35. Trump’s Plan For Power
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Hello and welcome to The Rest Is Politics US with me, Katty Kay. And I'm Anthony Scaramucci. How are you, Katty? You know, I'm kind of loving the fact that I'm home. It's been a lot of travel for both of us recently. I know you have a lot more coming up. So it's fun to be back in D.C. We were both in Pennsylvania over the course of the weekend. I was there again last year.

on Tuesday of this week. So we're going to talk about that later in the program. We're so close to the election. We're going to kick off today with the news that's been sort of roiling both campaigns and Washington, D.C. this week, which is the fears of many liberals that Donald Trump, if he's elected and the polls are still very close,

public service announcement, the fears of many liberals that Trump will rule like a dictator if he does get into office. We're going to look at what that actually means, what he says, what he could do, whether those fears are justified, whether

whether this is a symptom of what's known here as Trump derangement syndrome. And we'll dig into all of that. We've both been speaking to people about that, which is going to be interesting. And then after the break, we're going to look at the routes to the presidency through the key swing states. We might bring up one of those little maps and try and play with that because I love doing those maps. It feels like a sort of child's craft project, except you have the fate of the world in your hands of how you can get to 270 electoral college votes. It's

ramping up their ground game. They've got thousands of volunteers door knocking across the Rust Belt and the Sun Belt.

I think it's worth talking about what General John Kelly, who was Donald Trump's longest running chief of staff, has said for the very first time on the record this week about the former president and why it's getting so much attention here. Basically, he has said to Mike Schmidt of The New York Times, who I spoke to a couple of days ago, that

Donald Trump meets the definition of fascist. What he said, and he was recorded in a conversation knowingly by Mike Schmidt. Mike Schmidt has worked for four years to try and get John Kelly to go on the record. And John Kelly finally agreed to have a recording of the conversation that could be made public in the New York Times.

And what he says is that the definition of fascist is a far-right authoritarian, ultra-nationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy. And according to John Kelly, Trump meets the definition of being a fascist, and that is how he would like to rule. And of course, the

The Harris campaign has seized on this in town hall meetings, in an impromptu, unusual little press conference outside her house in Washington, D.C. And their closing argument, I wonder if Joe Biden is kind of, you know, rubbing his hands in glee or is kind of crying into his pillow because it's exactly what his argument was.

is that this is about democracy and America's democracy, and you cannot afford America, Kamala Harris seems to be saying, to put Donald Trump back in the office because no one less than General John Kelly, whose son died protecting the United States, who served as Donald Trump's chief of staff, has said that Donald Trump believed Hitler did a lot of good things and fits the definition of a fascist.

And wanted his generals to be more like Hitler's generals. And of course, in my conversations with John Kelly, Kelly pointed out to Trump, well, you know, some of Hitler's generals tried to kill Hitler. You know, you remember they dropped a bomb on him in 44 and there were several assassination attempts. And one of the generals, as you will recall from your British history,

He shared some of the German codes, which helped the Enigma team break the codes. And so, you know, Hitler's generals were starting to realize how bad Hitler was, and they turned on him. I don't think that Donald Trump was aware of all of that history. I'm just positive. Well, Kelly was trying to point it out to him. But I was on CNN yesterday, and the anchor said, well, we do have to point out before we begin this interview that you were dismissed by John Kelly.

I'm like, you could say that I was fired by him. Okay. I mean, because that's actually what I was. Okay. I mean, I was brutally fired by him at 9.32 in the morning on the 31st of July, 2017. I love that you still remember the time. Yeah, exactly. When you're in politics and you're getting your head beaten, that's...

That's to be expected in politics. We're going to continue beating you, Caddy, until the morale improves. And so Kelly fired me. We shook hands. He left the White House 18 months later. We had lunch and over a sandwich, we talked about the insanity of what Donald Trump is. And so he was reluctant. You know, remember, Kelly...

Esper, anybody that went to a military academy, served in the Marines, right hand up, you're taking a military oath to the Constitution. If you go to West Point, they tell you, you have to stay out of politics. Eisenhower was this close not running for president because he was a five-star general. We don't have those anymore. We only have four stars, but he wasn't going to run because he took that oath. And then they said, well, you've retired. You're now a citizen, blah, blah, blah.

And if you remember, when he retired from the presidency, he did not want to be called president. He said, please, if you're going to address me formally, call me General Eisenhower. He went back to his military standard. And so it's very, very hard for these guys. But Esper would tell you, this is Mark Esper, former Secretary of Defense, that he was going

that not only is Kelly right and Trump has fascist inclinations, that he told Esper to order the National Guard to shoot at the protesters in Lafayette Square. These were the Black Lives Matter protesters who were outside the White House in the summer of 2020. Right. So shoot at them and hit them in the kneecaps. Don't kill them, but bring the military out here. I want these protesters roughed up.

And of course, Esper said that I have to resign, sir. I can't issue an order like that. It's actually a direct violation of the First Amendment. It's a direct violation of the Constitution. Then he went to Milley, asked Milley to do the same thing. Milley said, I have to resign. He didn't want his two top military officials resigning in the middle of a campaign. So he dropped it. But here's the problem. He's moved the goalposts, Caddy, on everybody. He continues to move the goalposts.

