45. Is there an earthquake coming in Trumpworld?
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Hello and welcome to The Rest Is Politics US. I'm Cathy Kay. Now, just after we recorded this week's episode, we heard the news that Matt Gaetz, the congressman from Florida, has withdrawn his name from consideration to become the next Attorney General of America. So I wanted to bring you a quick update. Mr. Gaetz said that the Congress

controversy over his potential nomination was unfairly becoming a distraction to the work of the incoming Trump administration. Now, that distraction was that he had been accused of having sex with minors and of paying for sex. And there was an ongoing ethics investigation

into Matt Gaetz's behavior and the committee on that investigation met today and actually decided not to release the report. But this being Washington, nothing stays secret for very long. And some of the details of Matt Gaetz's behavior

past behavior and the allegations of his past behavior were starting to leak out into the press. That was making members of the Senate who would have to confirm him feeling very queasy about it. One of the senators immediately afterwards, Mike Rounds, a Republican senator up on the Hill, said that he was not surprised by the fact that Matt Gaetz had withdrawn from consideration. He said he thought the nomination was going to be problematic and thinks that the president didn't know about these allegations of sexual behavior.

Another person who has responded to me was a Democratic member of Congress who texted saying that Matt Gaetz has fewer and fewer friends up on Capitol Hill, but raising the issue of whether he might actually still return to Congress. He resigned his seat in Congress when he was nominated to be attorney general.

but he may actually be able to still come back as a member of Congress because he did win his reelection bid in November. So that's still a big question. As for who might be coming up to replace Matt Gaetz,

There's a guy called Andrew Bailey, who is the attorney general of Missouri, who mysteriously tweeted out just after the news of Matt Gaetz that he had a big announcement coming. And he's one of the people who's been in contention. I'm not sure President-elect Trump will like the fact that he jumped the gun on any announcement of its coming, but watch for the name of

Andrew Bailey. So Matt Gaetz now, the most controversial of all of President Trump's pick, out of the running. This is a blow to Donald Trump who wanted Matt Gaetz to be his Attorney General, but there were just too many issues surrounding Gaetz and the fact that as the congressperson said to me, he has very few friends up on Capitol Hill, means that he just wasn't going to make it through the confirmation process. So that's the update on the breaking news. There seems to be a lot of it around in Washington at the moment.

And I hope you enjoy today's episode of The Rest Is Politics US.

How are you, Katty? I'm doing well. Washington feels like it's sort of in the eye of the hurricane at the moment. We've gone through the election and then there's this weird lull period while we wait for the inauguration and the new administration to come in and everybody's figuring out in this city what the lie of the land is going to be. But at the moment, things seem weirdly calm in Washington. I know we have to go through the show menu and you're great at that, but can we just talk about Washington? We always

get to it so late. Yeah, I'm sorry. But can we just talk about Washington expectations? Because they saw Trump show season one and all of its craziness. So they're ready for Trump show season two or has the plot line and the casting got crazier? I think they initially thought that season two might be duller than season one. And now they're looking at the pilot episode and thinking, wow, this is going to be must see television.

even if they're rather horrified by the prospect of what's going to happen. So in the first half of the show, we are going to get to the show menu. We are going to talk about Trump's nominees, but we also want to get into what the president-elect is planning to do and what he actually can do versus what he's planning to do.

And in the second half of the program, we're going to take a look at how Democrats are planning to deal with the next four years of a Trump presidency, as Anthony calls it, season two.

Anthony, what might be useful is to kind of run through the big areas before we get to the latest nominees. And there's some breaking news around a couple of them that we can get to. We're kind of getting the contours now of who President Trump... Do we call him President Trump or President-elect Trump, by the way? Technically, he's President Trump. He is the President-elect, but he once was President. So from a protocol perspective...

it's okay to call him President Trump. Because that's what we've always called him for the last four years, right? Exactly. And so it's okay to call him President Trump. But what's interesting about Trump is he'll want to be called President. But Dwight Eisenhower, you may remember this, when he left the presidency, he drove his car to Gettysburg,

And then he asked Jack Kennedy, who was his successor, to please sign an executive order to make a declaration that he wanted to go back to general. And in the private sector, didn't want anybody to call him president. This is interesting. In the UK and in Europe, once somebody stopped being president, you don't call them president anymore. Or once they've stopped being congressman or senator or ambassador or whatever it is, whereas Americans seem to get their title and keep it for life. That's because we don't have an aristocracy. That's the reason. You could.

