33. Why Are They Holding Harris Back?
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Hello and welcome to The Rest Is Politics US with me, Katty Kay. And me, Anthony Scaramucci. Good morning, Katty. I don't know if it's good morning or good evening. I've just flown in on a very delayed flight, so I have...

whirlwinded into London to make it to the podcast after nearly crashing, by the way, on the runway because we were about to land and suddenly there was another plane on the runway and the pilot. I'm trying to get advertising for British Airways. I don't want to hear this. Okay. No, the flight was great. We, you know, United did a very good job. Just in case you happen to be listening, United, thank you for pulling up fast. Oh, it's United. Even better.

How are you? Look, what are we now? Three weeks out. Is that right? Is my head got this correct? That's crazy. So it's a little bit more than that. But to put it in perspective, it's 650 hours out. So election day starts in 650 hours. I just want you to think about what could happen. Okay. Are there any October surprises? You and I have gone over them. It doesn't feel like there's anything going to be a super surprise. Doesn't feel like we can get to a ceasefire in either of these two wars.

in the next 650 hours. I mean, I want to push you on this and ask you this. I feel like both these candidates are playing a little bit of defense. I don't see the offensive strategy for either candidate. Trump is doing his requisite rallies. Vice President Harris is out now on a little bit of a media tour, mostly friendly, 60 minutes, I would say slightly less so, but mostly friendly media

If I was looking at these things from a distance, I'd say, well, okay, they both think they're winning. And so they're playing a little defense. So I have that wrong, Katty. What are you seeing? I think you're right. And I will answer that in a second, but I'm just going to tell us, everybody who's listening, what we're going to do today. So we are 650 hours out from the election, which I think is about three and a half weeks, but Anthony is clearly much better at maths than me.

We're going to look at the state of the race, these media appearances that Kamala Harris has been doing. We'll dive into whether Wall Street might be warming to the vice president and her candidacy.

She has been making an effort to build closer ties with business leaders, which actually she was doing when she was in the White House too, in the administration. We'll have a quick look at Elon Musk's unusual tactics and then these media appearances. She's been doing a ton of them this week, and we can talk about those and whether that's defense or offense. After the break...

We're going to take a little step back. Obviously, it's been a huge week in foreign policy and explore how the world might look different under each of these candidates' leadership. Harris, often associated with stability. Trump linked more, I guess, to unpredictability. But which candidates do different countries prefer? And with a year, of course, having passed since the awful events of October the 7th, we'll look at how

either Harris or Trump might handle that conflict. So to get to your question, are they playing offense or defense? I had a really interesting conversation this week for a while with a senior Harris campaign official who said,

During the whole conversation, somebody I know well. Now, you always have to be careful with campaign officials at this stage in an election and this close to polling day because obviously they have a message they want to get out to the press. They know what it is that they want to say. But this is somebody I know well and who I trust.

And she said that they are very far removed from the Clinton campaign. Those of you who have listened to our four-part series on how Trump won in 2016 will know what we mean by this. They're very far removed from the Clinton campaign's confidence at the final stages of 2016.

She says everyone is running and they genuinely mean it as if they're scared of losing. There's no cockiness about the campaign. She says we're kind of negative Nancys and we all see the glass half full. And it's the opposite, this campaign official said, of Robbie Mook, who was the campaign manager for Hillary Clinton in 2016, who famously thought that they were going to win 400 electoral college votes. So

I don't know if that counts as defense or offense in your playbook, Anthony, but they're pushing back against the idea that she hasn't been out there enough. And we've seen all of these campaign interviews during the course of this week, and we can dive into those in a bit more detail. I don't know if that is what you mean by going on offense being much more visible, but they're certainly rejecting the idea that they feel they're ahead, that they're going to win this necessarily or even,

easily and they hope they're going to win, but they're very clear that they want to play as an underdog. And one of the things that was pointed out to me was that Jen Palmieri, who also worked on the Clinton campaign in 2016, has had a very big impact, who's now joined actually Doug Emhoff, the second gentleman's team who we spoke to, has had a big impact in changing the campaign's thinking about Donald Trump as a candidate.

And Palmieri has said, we need to stop considering Trump to be a bad candidate. He's actually a really good candidate. He's very good at running for president. That's a kind of interesting shift in their mindset that's taken place in the campaign. Rather than being dismissive of Trump, they now try to see him and get the messaging through. Listen, this guy is really good at this stuff and we have to beat him with everything we can. I don't know if that answers your question about defense or offense, but it just gives you a flavor of how they're feeling.

So I guess maybe I'm old school, Caddy, in the following sense. I've been working on this since 1992. So that's 32 years, eight different presidential campaigns. James Carville out with a new documentary, as well as Chris Wallace writing a book about 1960 and the campaign between Jack Kennedy and Richard Nixon. If you compare this campaign to 16, or you compare it to 92, or you pick a campaign that

These people were out there, Caddy. They were on buses. They were driving around in Pennsylvania. Barack Obama was going to Penn State in mid-October. He needed to win Pennsylvania. And his attitude was he was going to do an ellipse around the state. He was going to meet and greet and touch as many people as possible.