The Fox News hosts that are in the tank for Trump, and that's fine because there are some people in the tank for Harris, but you're just kidding, right? Mr. President, you're just kidding. You don't want to shut down the BBC in the US. You don't want to shut down MSNBC. No, no, no. I'm not kidding. Mr. Trump, you don't want to send the military against your political adversaries. You're just saying that, right? No, no, no.

I'm not kidding. So the question is, where is the guy? Now, I've known the guy for 20 years.

And he's in decline, Katty, because he's talking about Arnold Palmer. I don't know. I think we have an age appropriate podcast, but we're not going to talk about what he, I mean, he's talking about Arnold Palmer's anatomy. The size of his penis. I think we can say that. Yes. I love you, Katty. I love the fact that you are more New York than me at this point in the podcast series. So the point being, he's out of his mind.

But the question I have for you, I've been dying to ask you this all week. He is out of his mind. You know he's out of his mind. I know he's out of his mind. I think some of his supporters actually know he's out of his mind. So why are they still supporting him? What does it say about the Democrats? What does it say about the Democrats' strategy in this election that we've got somebody that his 40-year

Staffers say he's nuts. Kelly, his longest serving chief of staff, says he's a fascist. But he's still got 75, 80 million votes, could possibly win the election. So tell me what I'm missing, Katty. So there's a lot there. And I kind of want to unpack it bit by bit.

And in a way, I want to get to the GOP support for him and those 75 million people kind of a little bit later. What I would like to do first, because I think this builds to that, is ask you what you think the significance is of John Kelly being on tape today.

and being on the record now. And whether that is different from the fact that we've had John Kelly off the record, lots of us have known that John Kelly has said these kinds of things.

But does it make a difference hearing General John Kelly's voice? And this is what he actually said. Certainly the former president is in the far right area. He's certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators. He has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist for sure. So we now have John Kelly and I think hearing his words for me as a journalist, I feel

feel that's significant, that that reporting, the work Michael Schmidt did to get him to go on the record, I think it does make a difference around people's perception of Donald Trump and possibly around the politics and possibly it moves the needle. I want to talk about that. The other thing I want to talk about, and I think this is really important, is will he do it? If he gets elected, and this is what John Kelly said on that,

I think he'd love to be just like he was in business. He could tell people to do things and they would do it and not really bother too much about whether what the legalities were and were not. So he was asked if he was going to rule as a dictator. And I would love to hear from you whether you think the guardrails of

that just about held at the end of the Trump presidency, if Donald Trump was elected, and I think this is the conversation that's been happening. And I think the fact that Donald Trump has been talking about using the military, as you just talked about, against the enemy of the people, and then John Kelly comes out two days later on the record,

I feel the timing of that is important, that he's heard what Donald Trump has said about using the military against enemies of the people, whether they are journalists or whether they are Mark Milley or whether they are Tony Fauci or that other list of people that we know are on his enemies list and using the military against them. And whether you think he's going to do that and is able to do that, because I've had interesting conversations with people this week who have said,

Okay, let's be very rational and calm and look at what he can do and what he can't do. I do want to look at why people are still supporting him because I think that's critical and it gets to the strategy of what can the Democrats do about all of this to peel off some of those 75 million people.

But first of all, what do you think the significance is of Kelly saying this right now, 13 days, we are recording this 13 days ahead of the election. And then let's talk about whether we think he would do it, whether he would actually rule as a fascist. I think it helps her on the margin, but I don't think it helps her the way it would have helped Ronald Reagan in 1980 if one of Jimmy Carter's supporters

Remember, we had military people, World War II veterans running the country at that time. They were honorable people. If Jimmy Carter's chief of staff said that about him, it would have catapulted Reagan, October surprise, into the election. It would have been impossible for him, right? Impossible.

Game changer. Game changer. 44 years later, even 2008 for that matter, or you pick the timing. 2012, it would have been a game changer. Possibly, yeah. But it's 12 years from there and we've been immunized by Donald Trump's rhetoric. We've been immunized by his lying. We've been immunized by the excoriation of his personality. So there's a lot of people that are immune to it. There's lots of pushback.

You know, I hope we'll get into this in the second half because I've talked to a lot of people on the campaign, the Harris campaign. I've talked to some people on the Trump campaign. And there's an interesting thing going on, which we should let people know about. She's raised a billion and a half dollars, not reported yet, but it's at a billion and a half. Bill Gates just gave her 50.

But Donald Trump has a $44 billion tool, formerly known as Twitter, now known as X, that is completely algorithmically manipulated to make you believe that he's winning everywhere, that he's Ronald Reagan in 84. It's a 49-state landslide.

We both know that the poly market, which is a thinly traded market outside the United States, the scales have been tipped on that market by many billionaires betting Trump, try to make people think that this is a preordained thing. And people say to me, well, how does that help Trump? Won't his voters not show up? Well, you don't know Trump's voters. They're going to show up in the pouring rain and the freezing cold.

They're trying to get Harris voters to say, hey, this thing is too far gone. Don't show up at the polls. That's why they're manipulating these predicted poly markets. So I think it helps them on the margin, Caddy. And I love General Kelly. I love his wife. Spent a lot of time with them. I'm proud of him in my conversation with him after he died.

on the record. He says, yeah. You spoke to him just this week. Yeah. You won't be seeing me on The View. He said, I said, oh, that's too bad because that would be blockbuster ratings if you went on The View. It's just not his personality. He's a low-key kind of guy who'd rather be speaking to veterans and young Marines in VFW centers. Low-key. And listen, that took a lot for him to do that. So the Kelly piece may help her, but I guess what I'm getting at with you is

Why is his base so fervent? Okay. And it's three things to me. Okay. It's the laxity at the border, the wave of immigration and the base believing that those immigrants, even though they're primarily lawful, that those immigrants are committing crimes and stealing jobs from American citizens.