be director scaramucci because you were director of communication so maybe i should be referring to you as director by the way oh my god for those of you not watching talking of history there's a very sort of 1990s gordon gecko vibe going on with your outfit today brutal it's it's brutal

I got to go to Mike Bloomberg's conference. Okay, see, I got the Paisley tie. I'm ready to go.

put them into detention camps. President Trump this week has said that he would be prepared to use the US military in order to round up people who are in the country illegally, who have initially just people who have committed serious crimes. But what we don't know is what the next phase of that is. The administration to be is talking about 1 million people a year over the course of four years.

building these camps or using military bases as camps and using the U.S. military, President Trump tweeted out this week to round those people up. That's got the ire already of at least one Republican senator. Rand Paul from Kentucky came out and said he doesn't like that idea of using the U.S. military in that context.

But it's pretty clear that President Trump is going to sign something on day one around mass deportations. What is still not clear to me is how much they can actually do, because I've spoken to some people who understand the workings of government who have said it's actually quite difficult to do the kinds of numbers they are talking about, a million people a year, without sucking up all of the bandwidth of other things you might want to do. So the amount of law enforcement it would take to do that, the amount of personnel, the amount of

time and effort in the West Wing that it would take to kind of organize the scale, if they really are going to go for at least a million a year and possibly even more. Some people have spoken about 12 million over the course of four years, that that would just kind of bog the administration down when it's trying to do other things as well. Just looking at the people he's appointed, Stephen Miller, for example, in the White House as an advisor, this is clearly a priority. Do you get a good read on how much of this they can actually do, Anthony? I think it's nearly impossible to do it, but I want to...

So let's say a million people a year, that's approximately 83,000 a month.

And so I guess my question back to you, are there 83,000 illegal immigrants that are criminals, that are engaged in criminal activity in the United States per month? You're saying beyond the fact of being here illegally, that have committed other crimes. Let's accept Trump's numbers for a second. I think they're exaggerated, but let's give it to him. There's 15 million illegals in

in the country. How many of those people are committing crimes? Again, I'll just give you an example for our viewers and listeners. We have 1.8 million prisoners in our prison population, and it is the largest prison population in the world per capita. And so you tell me, Caddy, let's say our country's got 330 million people in it. There's 1.8 million prisoners in

So on 15 million people, that's implying, you know, 30 to 80,000 criminals. President Trump is saying he wants to knock out a million people. So when you're making the argument, you're saying, so you're telling me we have a million illegal immigrants in this country that are perpetrating crimes?

I mean, I know they're eating dogs and cats and all this other nonsense, but they're perpetrating crimes. And so it doesn't make sense. So therefore, if you're going to execute this thing, you have to go after non-criminals as well as criminals. And now, you know, you're going to eat into the tax base. It's going to cost you money. The estimate, you know, and I did this estimate on 1.8 million because that's our prison population. The estimate is $88 billion of taxpayer money per year.

to deport, forcibly deport 1.8 million people. I don't know. You tell me. The guy who's been put in charge of this operation, who'd be head of immigration and customs enforcement, has said there's no price tag that America would pay that is too big to pay for this and that any price, forget the federal deficit, that any price is fine. He has said that we would deport people who have committed crimes at

At first, so I think the at first suggests to me that they are planning to round up other people if they're going to hit that kind of target. And just to put this in kind of perspective, in his first term, Donald Trump deported one and a half million immigrants over the course of four years. That was actually down from Barack Obama, who deported millions.

3 million. In his second term, he was known as the deporter-in-chief. So it's not uncommon for people to deport. It's just the scale of it. I think it's particularly immigrants who are here illegally actually commit crimes at much lower rates than American citizens. We know that. So I would be surprised if there were a million people who had committed serious crimes. I think their intention is to deport big numbers. But this could be one of the tests of whether Donald Trump means what he says. And I always think with Trump, you have to

and I learned this covering him in the first four years, you have to judge him by what he does and not what he says. And we can talk a bit more about what that means for Democrats in the second half. But this may be one of those cases where he wants a big show of rounding people up initially. He wants camera pictures of people being put into detention centers.

who look like bad guys. But if he starts separating families, which this could imply if he's going to go beyond people who have committed serious crimes, then in his first administration, we know where that led. The American public did not actually like the pictures of families being separated at the border.