And neither of these candidates are doing that. Now, Trump is going to his requisite rallies. He's getting good turnouts at his rallies. He was in Butler, which I think was a dramatic thing for him. And he had a big turnout, of course, in

Elon Musk was there. We'll talk a little bit about Elon Musk later in the podcast. It was some quirkiness from Elon Musk, but I mean, listen, that's fine. Yeah, as ever. But I mean, listen, the guy's a quirky genius. We'll give him that. Yeah. But what I'm worried about for Harris, if I were on her team, I would say she is great one-on-one. She's great in interaction with people online.

Are you guys holding her back? And if you are holding her back, why are you holding her back? And if you're not holding her back, what is the actual strategy? Because what I would be worried about, I look at these numbers, okay? Nate Silver came out with some numbers yesterday. It's too close for me, okay? I don't see Trump over-polling, okay? They're all saying, no, no, no, we figured out Trump now. We've got him figured out for 16. We've got him figured out

for 20. And so the numbers you're looking at are the right numbers. Okay. The good news for Harris is she was plus one in Pennsylvania on Nate Silver. So they came out this morning from Pennsylvania. It's Liberty for Pennsylvania and the Bill Finch group. They have her up four. Okay. And that would be very meaningful for her. Of course, now Bob Casey is

They have him up 10 against David McCormick. Now, David's a friend of mine. I'll fully disclose that I'm a donor of David's as a lifelong Republican. And I know David and his wife, Dina, very well. I don't think he did well in that debate. Now, they'll be mad at me for saying that, but I watched the Bob Casey, Dave McCormick debate. You know, Casey is a, you know, he's a name brand. His father was a name brand in PA and he's running a very, very good campaign for,

If David beats him, it'll be off of Trump's coattails. If Casey wins plus 10, Harris will win Pennsylvania. Then the question is, will she win Michigan and will she win Wisconsin, the infamous blue wall? If she does that, she's going to be president. But I'm just saying to you, me, 650 hours away,

I would be like, okay, what are we doing each day to make sure we're touching as many people as possible in these swing states? Now, maybe the answer is we're going to do media and we're going to do podcasting, which I think is effective, but it doesn't strike me as effective. Something Trump said to me in 16, which I'll never forget. He says, yeah, I shake every one of those people's hands on that question.

receiving line or that rope line. If I'm at the airport, I go over to the area, I shake everybody's hand. If I can and the Secret Service allows me, I'm at the event, I'll shake everybody's hand. He goes, let me tell you something. I shake that person's hand, they're waiting on line to vote for me. Yeah, the personal touch.

They're not going to not vote for me. And they're going to tell 10 of their friends that I was right there in their presence. And I think it matters. And now, by the way, both sides are not doing it, Kat. He is much down too, right? If you compare all the data is showing this Politico, by the way, guys, if you want to look at a piece, they had a good piece this week where they went through all of the campaign schedules.

and they analyzed Barack Obama's campaign schedule in 2008, Clinton's campaign schedule in 2016, and now Harris's campaign schedule. And they looked at exactly the same period, kind of end of August to end of September. Obama had just two days off with no public events in that 08 campaign. I mean, he was out everywhere. His schedule was packed every single day, campaign events, appearances at local restaurants, fundraisers, everything. Clinton in that same period had...

had about the same number of days out on the campaign trail that Kamala Harris has had. It was about, I think, a third down on Obama. I mean, I think since the DNC, there's been about a third of her days where she hasn't been doing any campaign events. Now, the campaign would say that she's been out fundraising and that's very important and that's what pays for the ground game. And that's certainly true. Look, this campaign official said to me that she, that Harris, I don't know if this actually is for Harris, that the campaign is more nervous today than it was a month ago.

When they came out of the DNC and things were looking good and the polls seemed to be stretching, we're giving Harris more of a lead. And now they are saying the same things and their internals apparently are telling them the same things that we're seeing in public, which is there's a kind of coming home to Trump.

there's a tightening of the race and that this is going to be won by tiny slivers. The other state that I'm told that they're anxious about is Michigan. And that four points, if it holds in Pennsylvania, that feels like a lot to me. Well, that's one poll. I mean, the Nate Silver poll, she's plus one on the Nate Silver poll. Which seems more realistic. It's all in the margin of error, right? But okay, but here's the other thing, okay? Where are her surrogates? Okay, now I'm not a cynical person, but

guys like Gavin Newsom, Josh Shapiro, Governor Whitmer, where are they? Because I don't see them. I don't see them on TV. Are they on local TV? Are they doing local radio? I'm told that Shapiro and Whitmer are almost entirely locally focused as they would be because they need to shore up Pennsylvania and Michigan respectively. I'm told that the governors are about

to go on a tour that's going to be announced in the next couple of days. Hasn't been announced yet, but you're hearing it now, that there will be the Democratic governors from the Midwest are going to get together and do some kind of a big media blitz together. I mean, I think their thinking is, listen, it's October. We're going to really ramp it up now. But what is it? A million Americans plus have already voted, Antony. Now, they may be the people who've already decided. So you're still trying to reach those undecideds.