This is that nationalist fervor experienced in the UK, experienced in France, other parts of Europe. Trump's pressing that button as hard as he possibly can. And then the second thing is, and this is a terrible thing for me to say, I hope we don't get our podcast canceled because I enjoy talking to you every week, but he's a white racist up against a black woman. And unfortunately-

And it's as simple as that to a lot of these voters. And I'm sorry to say that about my country. I love my country, but it's sort of that. And so what she hasn't done, and you've heard me say this to you, and I don't know if I've mentioned it on the podcast, but she hasn't made that soaring speech, and she could have.

She could have said, listen, my project is 2047. That's 100 years after Jackie Robinson crossed the baseball diamond. This is an inclusive project. This is a vision for the next 25 years in America where we're working together. It's a flatter country, more equal opportunity, less biases, less tribalism. But she's not making that speech. She's hesitant to make that speech. Obama made that speech. Kennedy made that speech.

Anytime we've broken a taboo, a Catholic president, a black president, she's a black woman presidential candidate, a big landmark speech, get up on the soapbox, tell people why they shouldn't fear you. Tell people why you're an inclusive person. Face the race issue head on the way Obama did.

face the woman issue head on. Now, you could push back and say, well, Clinton, she tried to do that and it failed for her, but she's a very different personality. She's a very different candidate. And let me just make this last point, Cady. They spent 30 years in the conservative right, billions of dollars demolishing Hillary Clinton. They didn't do that to Harris.

They say, oh, we don't like her, but they didn't spend three decades. She was first lady in 93. They started the demolition of her in 93. She shows up in 2016 as a presidential candidate. They have fully defined her and demolished her. And so when she tried to do that, it didn't work for her. I think Harris had the opportunity to do that. She still does. Last night, she was asked by Anderson Cooper, did you make any mistakes?

And she flubbed the question. We could go to the tape, but she flubbed the question. But what she should have said last night is, yes, I did make a mistake. It was actually sitting on The View 10 days ago. And I said to those people that I would do the exact same thing that Joe Biden did. Here are the five things I would do differently. And she still has the chance to do that.

And there are people, believe it or not, that are undecided still. She could move those people to her ledger. And they have announced that she's going to do a speech on the ellipse on the eve of the election.

as you say, a big kind of closing speech right outside the White House in exactly the same spot that Donald Trump stood on January the 6th, rallying his forces and telling them they had to fight for the country, that they were going to go down to the Capitol and he was going to join them and they had to fight to keep their country. So she's going to choose that very significant location. I suspect she will talk about Donald Trump. The campaign has decided that leaning into this issue of dictatorship

and fascism has the potential to move some Republican voters who don't like Trump's character and who are nervous about Trump. They think that they can move them over with this fascism and dictatorship language. The other thing that she needs to talk about, though, and as somebody kind of

phrased it to me very nicely. He talks about he has an enemies list and she talks about a to-do list. And I think that to-do list is just as important as talking about Donald Trump and the threat he is. And what is she going to do on the border? What is she going to do for the rents of people in cities and battleground states like Nevada, where rents have gone up by multiples and people can no longer afford to live there? And for those people, I

Fascism, democracy, dictatorship seems very far away from their list of day-to-day concerns. And she needs to answer those questions as well. So she's kind of got to do it all. There has been an awful lot of anxiety this week amongst...

People on the left, I hear it a lot on Morning Joe, the show that I'm on. Obviously, Joe Scarborough, as you've mentioned before, somebody who is in Donald Trump's sights, who Donald Trump really doesn't like, has said he'd like to take vengeance against. I know that a lot of the anchors at MSNBC, some of the journalists at ABC, some of the journalists at CBS News, where he's also said he would like to shut the network down because of the way they've edited some programs about him. Do you think...

Whatever Donald Trump is saying now, do you think that when he gets into office, were he to win on November the 5th, he will govern as he is threatening to govern? Because I have...

different views on this. If you think about Donald Trump and the presidency, not just Donald Trump, but the presidency, there have been kind of guardrails around the president. And in Donald Trump's first term, the first layer of that guardrails were the people around him, right? The John Kellys, the Jim Mattises, the Secretary of Defense, Don McGahn, the White House counsel. There were people who told Donald Trump, you can't do this.

You might want to shoot the protesters in the knees. That is not something you're legally allowed to do. I think we all know that those people will not be around Donald Trump in a second term. We, you know, never underestimate the allure of working for the president of the United States. And some people may go back in again, but...

It's more likely that the kinds of people he's going to have around him are diehard loyalists and people who are much more MAGA ideologues. So they may not want to rein him in as much. And then the second layer of that kind of guardrail system is the three branches of government. And I think...