And it kind of united the country against him and against his policies. It really hurt him in the 2020 election. I imagine his team is wary of that. So they're not going to want the pictures of kids crying every day on national television. Yeah, it hurt him in 2018 too with the congressional midterms.

But, Cady, Tom Homan, who we're both referring to, the border czar, is talking about the revocation of birthright citizenship. And not to get overly technical, but basically, if you're born here in the United States, you are entitled to the citizenship as your children who were born here in the United States.

What Tom is saying is if you got here illegally or you're here on a visit or a tourist and your child is born here in the United States, they're no longer entitled to birthright citizenship and they can issue a revocation. And so, Katty, don't worry. The families are going to get deported together. So if the mother was here illegally, baby nurse living here for 30 years, paying her taxes, had three kids here, we're going to deport her, but we're going to revoke

the citizenship of the law abiding men, adults now that were born in the United States. And we're going to deport all of you back, I guess, to the country of origin. This is the other question is, I mean, all of this is,

is going to get bogged down in enormous legal challenges. We saw that when he tried to implement a ban on Muslims coming into the country in his first administration. So will it actually happen, I think, is my question. I mean, he can say all of this. I'm going to revoke birthright citizenship. I'm going to deport over a million people a year. But how much of it actually happens? Or does it just bog his administration down in legal challenges? So again, I'm 35 years as a market participant. The US stock market and the global markets are

are telling you that that's not going to happen. The U.S. stock market and the global markets are saying that Donald Trump and his team, his cast members, are going to run a center-right business, a center-right coalition that's going to be moderate. And they're going to deregulate and potentially extend

the Trump tax cuts, which is why the market's been booming in the subsequent weeks since the electoral success. So the market is saying, no, that is not going to happen. Tom Holman is saying, yes, it is going to happen. But again,

Take the numbers I gave you. Think about them for a moment. 15 million illegals. I think that number's high. Trump says that that's the number. Apply the percentage of people that are in prisons in the United States over the population. So you would get 81,000 criminals out of the 15 million people. So that's one month's worth of deportation. So if you're going to deport a million people a year, you're going to have to find law abiding

taxpaying residents of the United States, and you're going to have to rip them out of their homes and rip them out of their jobs and deport them. I love the idea that the markets are going to be the ultimate arbiter of Donald Trump's presidency and what keeps a check on him. We've spoken a lot about checks and balances on the podcast before and the guardrails that are around him, but it could end up, I think a couple of Democrats have said this to me over the course of the last week, that actually the real guardrail around Donald Trump will be the stock market.

And he does not want the stock market to crash on his watch. He's very proud of his stock market. And if the market starts saying, we don't like the things you're doing, whether it's tariffs or deportations, then that could be a reason why he doesn't do it. It seems to be the only thing that will really keep him in check at the moment.

the legal battles. So we've had Jack Smith, who was the special counsel, who was appointed by Merrick Garland, the attorney general, to oversee the investigations into Donald Trump after the 2020 election and the events of January 1st and the documents that were taken down to Mar-a-Lago. And Jack Smith has now resigned after Donald Trump said that he was going to fire him if he came back in again.

Do you think anything happens with these legal battles now? The New York prosecutors who were due, as you've mentioned many times, to sentence him at the end of November have said they've agreed to push the sentencing to after Donald Trump leaves office in four years' time. I'm assuming this is kind of the end. The only one that...

What interests me is whether anything could ever be revived in the Mar-a-Lago documents case, which constitutional lawyers have said to me is the most significant case against Donald Trump, the most easy to prove and the most egregious against him, in fact. Could that still have legs post-2028 or is that all over, do you think?

You're the lawyer, by the way, on the podcast, not me. Just to make clear to our audience. First off, when he takes power, my guess is he's going to pardon himself. And maybe he won't do it in the first day or the first week, but certainly before the end of his term, assuming that he lives up to the Constitution and he leaves pursuant to the Constitution, he doesn't try to alter

the game. And if you think he's not capable of altering the game, you don't really know him. At some point in the term, if Donald Trump says, hey, citizens, I got gypped out of the 2020 election. And Bill Clinton used to think that you could have a break in the action and then go serve two terms.