Let's run through those campaign appearances that she made. I'd love to get your take on which ones you felt were valuable and which ones you felt were less valuable for the campaign. So the 60 Minutes one for sure was very valuable. And despite...

Criticisms of her. I thought she was very coherent. I thought she was very articulate. And she is contrasting her economic plan. She's contrasting her view of U.S. national security policy, I think, brilliantly to Donald Trump. The question is, his image is this big bluster her versus her image. Is that going to be held against her? OK, I know this is terrible to say that, but there's also imagery here.

But I thought her 60 Minutes performance was top notch. We should just quickly remind people that it is a tradition in American politics, in modern American politics, for both presidential candidates to sit down for an interview with 60 Minutes. She did it. Donald Trump agreed to do it and then backed out of doing it. Yeah. And he's claiming media bias and all this stuff. I get it. The media is segmented. And I get that each candidate wants to go to a friendly...

But I admire her for doing that. The View, which again, for international audiences, is an ABC program. It's based here in New York. I've had the good fortune or the bad fortune to do The View a few times. You sit in the center of four women and they come at you from different directions. And they ask you generally tough questions. And I watched her entire interview in preparation for this podcast. And I thought she did well there.

And I think she landed something that the campaign should extract from the view and they should get it out there. And that is, I am about healing. I am about togetherness, comparing and contrasting. Your son wants to give you coffee. So just make sure you take care of him. Make sure he gets a bigger allowance. He wants me to make sure you get a bigger allowance for bringing me coffee and bringing all the luggage from Heathrow because I was in such a rush to get the microphone. Tell him I'm his agent. I'm his agent.

And he's going to be your agent, Jude. Surrogate advocate. Yes. So here's the thing. I'll just say this to you. Okay. I watch her. I'm like, okay, that's really good. Okay. Okay. That's really good. I want more people to see that. I want more people to contrast her with that. Okay. That's really good.

She's also got these ad opportunities. She's running a great ad right now on the swing states. It's five or six Trump cabinet members saying exactly how they feel about Trump. I think it's very effective. There was a big two pager in the Sunday New York Times this weekend about all of the people and what they've said about Donald Trump since they've left the White House.

What about all the lies? 30,000 lies during the four years in the administration, 14 or 15,000 lies on this campaign, a lie coming out of his mouth literally every 90 seconds. We need to see more of that. Again, this is my opinion. Okay. Now flip side, because I want to be balanced, right? This is a balanced podcast. Trump,

On the other hand, I would just say to you, he's looking at the numbers and he's saying to himself, I'm going to win this thing. And so I'm running for Donald Trump, Katty Kay, a very disciplined campaign. Clearly, she's been out a lot more. The campaign is happy with that. She did four major network interviews and a very big podcast. The view audience, clearly women, particularly slightly older women,

or women with a lot of kids at home who are not working, who are looking after the kids. It's a mid-morning show. I picked up on exactly what you picked up on from that interview, something she did very well, which was bring her personal experience into her policy proposals. So she went on The View with one policy objective, which was to announce help for people who are looking after elder parents. And it's something that the so-called sandwich generation, you and me,

know very well. And it's exactly the audience, the view. And I think the way she talked about looking after her mom when she was dying of cancer, you know, and going to the hospital to look after her. I thought that was a very good moment. And it tied very closely with the idea of somebody who cares about your values, somebody who relates to you. So I thought that was a successful appearance. It was, I thought it was a pretty soft appearance. There was not a lot of challenging. I wonder what you thought she was pressed a lot in the 60 Minutes interview with

on two things. Why they didn't move faster on the border with an executive action to stop the flow of migrants. And she really just didn't have an answer to that. She kept saying, well, you know, migrants are now down by half and fentanyl is down by half.

And then the second thing is she was asked about her economic policies, particularly the $25,000 for new homebuyers, the $6,000 tax credit for new parents, and she was pressed repeatedly on how she was going to pay for that. And this gets to the kind of whether she's winning over Wall Street, but I don't think she did a particularly good job on that either. When she was pushed on two areas of economic policy and on the migration issue, she just sort of didn't really answer. Now, look...

I know that the campaign would say, "Hold on a second. You're stacking this up against Donald Trump." She did bring out this statistic, which I think is interesting, is that there's a whole slew of economists and the nonpartisan Center for Budget Accountability that says that Donald Trump's economic policies would

balloon the deficit by twice as much as Kamala Harris is. So they're actually more deficit inflationary than hers are. And I think that's why she needs to do more of these and potentially more unfriendly interviews, because it's not really about the answer and the specifics of the answer. It's about showing that you can answer. It's about showing that when you're under pressure or when somebody's coming at you hard, you have that kind of temperament and agility and that facility to push back and to answer in a way that makes you look and sound different

confident and strong and presidential. And I'm so wary of using those words because I realize that there is, you know, I'm increasingly wondering, you know, where the hidden sexism is in all of this. And I think there is some of it, but I do think that doing more of those kind of tough ones that she's not as good at would be good for her. Maybe it's sexism. Maybe it's Trump branding. I don't know exactly what it is, but he gets a pass. So... Which is crazy, right? I mean, that is crazy. I'm going to lie to your face. I get a pass.