One thing that has been explained to me is that the risk, if you take away the kind of adults in the room, is that you're going to have constant clashes between the judiciary and the executive. The president will try to do something. The constitution will say, no, he can't do it. It will go to the courts. The courts will end up knocking on the White House door. And you'll have a constant tug of war between the different branches of the American government, whether

And then, as he has said himself, he would actually call on the military to go after his political enemies. That is something I don't think is likely to happen. I've had conversations with General James Admiral Stravidis, who used to be a Supreme Allied Commander of NATO,

a very senior admiral in the American military who has said he just can't, and he's adamant about this. I asked him about it just today. He does not see the rank and file members of the military turning against the American people, that he thinks in that way, the system will hold. And even though Donald Trump is talking about using the military to go after his political enemies,

Once you get below the sort of two or three people that Donald Trump can put into the Department of Defense who could be loyalists, you've got hundreds of thousands of people who are loyal to the Constitution and have sworn an oath to the Constitution. So,

So do you think Donald Trump rules as a fascist and is able to rule as a fascist in the United States if he wins a second term, Anthony? You know, this is again contrarian, but this is based on my knowledge of him and based on my friends. You know, look, we're adversaries right now, but I still have a lot of friends that work for Donald Trump. I saw many of them in the spin room when I was advocating for Vice President Harris. There is a group of people inside his office

campaign. That belief, he wins. He says, okay, great. Get Jamie Dimon on the phone. Get Larry Fink. Get John Paulson. Pick the best names out there that will work in the administration. I'm going to play golf. The grownups can run it. Remember, he's a big name dropper. He's a big status seeker. He loves having these billionaires like Elon Musk groveling to him. Remember he said Elon Musk was on his knees of

He would have done anything I said or I told him to bark, he would have barked. Remember all that nonsense he said about Elon? So he'll put these people in his administration and go play golf and

And all the scaremongering that we're hearing about will be by the wayside. And you'll have relative Trump dysfunctionality and relative Trump, poor communication and dog whistle blowing, but nothing will get done of any materiality. Okay, so that's one side of the equation.

The other side of the equation is that the Heritage Foundation people and the alt-right people, the Bannonites, get their hooks into the administration. And Trump, and we'll use a Bannon term, floods the zone with these alt-right people that have been preparing themselves for a new Trump administration.

And Trump himself, who has been stewing and brewing and telling people privately, I should have gone after Joe Scarborough when I was president. I should have broken up Amazon and destroyed the Washington Post while I was president. I had a bunch of dummies working for me and they didn't fortify me and strengthen me with all the different procedural and quote unquote legal things I could do to destroy my adversaries.

And so I've been stewing and brewing for the last four years. I'm coming down from the mountaintop now with the tablets to destroy people. And I have the alt-right with me that's going to help me destroy these people. So will the military backstop them? I predict that Admiral Sorvetis is right. They probably will not backstop them.

Will the courts backstop him? Some of the people won't, but we know where the Supreme Court is on Donald Trump and they certainly are there to help him. We also know that he wants to take the FBI out of the Justice Department and he wants to put it into a direct reporting situation to the White House. Okay.

Okay, that's Gestapo-like. Suppose he does that and suppose he replaces Ray with one of these alt-right people. The director of the FBI. Director of the FBI. Could he do things to his adversaries on his enemies list?

that would be disadvantageous to his adversaries? And so the answer is yes. And then guess what, Caddy K? He has the umbrella of this new immunity. Okay. Now I don't think it's overly stretched the way the liberals think it is. I've read through the case.

but it is brought. And I'll give you an example of this. If Richard Nixon was caught in the Watergate scandal and cover up right now, under the new immunity laws, he would be completely exonerated. There would have been no case against him. There would have been no resignation. He just would have said, hey, take a look at this case. It's inside the ambit of my authority. So for me, it's uncertain what would happen. But

But the fact that it's uncertain that it would happen and the fact that you have the institutional integrity of the Constitution and the system that has primarily made us peaceful and prosperous and has made this literally one of the most fantastic economic miracles ever.

in the history of the world. And the economy is actually doing quite well right now. I can rant off statistics, but this isn't an economic podcast. It's a political one. Yeah. I mean, look at the cover of The Economist. The American economy is the envy of the world. Yeah. The economy is doing very, very well. The inflation is coming down. It looks like the Fed is going to stick a soft landing.

Why Harris is not talking about that more. It could be that she doesn't have the confidence. She did an interview with Mark Cuban. She sounded good in the interview, but you could tell she's not an experienced business leader, experienced economist, nor is Trump. But Trump gets a pass on that because of The Apprentice and his appearance of walking off the helicopter on The Apprentice. So why blow that?

You may not like Harris's tax policy. You may not like inklings of certain things that she's doing, but why bet the system? You may be right. Sorvitas may be right. Nothing will happen. Maybe my friends are right. He's going to go play golf, but why if there's a 10, 15, 25% chance that

that he's going to do something ridiculously stupid and be a useful idiot for Vladimir Putin and pull us out of NATO and partition Ukraine and send Moldova back to the Soviet Union. Why take that chance, Katty? That's my question. I had a very good conversation with Jack Goldsmith, who I've mentioned before on the podcast, who is a conservative constitutional lawyer at Harvard, very smart guy.

He's not a fan of Trump's. He is definitely not a liberal. He believes in the American system. And he pointed out something that was interesting, which was that in 2016, there was a long list of things that Donald Trump said he was going to do that would have been illegal, like reinstate torture as a policy of American foreign policy, lock Hillary Clinton up. He promised to build a registry of Muslims in the country.