I'd like the Congress to pass a law to allow me to do that. And I'm going to run for reelection. Okay. And is that impossible, Katty? I don't believe it is impossible. I think it's unlikely. I think, first of all, he'll be super old, even older than you and even older than me after my birthday. And...

Would the 50-year-old Donald Trump do that? This is where we get into arguments about whether Donald Trump is really going to overthrow the whole American system and is capable of doing that. I would find it hard to see the Supreme Court agreeing to something as enormous as saying, okay, the term limits no longer apply and you can run for a third term. But I

I don't even know that he wants to. Does he run for a third term in office? Now he's proved that he could win if the point was proving that he's not a loser and that he can win again and that he can implement these huge changes to the American government in terms of bureaucracy and things. Does he want to have a third term? I mean, maybe I'm being lack of imagination, but I find that hard to imagine. Okay. I hope you're right. Again, go by the stock market. The stock market is telling you that Caddy K is right.

But, you know, as a as a risk manager, what I just said, I don't have it at a zero percent. I have it at some percent, but I have it as a high likelihood he pardons himself at some point during the term. Those cases are terrible, but they they go away. They go away because he won the election and Americans.

It's just the facts. Winning matters. What happens to the Georgia case? Because that's the only one which is a state case and not a federal case. And he can't pardon himself on that. So presumably that would hold, right? He still can't pardon himself on the Georgia case, which I know has been delayed and postponed and full of problems. But I don't think the case is ever brought. And I think Kemp could easily pardon him for that. The governor of Georgia who's been in, everybody's in the Trump rotisserie. Okay. What's the Trump rotisserie?

I hate Donald Trump. I love Donald Trump. I hate Donald Trump. Trump and Kemp, the governor of Georgia, were fighting for

Kemp and his family were getting death threats. And then Trump was like, okay, wait a minute, I need this guy to win Georgia. I got to go make peace with the guy. Then they go lovey-dovey three, four weeks before the election. So that's like everybody. I know we're going to talk about Bobby Kennedy and obviously J.D. Vance called him Hitler. I mean, this is what we're doing. Yeah. On the world stage, it's been a bad week for the Ukrainians who have been suffering more

attacks in Ukraine, a ballistic missile attack in the east of the country. And you've got the Biden administration trying to surge weapons to the Ukrainians, perhaps not far enough, because it looks like some of them might go by boat rather than by air, which would get them there even quicker. The Brits also allowing the Ukrainians, as well as the Biden administration, to use more long-range weaponry into attacking inside Russian territory. So a lot happening on the ground in Ukraine, while Kyiv is also bracing for actual attacks on the capital city.

I'm looking at the appointments around Donald Trump, and it's a weird mix of ideologies because you've got somebody like Marco Rubio, who's the candidate to be Secretary of State, who has actually been a defender of the Ukrainians and of America's efforts and has tried to do things in the Senate that would make it harder for Donald Trump, for example, to pull out of NATO. But then you've also got people like Tulsi Gabbard, who's much more of an isolationist

and is more popular on Russian television this week than she is on American television at the moment, who's the nominee to be director of national intelligence, which is the top intelligence, overarching intelligence job in

So I think that's it. He did what Steve Bannon said. He flooded the zone. And so you've got a lot of questionable and controversial picks. The other person I would just add to the conversation in agreement with you is Mike Waltz. Mike Waltz has been a former U.S. Special Forces. Mike Waltz has been with Rubio on...

on the idea that Ukraine's sovereign integrity needs to remain intact. And so that's an interesting thing. I'm going to say something wildly contrarian. Some people listening will throw up. You're driving the car, try not to get too nauseous. But because Trump is so unpredictable on certain things,

Hear me out for a second. Trump could turn around now. He's 78 years old. He knows that if there's a PP tape on him from Vladimir Putin, it doesn't matter. We've learned that about Trump. There's nothing you can say about Donald Trump. He's got a heat shield around him. He's impregnable. And he may turn around and say, hey, Vlad, you're making me look bad. Everybody thinks...

I'm your lackey. You got to walk back from this situation. We're going to put a demilitarized zone in there and we're going to give a 10 year agreement that nobody joins NATO for the next 10 years. Here's a demilitarized zone, but you got to push yourself back. You got to walk yourself back several hundred miles closer to your border. Maybe Crimea is gone that that left with the Obama administration. Yeah, but but it's not in it's not impossible. Vlad.