I'm not going to answer policy. I get a pass. Sending COVID tests of Vladimir Putin. Get a pass. Pass. I'm going to call Vladimir Putin and I'm going to do citizen diplomacy, which is a violation of the Logan Act and a felony in the United States. Get a pass. Pass.

So what is that, Katty? Help me with that, because I actually think I understand it, but I want to hear your version of it first, and then I'm going to tell you my version. I think it's that Donald Trump has kind of normalized over the course of the last eight years the extraordinariness of lying that he brings to the political process. And because he does it time and time again, and at some point the press

can't just fact check every single thing he says and,

he gets a pass for saying it because, I mean, it's like, you know, you owe the bank a dollar, you have a problem. You owe the bank a million dollars, the bank has a problem. And so he gets a pass just because he has support. And I think because everybody is very wary, understandably, of pinning Donald Trump's supporters with Donald Trump. So that whole basket of deplorables thing that Hillary Clinton so stupidly said in the 2016 campaign that smacks of elitism and

dismissiveness to Donald Trump's supporters. Nobody wants to be in the position where they're saying, how on earth could people believe this guy? I mean, Kamala Harris has come close to this. How could people vote for Donald Trump? Because that ignores the very real concerns of Donald Trump's supporters. And I think Donald Trump's supporters increasingly in this election, and I saw this interesting comment about Trump recently, is that

he is more normal today than he was in 2020 or 2016. I mean, he's treated more normally. So he's allowed to be more extreme today than he was in 2020 or 2016. I think that was in this Wall Street Journal article about how he's winning over Wall Street, which is that we've kind of baked it in. You get slightly inured to it. Okay. So let me fire this at you, okay? You be my focus group for a second, okay? You ready? See, I think...

Trump understands something that nobody in the media gets yet and the politicians don't get yet and the campaign managers don't.

Maybe Jennifer Palmieri gets it, but very few people get it. I'm going to tell you what it is and then you react to it, okay? Politicians walk into a room, Katty, and their job is to not offend anybody. Their language is mealy mouth. It's sanitized. It's unoffensible. Donald Trump has decided that he doesn't want to do that. So,

So Donald Trump is coming in with a totally different language. Like 25 years from now, if somebody writes the phenomena of Donald Trump, they'll say, okay, this human wrecking ball understood that the politicians were practiced at mealy mouth language, middle of the road language. So when he says lying Ted Cruz, low energy, this guy, little Marco, that guy, comrade Camelot,

It is a shocker to the politicians. It's a shocker to their staffs. And it's likable to enough people. Okay. Trump said something to me once that I'll never forget. He said to me, yeah, a billion people know who I am. 500 million people know.

Hate my guts. But Caddy K, think of the possibilities with the other 500 million people. Okay. I mean, he can sell them watches. He can sell them Bibles. He can sell them steak. Are you with me? And so he doesn't give a you know what.

Okay. Do you understand what he's doing? He's made a decision. I don't need to win everybody. I'm going to get my base in these areas of the country, and I'm going to return to the presidency with my smash mouth talking. And what I don't get about the Democrats is that what I just said to you, one, do you agree with me or not? And then number two, if you do agree with me, why don't the Democrats see it?

And then what would their response be if they understood what I just said? Okay. So yes, I do agree with you. I wonder whether he is as much a shock jock today. I mean, how do you keep the shock levels new and fresh? I guess, you know, do you have to keep coming up with new stuff? And maybe that's what he's testing out. At the end of this campaign, I'm being told by people on the Trump side,

in kind of Trump's world that he is not listening to Chris Lasavita, Susie Wiles anymore. He is just going full on where he wants to go. And that's a lot of that's around immigration and talking about immigrants. So I think the novelty of Trump was that he gave voice, particularly to people who felt they couldn't say stuff. So this whole anti-PC thing, I'm going to say the stuff you want to say. I'm going to be rude about little Marco or low energy Jeb.

in a way that you would like to do. I'm going to make it funny. Your worst instincts, I'm going to give you a chance to say that. And I think that was very popular. He also has tapped into something that I think the Democrats really caught on to too late, which is that people hate politicians. They are so fed up with politicians, so fed up with Washington. I mean, who has the worst approval ratings in America continuously? Congress.

They hate politicians and Donald Trump in not sounding like a politician, in not going into room and trying to make friends with everybody, actually manages just by doing that to win over a certain number of people, right?