And he actually didn't do any of them. And I think Jack's point was that sometimes Donald Trump says he's going to do these things, and he actually agrees that Trump has authoritarian tendencies. And as John Kelly said, he would like to do these things. He would like to run America like a business with no checks and balances against him. But there still are checks and balances. Yes, he can call out the military. And the circumstances are very open-ended under the Insurrection Act,

He can actually call out the military against protesters and against rioters and use that as an excuse to go after them. But as Jack was saying, it would end his presidency. I mean, it would ruin his presidency as well as ruining the country.

And the likelihood is that he will probably use other means. He will try to change the Federal Communications Commission to give favorability, for example, to Elon Musk. He may use the Department of Justice to go after individuals, or he may use the IRS to go after individuals over their taxes. So I think there's things he would like to try, and we don't know. And I guess the

The point is yours is that, and as Jack Goldsmith said, the very fact that this is being talked about, even if it is only to try to win an election and get your base motivated, is in itself worrying for the United States and worrying for people who want to do business for the United States.

and has provided this incredible febrile atmosphere of uncertainty that is unnecessary, un-American, and unprecedented. So we don't know. We cannot sit here and say, listen, he won't do the things that he said he's going to do. But it is worth looking at his first presidency, looking at the guardrails, looking at the things he said he was going to do that he didn't actually do, and looking at how the system did hold.

And yes, this may be different this time around. And yes, they are more organized. Yes, they realize where they went wrong. And they've got this whole Project 2025 and changing the civil service and using the Vacancies Act to put loyalists in positions of power across the government. But they didn't succeed to do this the last time around. And we have to just hope that the American system holds because it has been an excellent system for America and for the rest of the world.

and hope that it holds this time around as well. We are going to take a quick break, and we will be back with our reporting from Pennsylvania. That was fun. We've both been out there. There's a little battle looming between the two of us. I'm going to win. I just like that said up front. Okay, you're showing your superiority.

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Welcome back. And before we get into what's going on in the swing states and our reporting on that and the kind of general state of the race with just, what, a week and a half to go, we wanted to remind you that we have two live shows in the states next week.

Thank you so much to everyone who's bought tickets. New York is now sold out, but we do have a very few final tickets available in Washington, D.C., so please do come along. That is on October the 30th, Wednesday, October the 30th, the night before Halloween. Come and get your trick-or-treat. It's therestispoliticsus.com to buy tickets. The link is also in the podcast episode description box.

And also, don't forget that we have this bonus episode coming up for founding members of our podcast. It's coming out this Saturday. We're going to discuss Trump's accusation of election interference. Obviously, that had something to do with your country, I believe, Katty Kay. And so we'll talk a little bit about that and whether or not that's bogus. But it's the rest is politicsus.com to sign up to

to be a founding member. And I do appreciate the emails that I get from founding members. Hopefully we can continue to build our list of members. Okay, so let's get on with this half of this week's program. And we're going to talk about the state of the race and take a quick look at the main swing states. And Anthony, I know that you have been speaking to people from both campaigns, as has I. So let's compare notes. What are you hearing from

from the Harris people? Yeah. So I've sat in on a few conference calls and I've also talked to some people directly. And so I'm going to lay it out for you briefly, but this is what they are saying. They have raised a billion and a half dollars. I don't know if that number has been completely announced yet, but they've got the money until they've got 12 days. They have seven states. The Harris campaign believes that these are seven unique demographies, Katty. It's almost like running seven

national elections at the same time. And they are knocking on doors. And so since the convention, according to the campaign, they've knocked on over 1 million doors. We did 60 of them this weekend. I'll talk a little bit about that. They believe that obviously women are going to decide this election. And the campaign is saying to people,

women vote. The Donald Trump campaign needs to rely on people that rarely vote. These are young black men, black men ages 30 to 40, black men ages 18 to 30 that are supposedly before Trump when they do the polling data and white men in that age category. It turns out they don't vote as much as the demographically equal women in those age categories. And so campaign believes that

that the Trump campaign has to rely on people that typically don't vote. Harris is relying on people that always vote. Here's the question. Is Trump being under-polled again? Okay, now the campaign believes that he's not. They believe there's just been major course corrections and even people just...

fudge factoring three-ish percent into these poll numbers as a 3% plug on Trump. So he doesn't appear to be underpolled. But the real question is Dobbs being underpolled. Okay. And so what is Dobbs just briefly? That is the overturning of the Roe v. Wade decision. Basically, we had a national...

freedom of reproductive activity for women in the United States. Now we have 14 states that will deny women access to an abortion and some states deny them healthcare if they're pregnant. And so it's a little bit of a risky thing there. That has been underpolled in 22. It's been underpolled in 23 by four to six points. And so the question is, is it still being underpolled?

Of course, Joe Biden was supposed to lose the midterm elections in this broad-based red wave. That did not happen. He kept the Senate, as we both know. And so that's a big question. Can I just ask you something? Did you get a sense when you're sitting in on those conference calls that their own

numbers, what campaigns like to call the internal numbers. And those are polls that are generally based on larger polling samples, the national polls. It's obviously very expensive to conduct a poll for the New York Times or The Economist or...

