nativism and the appeal to people's desire to blame somebody else for their economic circumstances. Are there things that still, in policy terms, you feel more affinity with the Republican Party, even today's Republican Party, than you do with the Democratic Party?

Yes and no. So yes, I want there to be fair regulation. I want us to have a comprehensive energy strategy. You have to go from coal to oil to natural gas. You can't just cut everything and pretend you're going to have wind supply the energy for this industrial economy. It's not going to work, okay? And all of that optics...

And all of that virtue signaling is a bunch of malarkey, to use the Joe Biden expression. And so, yes, I'm for a practical business and practical energy policies, practical tax policies. However, what I don't like is the profligate spending. Donald Trump spent $7.9 trillion in four years.

We went from George Washington to George W. Bush, $7 trillion, four years of Donald Trump spending like drunken sailors. And so we can't do that to our grandchildren or great-grandchildren. But in a sense, Anthony, isn't that, isn't the rejection of fiscal conservatism that you heard, I mean, that it's

peak, you heard it in 2012 at the Republican National Convention. I was there, Mitt Romney's convention. And it wasn't just an economic policy. It was a badge of patriotism to talk about deficit reduction. It was almost an act of faith to talk about deficit reduction. Well, he would have been a great president and he had some great ideas to reduce that deficit, which maybe someday we'll talk about. But

But what happened here, Trump saw something that other politicians didn't see. Trump went to those blue collar workers, which is partly why I imagine you were attracted to Trump in the beginning. He went to America's working class and said, you know what? This deficit reduction stuff,

That's for the coastal elites in the party. What we actually need to do is forget the idea of cutting social services, cutting your pensions, cutting your health care, because that doesn't help the working class. And he gave the working classes in America

in a way, by expanding deficits, he gave them something that they wanted and needed. I mean, is that to... He flipped the Democrat... He took the Democrat's tent and he flipped it up and put it up in the Republican garden and said, okay, we are no longer the party of deficit reduction. We're the party of spending. You see, you are so eloquent and you're like a posh Brit. So I'm going to say it differently than you. Okay, ready? I'm walking up the plane steps...

with Trump. And I'm like, wow, that wasn't really a Republican speech that you just gave. I think we were in like a Youngstown, Ohio. He looks at me as we're wrapping up the plane. He says, hey, imbecile. I said, yes, sir. He says, you're fiscally conservative and you're socially liberal, right? You're a New Yorker. Aren't you fiscally conservative and socially liberal? You're a New Yorker from Wall Street. I said, yes, sir, Mr. Trump. That's exactly what I am. Well, you're an imbecile. Let me tell you where these Republicans are.

They're socially conservative pro-life. They are fiscally liberal. You've got the whole thing wrong, Scaramucci. And this is where they are. And that's why I'm talking to him this way. Do not underestimate the SOB's political instincts. Okay. And so the current crop of voters that sit in the Republican Party, they have an orthodoxy around Christianity, as Tim Alberta,

And they have a view. There's a great sign from the Tea Party. And there's a guy out there. He's holding a sign up. It says, get your government hands off my Medicare. And then there's a journalist walks up to the guy, excuse me, that's a government program. And the guy goes, oh, oh.

Oh, okay. And then he slinks away. The point is they don't, I mean, come on. Caddy, this is Trump's America. And if the Harris people don't understand what I'm saying, they're going to lose the election. They have to calibrate themselves to parry what Trump knows. You don't have to like them, but this guy went from reality star and real estate executive 18 months later to the American presidency. So you can't deny his political acumen.

But I think he's a nut job, and I want to return to some level of normal Republicanism. And the last president to balance budgets was actually Bill Clinton, a Democrat. And the last president since then to reduce deficit spending was Barack Obama, also a Democrat. And actually, the Republican Party has spoken about fiscal conservatism, but it's George W. Bush and Donald Trump who have boosted deficits.

So this is the fascinating thing that you're saying, and I just want to add something to it, and people can Google this. If you go back to 1990, George Bush and Richard Darman, his budget director, said we had too much deficit spending under Reagan, right?

Let's put up some guardrails and you can Google this. It's called pay as you go legislation. If we're going to have a tax cut, we have to find something in the budget to cut. If we're going to increase social services, we have to increase taxes. Bush put this in place. And then when the Gulf War happened, we went into a recession. He raised social services because of the recession and therefore he raised taxes. Read my lips, no new taxes. He lost the election.

But Bill Clinton, God bless him, adhered to the pay-as-you-go legislation. There was a very famous battle. Bob Rubin, my old boss, and Robert Reich, the Secretary of Labor, my old professor from Harvard Law School, they were fighting in the Roosevelt Room. One wanted to raise taxes to pay for all the services that Clinton wanted. The other one said just spend deficits.

Bob Rubin won that. He said, beware of the bond vigilantes. They set up an eight-year plan to reduce the deficit. It worked, Caddy. We had a $240 billion surplus at the end of Bill Clinton's fiscal year 2000.

So anyway, just the point I'm making is it was started by Republicans. Clinton adhered to it and it worked. And then George W. Bush unraveled it when he went to war with the Afghanistan and Iraq. I just have one quick question. Could you see the Republican Party once Donald Trump has left the stage?

and somebody else is the leader of the Republican Party, could you see the party returning to the classic American Republican principles of free trade, deficit reduction, and global leadership? Or has that party left the station? So I believe that I think like an entrepreneur, I think that party has left the station,

And I think a new center-right coalition has to be rebuilt. I think you have to take elements of the 2012 playbook. I think you have to take elements of what Trump is actually saying. And you have to convince the 20% of the people that feel left out in the system that they too can be aspirational in the system. And so the party that will win as a center-right coalition is a healing, unifying party that

We need a leader of that party that's very different from Donald Trump, but does take elements of what he is saying and weaves it into a new narrative. We'll have to see who or what happens, but Trumpism, because it's personality-based,

When Donald Trump eventually leaves the stage, unless he does some type of performative coup a la Project 2025, but when he leaves the stage, Trumpism is over, but the Republicans that I grew up with also over. You need a new center-right coalition that has elements of what he's talking about and elements of the old world.

That's it for this week. Join us next week when we're going to be at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and we will be doing extra editions of The Rest Is Politics U.S. on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday night after the Vice President Kamala Harris accepts her nomination as the candidate for the Democratic Party for the presidency. But for now, from The Rest Is Politics U.S., thanks for listening. Tune in next week. I'm Cady Kaye. And I'm Anthony Scaramucci. Hope to see you next week.