You and I would be like the politician and wanting everybody to like us. Yeah, I'm a conflict warder. I got to have everybody like me. There'd be one person in the corner who didn't smile when we walked in and that's the person we'd want to feel. I would be insecure. I'd be preying on that person's elections. But you got to know yourself. Trump doesn't care. Trump doesn't care. And so far, by luck or by having bad candidates, it's worked for him. And then

How do the Democrats respond? Hillary Clinton responded by going after Donald Trump, saying this guy is egregious.

you know, he is deplorable. You can't possibly vote for him. That didn't work. Joe Biden responded by appealing to his own base and getting just more numbers out than Donald Trump did. He kind of made fun of Trump. I think Joe Biden is the only politician who really enjoyed going after Trump. He got the joke. And this time around, it's not clear how Kamala Harris should respond. She did great in that debate. Okay. Because she...

She never took his bait. Biden never took the bait. But what I would say to her, if she was sitting right here with us,

Which, by the way, we should try and make sure we organize that. Let's try to get her on. But I would say, Madam Vice President, listen, okay, you don't have to win everybody. Go find the people that like you and dislike him and go hard at those people over the next 650 hours. And if you do that, you're going to win the election. If you don't do that, he's doing that.

And he has enough people, Katty, where he could win the election because it's going to come down to those seven swing states. So that's why she's been doing podcasts like Call Her Daddy. And I listened to that one and I thought actually she did a good job on that. Actually, that's what we need to do, Antony. Clearly, we just do need to do a podcast about sex and women and then we'd be fine because she'd come and join us. She did this podcast that had 2 million listeners in America and she was sat with her for 40 minutes. It wasn't a policy conversation, but I thought she did a pretty good job

in kind of reaching out to exactly those kind of people who would like it. Okay, we did promise that we would talk about this thing about Wall Street. I wanted to get your take. There was an article I read over the weekend in the FT that got me thinking about this, whether Kamala Harris has done enough

to persuade people on Wall Street that she is more like a kind of Bill Clinton, pro-business, centrist Democrat than like Barack Obama or Joe Biden, who had a kind of antipathetic relationship with the business community. What do you think? Here's what I would say, because it's important to provide some context. I'm 35 years on Wall Street. I'm

Wall Street likes inertia. There's a great line on Wall Street about money being a coward caddy. What do I mean by that? Money wants to go where there's no conflict and there's low volatility. And so they want stable government. They want peace and prosperity globally. Obviously, they want global trade and they want rising earnings. And that's really what they want to do. And they want to go play golf.

For many, many years, it was a group of Democrats that were on Wall Street supporting Democratic candidates and there were a group of Republicans supporting Republican candidates. I was among the Republicans. Trump changed all that. So what Trump did was he got the Schwarzmans and he got the different garden variety Republican support. And then he started acting like a lunatic inside the White House.

And guys like Swartzman had to come off of his industry policy committee because they were, you know, they didn't want to be seen as a racist. They didn't, they had board members that were very upset with his reprehensible behavior. So, so what's happened now is there's been a withdrawal of Republican support.

in general. Guys like Ken Griffin, as an example, one of the richest people in our country, very big supporter of Republicans for multiple decades. He has not supported President Trump. He is using his money for Senate races, but he's not supporting President Trump because he doesn't want the controversy. And again, Wall Street likes this low confrontation, low volatility sort of stuff. And so now what she's done a good job of is she said, okay, listen, I started out as a progressive politician.

reasonably left to the hard left candidate, but I'm basically running as a centrist. I understand that I can't be that and be president for all people."

And so they like her. They quietly say to each other, she wins, things are going to be okay. And what I would like the vice president to say, not only are things going to be okay, we're at record stock market levels. Inflation is coming down. This other nut wants to end the independence of the Federal Reserve. If I was her Wall Street advocate, I'd be like, what the hell? You can't have this nut end the independence of Federal Reserve. Look at what happened to Turkey when that happened with Erdogan.

So for me, she's doing a good job on Wall Street. They're never going to come out and support her the way they used to. Okay. And the Republicans are not going to support Trump the way they used to because of the danger of his volatility and the way he sounds.

But I just want to segue into Musk for one second, okay? Because I'm really thinking about this. He's a brilliant guy. Anybody that can land a rocket, launch a rocket, and then land it back on a landing pad, brilliant guy, one of the richest people in the world. When Musk is told he's the richest person in the world, he says, no, Vladimir Putin is. That's probably true, caddy. But he's a weird guy. And so I'm going to say three things. I'm

And I want you to think about these three things. Number one, Trump despises this guy. He despises him. He'll accept his support. But when he's jumping around like a lunatic on the Butler PA, I think he doesn't like it. Just trust me. He also doesn't like talking to him because I know Trump's personality. He don't like talking to him. It looked really awkward. Yeah. Okay. So he doesn't like him. He doesn't like Musk. He'll accept his support. Number two, okay.

I think Musk has good intentions, actually. I know other people will say, no, they say he's malevolent, but I think there's actors around Musk that don't have good intentions. These guys see Trump as an American Putin. They're all oligarchs. They want to maintain their oligarchy. They don't want to be overly taxed.