Marquette University. And so they tend to use fairly small sample sizes of people because it takes a lot of time and effort and money to get to those people. And the internal polls for the campaigns tend to have bigger sample sizes of people. Did you get a sense from sitting in on those Democratic campaign conference calls that their internal numbers are significantly different from the public polls that we're seeing at the moment? I did not get that. I got the sense from them that they were being very

straight up and saying that this stuff is very close. And so they see Wisconsin as of yesterday, they feel like they're up one to two points at Wisconsin. Michigan, they feel like they're up one to two points in Michigan. Georgia, they feel like they're down. Okay. They

Nevada, they feel like they're down. And again, when I say down, it's one to two points. It's all in the margin of error. When I say up, it's one to two points. So the question is, who's showing up at the polls? Now, what these guys will tell you is they've got hundreds of thousands of volunteers and the door knockers are saying, you're voting for us. Okay, that's great. Do you need a ride to the polling station? Okay. Okay. Do you need help

getting there. Okay. And that's a big thing in this campaign because it's a get out the vote election. Two things that the Harris campaign does not like. Okay. Trump is at his ceiling. It's 12 days before the election. He's never gone through 48%. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that he's there if not past it. I'm hearing that too, that his

ceiling may be higher than they thought it was. Yes, but it has been consistently tops out at 48%. It's 12 days before the election. He's there now. So that's concerning them. Can he go higher than that? Okay. They think she can get to 50, 51%.

They don't think Trump can get beyond 48. So the question is, can they get her people out? Now, this is the most fascinating part of the conversation, okay? Trump is really not campaigning. Follow his schedule. I thought the French fry thing at McDonald's was very effective, by the way. That's just me. I want to be very objective to people.

He's charming in a situation like that. He was effective. Great photo op, but he's not campaigning. Believe it or not, she's doing more campaigning. If you follow things on Twitter, she's campaigning terribly. If you follow things outside of Twitter, she's campaigning wonderfully. Okay, just...

What's going on now in terms of media segmentation. But here's the thing, the most fascinating thing the campaign said is that low information voters, I think you call them low propensity voters, but they were calling them low information voters. So in the Latin community, as an example.

They've got to go to the low information voters and say, this is what Donald Trump wants to do to your family. They want to deport your wife. They want to hurt your son's job opportunities by doing the following things to him. And they have to explain to people what the issues are before they go to vote. And so this is a process.

Okay, where Trump has an advantage over her is with low information voters. He has 100% name saturation. So someone going to the polls...

They see her name, they see his name, his name's more familiar, four to five decades of name saturation. And so they're combating that with the low information voter. So, Katty, if this is all about getting out the vote, you've been out in the field, how do you think their operation is going? Is it as good as they're saying? I think you're right. At this stage in the election, it's less about persuading people and more about making sure the people they need to vote actually turn out. And I

went with someone who was out knocking on doors, a volunteer who was knocking on doors in York, Pennsylvania last weekend. The campaign said they had 250,000 volunteers from around the country flood Pennsylvania alone over the course of the weekend. And it's an incredible operation. Volunteers get on a bus. They're driven two and a half hours up to York, Pennsylvania, which is where I was going to see the operation.

each volunteer is given an app on their phone and they have like a four block radius and they need to go and knock on those doors. Now,

The guy I was with had these four blocks. He had about 50 houses and only about six people answered the door. This was a working class neighborhood of York, Pennsylvania, very mixed, very Hispanic, black and white. I mean, an unusually mixed neighborhood, but definitely working class. And the campaign had told them that this was a democratic area and that they would be unlikely to meet Trump supporters.

So, for about two hours, this guy was knocking on doors and he got about five people to answer. He spoke to a couple of guys who were sitting on a front porch who were Hispanic Americans from the Dominican Republic who said to him that they would not be voting for Kamala Harris because she was not strong enough.

and that no foreign leader, particularly Arab leaders, they said leaders from Middle Eastern countries would never respect her because she's a woman and that they like Trump because Trump is strong. Another couple of black women who were on his list, elderly black women said they were not going to vote for Kamala Harris because she killed babies was the phrase they used because she's pro-abortion rights. So he managed to speak in person about

to 10 different voters, four of whom were for Trump and...

And three of whom had actually voted already and three said they were going to vote. But I heard the conversations. I would say maybe one or two of them would vote. So I came away from that thinking that is not great news for the Harris campaign. This was meant to be a Democratic stronghold. First of all, it's taking a volunteer two hours to knock on 50 doors,

And fewer than a dozen doors are actually answering. So that's a lot of manpower not to reach very many people. And because they're doing it all on their phones and they've all joined the buses early in the morning in Washington, D.C., they've driven up two and a half hours. They spent another hour and a half getting organized and being sent to the right place and uploading the apps. Guess what happens to your phone after an hour and a half?

It's dead. So after an hour and a half, most of the other volunteers actually had given up because they couldn't access the houses on their phone anymore. So even though these numbers are impressive, when you actually see it on the ground and you go around with somebody, you realize the pitfalls in the operation.

I did then spend some more time on Tuesday in the suburbs of Philly with Congresswoman Madeleine Dean, a Democrat. And she said that in her neighborhood, there is much more enthusiasm. It's a much more pro-democratic area. They have very high turnout. And I think at this point, the campaign strategy is to drive up turnout as much as they can in these areas which are enthusiastic and pro-democratic.

I know you went to that area too. And so you drive up turnout as much as you can and you take your losses in somewhere like York, Pennsylvania. And you just hope that the numbers play out. But yes, the machine is there. Yes, they're all being bussed in.

When it actually got to it, the numbers of doors that these volunteers are knocking on is pretty small. Makes you pessimistic. I came away from York quite pessimistic about the operation. Yeah, I would have to say, having seen it in action, it was not the kind of rah-rah. It was not massively pro-harassment. I mean, a lot of these people, to be honest, Anthony...

You know, you ask them, are you going to vote? And they're like, you can tell their priorities, their rent. Not all of them really seem to know who Kamala Harris was. Then really not focused on the election. A couple asked when election day is. I mean, this is, you know, this is the low information, low propensity voters vote.

that the campaign said were in a democratic neighborhood. I'm going to watch York, Pennsylvania on election night and see what happens. It'll be interesting. When the campaign says they have to define her, they have to defend her and attack him. So they say define, defend, attack. Are they doing a good job of that? I think on the attack side, they've started doing a good job.

I don't know still that the define side has been done as well. When we said in the last half, they're making this comparison, Trump has an enemies list, she has a to-do list. I still think the question is, what's the to-do? And you heard it in some of the interviews she gave with Liz Cheney, people saying, can you give me the takeaway from this? Can I know in concrete terms what you're going to do? And I think

Certainly the voters I heard in York, Pennsylvania were not saying, oh yes, I love this policy of hers. That was not what was jumping out to me in York. Now in Philadelphia, it was a different operation. It was a much more upscale neighborhood, people with more money, people with much more engaged, many more Harris yard signs, sort of upper middle class voters who were talking about abortion rights and democracy, different electorate.

How do you think she's doing there? You know, I had a little bit different of experience. So I was in Montgomery County in a place called Green Lane, and we knocked on a lot of doors and we were doing pretty well. Some people said, hey, please don't bother me. That always happens. But some other people were saying- You sure they weren't rolling out the carpet for the celebrity, Anthony Scaramucci, who was coming and they made sure people were home. I did take one or two selfies, by the way. Okay, so there. I

I saw. I saw the videos. Yeah. In all seriousness, one guy came out with his ballot. He said he just filled it out. He was putting it in his mailbox to be shipped over to the post office. Some other people said they were going to get out and vote. But, you know, to your point,

a lot of door knocking, a lot of doors not being answered. But they say this works. They say that if you get the person, they come out of the house, they talk to you, you've asked them for their vote, it increases the propensity of them voting. But I guess my thing, and I want to talk, if you don't mind, a tiny bit about this Cambridge Analytica, because this is something that

Trump used very effectively. And what Cambridge Analytica did was they targeted people and they figured out if the person was on the fence or not. And then they figured out what their hot buttons were. And then they love-bombed them, caddy. So if they were pro-life, they would send love bombs of Trump talking about his pro-life position. Or if they were pro-this or pro-that or against this,

And they claimed that they could switch an undecided voter to a Trump supporter in 96 hours of this sort of algorithmic technique that they were doing. Now, that's not happening anymore. But I guess my question to you is, she has the money, but Trump has Elon Musk and he has X. He has this very formidable social media platform. It seems very clear to me that that social media platform has been engineered to

at this point to help his campaign? I don't know. It may even be borderline election interference. I'm just asking you, is that helping? Borderline election interference may be the $1 million that he's offering to Pennsylvania voters, not to sign up to vote, but to sign up to a petition from which he can start getting names. So that is going to be, it looks like that's going to be contested by Pennsylvania courts.

I think it's what you said earlier. There are now so few people left to persuade. Some of those people may be on Twitter, I suppose. And if it really is about dozens of people, not even hundreds of people in a particular neighborhood, then maybe that can make a difference.

I'm not sure that low information voters, these low propensity voters that they're trying to get out to the polls are necessarily the people that are on Twitter following this in the way that you and I follow this anyway.

I think it's about the machine at this point and about using all the money they've had to turn out as many people as they possibly can. And when I was in Philadelphia in Montgomery County, and I think you met a congresswoman, Madeleine Dean, she was confident that their machine is working well and that it was much, much better oiled

2020 election doesn't count because of COVID, but that it was a much better oiled machine than 2016, and that they were starting to see very high numbers of people already early voting. So,

That's what we're hearing from the Harris campaign. Oh, wait, stop. Before we move on from the Harris campaign to briefly discuss what you've heard from the Trump campaign, because they are sounding even more confident. I'm not hearing that Trump people, by the way, in my conversations with them say at all that this is close and this is a knife edge. They just seem to be saying they're going to win this. But before we get to that, when I was in Pennsylvania out with Madeleine Dean, I met the woman who held the sign behind you at the

the debate. She was your sign page. Her name was Elaine. She was lovely. And look what she did for me. Okay, so there is Elaine behind me carrying a sign like Anthony Scaramucci's sign from the debate. And on it, it says, Katty K. So I now have a sign too. You're just a brutal, you're a brutal person. And I've taken your sign. My sign was made by the woman who made yours. First of all, I'm bringing out my sign. Oh, you're bringing out your sign. Okay.

This Anglican woman is trying to suggest that her name is getting the props of my name on the sign. Do you see how small my first name is at the top of this sign? Look. Okay, they're using the entire K-A-T-T-Y on that sign. Okay, look at the top of this sign. You want to know what Elaine told me? I hate to burst your bubble, but each sign is exactly the same height. So even if your name had been...

Smith or K, your height of your sign would have been exactly the same. I know you like to think you got a bigger sign than anyone else. When you told me to join forces with you, I didn't think this was going to be an ego crushing exercise every single week. Okay.