Each one of them sees themselves as an eventual trillionaire. And the way you get there is you've got to consolidate yourself up against political power. That's very dangerous for the United States. Okay. I'm a middle-class kid, blue collar kid. Okay. Very, very dangerous for that to happen in the United States because that would really dissolve politics.

the American dream. And I think Harris has to tell people that, what the hell are you guys doing? Okay. You want to crowd the top with multiple billionaires and trillionaires? You guys are not that smart and you're not that important. Okay. We got to help the lower middle class with equal

opportunity. I don't believe in equal outcomes, but I got to help these people with equal opportunity. You guys got to knock it off. Okay. And Teddy Roosevelt did that, Caddy, to the robber batter. It's in the 1890s. Okay. Guys like Thiel represent these people.

Okay. David Sachs represents these people. Okay. These guys see themselves in a different light. And F. Scott Fitzgerald, the famous American novelist once said that the rich are different than you and me. Okay. And they're not, Katty. You know, they're not different, but they think they are. Yeah. Okay. And that's a danger in a society. And so this cavorting is very, very bad for the country.

And I wish Musk would wake up, but he doesn't have the social or emotional intelligence, okay, to really understand what I'm saying. And he would reject everything that I'm saying. Interesting. A bunch of white South African men or men with connections to South Africa who are kind of hanging around Trump at the moment. I don't know exactly what that means, but it is a random thought that I had the other day when you think about people like Peter Thiel and Sachs and

And Elon Musk. Okay, we are going to take a break and come back and have a quick look at what these two candidates would mean for the rest of the world at a time when there is so much going on around the globe. With an hour before boarding, there's only one place to go, the Chase Sapphire Lounge by the club. There, you can recharge before the big adventure or enjoy a locally inspired dish. You can recline in a comfy chair to catch up on your favorite show or order a craft cocktail at the bar.

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Welcome back to The Rest Is Politics US with me, Katty Kay. And I'm Anthony Scaramucci. And we are going to take a few minutes just to kind of do a whiz around the world since I have jet lag. Having come over from America, we think all of you should have jet lag and join me.

Because obviously there's been a lot going on in foreign policy and I think it is worth stepping back a little bit and thinking on the big hotspots of the world. What would be different under Trump and what would be different under Kamala Harris? I'm just going to lay out a couple of things. I think there are things that will not change. We are in an era of protectionist economic policies. That's not going to change very much whether Harris or Trump is elected.

We are in an era of hawkishness towards China. That's not going to change very much if Kamala Harris is elected or if Donald Trump is elected. I think the things that will change, the biggest difference between the two will be

commitments to kind of international action on climate change, which I think Harris will be much more committed to than Donald Trump. Europe, there's this expression going around in kind of Trump world that make America great again and America first really means Europe last. I think there'll be less commitment to Europe and allies under Donald Trump than there will be under Kamala Harris.

The other big issue is Ukraine and NATO. And there's been a couple of things that Kamala Harris said this week in those interviews, which I thought were telling about Ukraine and NATO, because I think that's an area too, where she is probably more pragmatic than Joe Biden is. He came out of that kind of whole Cold War era, has always been dedicated to the principle of America leading. He's very transatlanticist. She

comes from Silicon Valley, grew up in California, is younger than Joe Biden, is also committed to the idea of America as a good role model in the world, but she's a little less...

fervent, I think, about being a transatlanticist and about America being a global superpower and what that means for America. I think she's more pragmatic. She doesn't seem to have a very clear ideology when it comes to foreign policy. I wouldn't put her in the kind of Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush's national security advisor type role of somebody who's steeped in Cold War thinking.

And she said something in the interview with 60 Minutes that I did think was interesting. She pushed on whether Ukraine would be allowed to join NATO and whether she would push for that. And interestingly, she demurred. And she said, look, we will talk about that when we get to it, which is probably a sensible, tactical foreign policy thing to do. I can imagine all the diplomats around her saying, phew, thank goodness she didn't go out on a limb.

I felt that was a little kind of departure note, even if he wouldn't say it, from Joe Biden, who absolutely would want Ukraine to join NATO.

And I think you're seeing a little daylight there. That's the area I think there is potentially the biggest difference between the two of them. Super tricky for her, right? She's the vice president, sitting vice president. He endorses her. She's asked, would you have done anything different in the Biden administration on The View? She can't say that she would do things different. She was in his administration. That was a little awkward.

She was his teammate, you know, and that's how she should have answered. She said, listen, it's his administration. I'm his teammate. You know, here's what I'm going to do 2025 to 2029 if you give me the opportunity. But, you know, I'm not going to say anything about him. But, Katty, here's the issue. Where do you want America to be? What is the vision for America? And so I want to ask you, what does Vladimir Putin want for America? If you were sitting with Vladimir Putin, he was a close friend of yours, and he was a

And he said, this is what I want to have happen in America. What would it be? He wants as much internal division in America as possible so that people start to lose faith in

in the American system of government. Okay, what else does he want? He wants America and Europe to have as much of a fractious relationship as possible. He wants to have an America that is not particularly interested in being part of NATO, that would love the idea of Donald Trump pulling out of NATO altogether, or undermining at least Article 5 of NATO, the commitment that if one country is attacked, all the others respond. The strategy is to make America weaker. The tact

Okay. So, I mean, I think that's a brilliant rendition of it. And so I've been spending some time on the weekends reading about Franklin and Washington and Madison.

and Hamilton, and not just reading about them, but reading their writings. What were they writing at the time that they were forming America? And what is so fascinating about that is they were like, whoa, this is such a big opportunity here. We have this new country. We have this enlightenment ideas. We can break the aristocratic sclerosis that goes on in Europe, this sort of caste system that Europeans have.

And you'll have to tell me they still have it, but they certainly had it in the 1750s. It's alive and kicking. Okay. And so we can create this flat society where we can create this opportunity, right? Harris talks about an opportunity economy.

But the founders were like, wait a minute, this is amazing opportunity society that we can create. And they go about creating it and they get people in public service that are thinking about it from that way. So the end of the war happens and the United States does three things that very few countries do at the end of a war.

They invoke the Marshall Plan. Okay, that was $14 billion at that time. It's worth about $150 billion of 2024 dollars to help rebuild Europe and parts of Asia. They go into the general agreements of trade and tariffs and they unbalance the situation.

And why is it unbalanced? Well, the Americans are going to accept tariffs and we're going to reduce them on the way in so that goods and services can flow into the US relatively untariffed. And we're going to accept tariffs from these other countries. Well, why are you going to do that? Well, they're war-torn countries where 65% of the economic output, 2% of the world's population. And if we can get rising living standards around the world, we won't have another conflict. This is what these people are thinking about in architecting it.

So the trade tariffs are uneven. Okay. When I tried to explain this to Trump on the airplane, traveling around with them, he, you know, he more or less gave me the finger. Okay. I was trying to explain to him why it was imbalanced. Okay. And then the third thing that we did at the end of the second world war is we binded ourselves to other free countries. And we said, if we bind ourselves to these other free countries, we can reject totalitarianism.

Okay. And so what that was about was what Washington said. I don't need the power. Okay. I'm like General Cincinnatus, the famous Roman general. I'm going to go and put the government in place and I'm going to go become a farmer again. I don't need or want the power. Let me show you how it's done because I'm only visiting this earth anyway. I'm not here permanently. But now you've got people like Putin and you got people like Trump that they want the power, Caddy, and they want the power for their families and they want the power for their lifetimes.

And they think about this in a totally different way than the way it started. And the reason I'm bringing all this up is that we got to get back to what I'm saying. We've got to get back to the opportunity economy. We're going to get back to the flatness and the freedom. And we've got to explain to people in the United States why we have to engage with Western liberal democracies to protect each other from this nonsense. We have 5.7 billion people

living under some level of totalitarianism right now. And if we don't hook up with each other and we don't reject that,

It's going to be a catastrophe for the United States. But everything you said about Putin, Trump doesn't give a shit about one of those things. He's like, that's fine. Let there be unrest. Let there be division. My team, the white team, is that that's the one that's going to be winning and I'm going to be empowered, my family? No problem. I don't give a shit. You see, and I find that reprehensible and I find him very un-American. Okay. And I'm not sure that the Democrats have come up with the narrative to reject that.

I mean, the alternative narrative to Trump's very transactional view of foreign policy, which is you scratch my back, I'll scratch your back, whether you're an ally or an adversary, didn't really make very much difference to him. The big distinction between that and an America as the shiny city on the hill that leads the world

and promotes democratic values around the world. I think back to George W. Bush's second inaugural address where he literally said, "Our role is to help people who are oppressed and living in authoritarian countries." It was an incredibly robust defense of America as a global leader for good at a time when the rest of the world was pretty skeptical about that.

But that's the big split. That's the big fault line. And I don't know where Kamala Harris, I feel, is somewhere in between those two views. She's not as much of an interventionist. I mean, you know, maybe she learned from Barack Obama, who was desperate to kind of pull out of wars by the end, having sanctioned a surge in forces at the beginning of his administration in Afghanistan, got to the end and said, Jesus, I'm done. You know, we can't do anything around the world at the moment.

And maybe that's more the Harris point of view. You don't want to get involved in military expeditions unless you really, really have to and you want to try and do everything you can to avoid them. She's a little more of a pragmatist than George W. Bush was or Joe Biden was, that that generation was. And what I'm trying to figure out is in terms of other countries, Ukraine, the Middle East,

What's the difference between her pragmatism about what America can actually do and his transactionalism? So I think one difference is that as a pragmatist, she sees the value of alliances. She actually does think you get more done by getting people on board. About Trump, we know that he really doesn't like a few things. He doesn't like trade deficits for America. He doesn't like multilateral organizations.