You've crushed my ego. I'll call my therapist after the show. Elaine sends you her very best wishes. Okay, quickly. What are you hearing from the Trump campaign? How are they? Confident, not confident, scale of one to ten. The Trump campaign is expecting a landslide. Vivek Ramaswamy is talking about that on Fox News.

The Trump campaign thinks that this is a slaughterhouse situation. They are as smug as anybody they've ever seen. And I don't know, I am reminiscing about the 2012 Mitt Romney campaign, where I was told a week before the election, Mitt had it in the bag. We had to really get down to brass tacks related to his transition. We had to start thinking about the different agencies, so on and so forth.

Mitt then had a big party in Boston at the Westin adjacent to the convention center. He had fireworks in Boston Harbor. And so he was going to shoot off the fireworks after the announcement of his victory over Barack Obama. When he lost the election, there was a group of stunned people. One person that was stunned and upset was wearing a trench coat, sort of this like weather-

and he had orange hair and he stood up and he walked out of the place. His name was Donald Trump. And he stood up and walked out of the place with Michael Cohen. And I said, where are you guys going? And Cohen looked at me and said, oh, you know, Trump doesn't want to stay here.

for missed concession speech. We're heading back to Logan Airport to fly back to New York. So maybe they're right. I don't know because I've been humbled by life and I've been wrong about a lot of things. But I feel this thing is too close to call at this point. I'm for Harris, so I'd like to be able to tell people she's got it in the bag. It doesn't appear like she does.

to me. If you talk to George Conway, if we brought him on as a guest, George has this pack that discusses the psychological decline of Donald Trump. He thinks it's in the bag. He thinks that she's going to have an easy victory in 12 days. I don't see that. But I also don't see the need for the overconfidence that the Trump people have. What are your thoughts there?

I almost wouldn't be surprised by any outcome. I could see, and I think somebody's done polling speculation on this, the most likely outcome is a clean sweep for her. The second most likely outcome is a clean sweep for him. I suspect there's going to be a division of the seven battleground states.

And I wouldn't be surprised if we woke up and I don't think it'll be the next morning. It might not even be the morning after that. It may take two or three days, but I suspect, you know, it's going to be some division and it could go either way. Let me, let me ask you this. If you're sitting here and it's November the 7th and Trump is ahead and they're now waiting for

It's two days after the election. The election is on the 5th. It's November 7th. Two days after the election, Trump is ahead. And they're now waiting for Maricopa County in Arizona. And they're waiting for York, Pennsylvania and all of the tabulation of these mail-in ballots. And it flips. And now he's losing.

And it's coming to Saturday. And that was a famous day four years ago where the networks declared Joe Biden the president-elect of the United States on the Saturday after the election. What happens, Katty? Well, Madeleine Dean told me when I spoke to her this week that she thinks that Pennsylvania will call it on Wednesday evening.

And the chances are that when Pennsylvania calls, we know when the election is called. But if it flips, and again, remember, a lot more Republicans are voting in those mail-in ballots. So I don't think we're going to have quite the same scenario of what was described last time as a red mirage, that it looked like the Republicans had won and then all of the ballots flooded in from the mail-in ballots. And they were Democrats because I think we're seeing a lot more evidence that Republicans are voting by mail and voting early too. And so they could be in that final count. Yeah.

You know, that's the question we're all, you know, we're all hoping that once it's called, it's clear and it's clean and the other side concedes defeat. Before we go, let's have a calling sweepstakes. So this gets called Saturday after the election? I think it gets called earlier. If Dean is right and Pennsylvania has improved their counting processes...

and can do it much faster now of those mail-in ballots, then we should get a result on that Wednesday night is what she is speculating. But it could go into Thursday. But I think it'll be a couple of days. Okay. And if it's called for Trump, she concedes to Trump? Yes. I think if it is called for Trump, she concedes for Trump. Okay. And if it's called for Vice President Harris, he concedes to Trump?

I see that as less likely. Okay. When do you think, what day are you putting us? I'm sticking with the Saturday. I think there'll be a tremendous amount of commotion.

I think you may be right because they're so worried about it lingering, but I'm sticking with the Saturday. And then I'm also sticking with that he won't concede, but I'm sticking with he'll be more muted than people expect him to be. Interesting. In which case we may be for a calmer period after the election than many people are fearing. Because I'm making the bet, as I've said, and I said this at the O2 Arena last week,

that he's got a sentencing on the 26th of November, three weeks after the election. And he doesn't want to go to jail. And he doesn't want to foment violence that will lead to that.

And peace and harmony will reign in the United States of America. And on that nice note, we will end it this week. Who's going to win though? Don't leave without telling me. No, I'm not going to play that game this week. I'm not playing because it's a useless game to play. We don't know. I could call it either way. We don't know. I don't know any more than you know. So we're going to be grownups. Let me rephrase the question. Let me rephrase the question. Whose cards would you like to have? I would rather have her cards than his cards. That's my prediction. All right.

We will see you guys next week. We're going to do some extra episodes. And don't forget that on Saturday, we have our bonus question and answer episode, including is the United Kingdom meddling with the American election? And that is just for our founding members. So do join the club. You'll get those extra episodes. And next week, we'll be back with a few extra episodes as well, just in the run up to the election. See you then. And for those of you that are coming to New York and DC for the live shows, we look forward to meeting you in person.