He really doesn't seem to like Europe very much and those old alliances very much. And I think that ironically probably gets on well with some people. I think Narendra Modi of India fits very well into the kind of Trump way of doing things. It's very transactional. How do we get what we need in this particular outcome? And maybe there's a value to some transaction. I do think there are things that Donald Trump did as president, the Abraham Accords between Israel and various Middle Eastern countries that might look flimsy now, but actually had value.

kind of focusing hard on China and China's unfair practices. I think that was something that other presidents hadn't taken on. Obama didn't manage to take on. But I think that there is a limit to it because once you start alienating alliances, there is only so much that America can do by itself, especially if it's an America that allows itself to be weakened. I mean, I happen to believe the world is better off when America is strong and healthy and engaged. And of

Of course, there have been blips along the road. But generally, you know, Europe, we know that from World War I and World War II and the Cold War. But I don't know where Kamala Harris, I mean, it's interesting. You have to look at some of the people who are around Kamala Harris, like Phil Gordon, who's likely to be her national security advisor, who is kind of a committed Atlanticist and also a committed realist. And I guess that's the difference between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump is that one is a kind of realist pragmatist with a focus on alliances and what do we need to get things done for the better. And one is purely realistic.

transactional. I don't know, just quickly on the Middle East before we wrap up this section, we should talk more about this later, but what do you think the difference in outcome, is there any difference in outcome for the awful situation in the Middle East at the moment, kind of hornet's nest that the Middle East is becoming between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump being elected in November? Again, my issue is the wildcard nature of Trump. Maybe I'm talking like a Wall Streeter now because we like lower volatility, but

There's a wild card nature to Trump. You know, if he's taking seven calls from Vladimir Putin, sending him COVID-19 tests, and he's in cahoots with them, Putin has an OZ to the Iranians. And so what's going to happen there? And what does that mean for the Israelis? You know, we don't know. We do know that Trump doesn't care about anybody. And so if it suits his interest to betray the Israelis, he'll do that. If it suits his interest not to, he'll do that.

So there's no steadfastness. There's no consistency. What the US benefited from in the post-World War II era, we lost our way in Iraq and Afghanistan, was, okay, this is what we stand for. We made mistakes, made mistakes in Vietnam, but this is what we stand for. This is what we're going to do. When that wall came down, it was 40 years of

of bipartisan commitment to a containment strategy of communism. And it led to the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union and obviously great pain for Vladimir Putin, but great prosperity for Europe. And so where is Trump on this stuff? I don't know where he is. I would rather go with her and her national security team

who are steadfast with Israel, understand the Sunni-Shia dynamic in the Middle East, understand that there's always going to be a tribal conflict because of the way the borders were put together, okay, and are trying to figure out a way to balance the power the way Kissinger or somebody like Von Metternich would have said. I would rather go with that because I

Katty, you know, and I know, when I was a kid, I said, okay, the Middle East is a disaster. When I get to be 60, it's going to be all fine. Everyone's going to figure everything out. We're much more mature than our grandparents. We're going to do a better job than them. It's an even greater disaster today.

But what Nixon would say, what Kissinger would say, what George Shultz would say is that we got to have a plan and we got to stick to the plan. Okay. And Carter would have said that, Clinton would have said that, and Harris's team is saying that. And so for me, I would rather go with that than this level of,

wild unpredictability. And oh, by the way, who's Trump's national security advisor? Who's he going to be? And where is he going to be? Because if he's in Trump world, all of the people like McMaster have left. So where are they going to be? They want an isolationist America. And I'm telling you, the world is not ready for an isolationist America. There's people listening that may or may not like the American government, may not like the American people or its standing in the world. But trust me,

You're not going to want an isolationist America. You're going to want an America that has one third or one quarter of the global economy and almost the largest military by a factor of 10. You're going to want them engaged with the rest of the world. Yeah, I agree with that. One interesting thing that Senator Chris Coons, who's close to both Joe Biden and

And also to Kamala Harris said about her view of the Middle East was that she doesn't see it as a two-state solution. She sees it as a 23-state solution and that she puts the Israeli-Palestinian issue in the context of broader Middle East instability, having lived the first decades.

20 years of my life in the Middle East, that sounds like a pretty sensible approach to me. And with that, we will wrap it up. We've given you a jet lag this week, but it was worth going around the world and looking at all these different hotspots. We will see you next Friday. And if you are a member, a founding member of the Restless Politics US Club, then you can get our thoughts on how Trump won the White House.

in 2016 this Saturday in our question and answer session that is just for club members. So if you haven't signed up, please do so. It's great. We have bonus content for you every week and we'll be diving back into some of the Trump 2016 trauma that Antony is still suffering. And we're also in the UK this week. So come and join us. We're going to be live in Glasgow on Saturday night. Cardiff,

on Monday night and the O2 Arena in London on Tuesday night. So do join us for that. And we're going to be live in New York City on the 28th of October and live in Washington, D.C. on the 30th of October. Go to therestispoliticsus.com for tickets to that too. Thank you, guys.