I'm trying to help you out here. I'm going to take all the sanctions back. My friend, Vlad. Yeah, you know, you and I are really close. I could see the orange man doing that. And people probably throw up, but right now the consensus is for the Liberals –

Orange man bad, Vlad bad, and they're going to partition Ukraine and we're going to have a nightmare sweeping over Europe. But you've got people on Trump's team that don't want that. Yeah, I agree with that. And you've also got Trump who's like, you know, everyone thinks that I'm Vlad's lapdog. I'm 78 years old. I'm the leader of the free world. Let's show who's boss here. Yeah, let me flex on Vlad a little bit. Let me tell him that he's got to get back in his backyard.

This is the flex on Vlad episode. The rest is politics. I'm just telling you how the guy thinks. So you're sitting there, everyone's conventionally thinking this way, take a breath and think that he may go the other way. And he's got teammates that want to do what I just said, by the way. Talking of flexing, there's a tape that CNN has just got hold of and it's just come into my newsfeed. So I'm reading it. And CNN says, in audio that we've uncovered from his radio show...

R.F.K. Jr. praised a description of Trump and his supporters as belligerent idiots, outright Nazis and cowards and bootlickers. And R.F.K. Jr.

RFK Jr. also compared Trump to Adolf Hitler. How does that go down in Trump world? Well, maybe Trump takes this as a compliment to be compared. I mean, you know, Vance compared him to Hitler. He made him the vice president. I don't know. Maybe Trump's like, thanks for the compliment. I don't know. Okay. This is so interesting about Trump because you're right. Some people criticize him and never get forgiven. Right. And other people can criticize him like J.D. Vance. Right. Nikki Haley, never forgiven. Right.

J.D. Vance has said way worse things. I mean, look, RFK Jr.'s describing Trump and his supporters as belligerent idiots, outright Nazis, cowards, and bootlickers, and comparing him to Adolf Hitler. Well, that's okay. I'm going to give you – see that? See, I actually have under my desk the Trump decoder ring.

You don't even have to buy it in the cereal box, Cady. When I was a kid, I used to dig into the box. My mother would go crazy, get your dirty, grubby hands out of the cereal box. Let me give you the Trump decoder ring, okay? Nikki Haley, never forgiven. I made you, Nikki Haley. You're a nobody without me.

I am a somebody. And because of my narcissistic greatness, I made you. Now you're coming after me. I made you. Vance was not made by Trump. RFK was not made by Trump.

You could pick all the assortment of people. Lindsey Graham, Trump's a loser. Cruz, he's a lascivious liar. I mean, all these different people, and they're all sitting there in the Trump stable of frenemies. And so this will pass. Belligerent Nazis, Hitler, this will pass. Trump weirdly likes it. Okay, I know you think I'm crazy.

But he likes the fact that people that really despise him are licking his boots now. He loves that.

OK. And, you know, he loves the grovel. If a journalist is going to go down there because their knees are knocking. Love that. If Nikki Haley, I'm going to banish you because I made you. Yeah. OK. But, you know, he didn't make these other guys. So that's how Trump thinks. And that's what's going on in his brain. So the belligerence and the Nazis and the Hitler Trump's cool with all that. And by the way, he was blasting RFK. He was blasting Joe Rogan.

And then he met with Joe Rogan because Elon Musk set him up. Then they were trying to hug each other at the UFC match. I don't know if you saw the body language between the two of those guys, but Rogan was looking at him like, how did I get involved with this? You know what I mean? You could tell he really doesn't like Trump. He was trying so hard to like him. I was sitting there laughing. I was saying this to my wife.

I said, you know, eight short years ago, I was sitting at Trump Tower with these lunatics.

trying to build a cabinet, trying to build personnel. You'd bring Trump a name. Okay, I like that name. Four minutes later, he doesn't like the name. Why don't you like the name? Well, Katty Kay called me and said that the guy had a booger in his nose, and so I don't like him. I just saw a video of the guy, and it looked like he had like a nose hair shooting out, and that's really bad on television. I mean, that's him. And then you go back in with another name. Oh, no, I don't like that name. And then you're sitting there, and you're stressed out.

out of your mind. Okay. And you're sitting there saying, how are we going to build this thing? And then the stuff that he doesn't care about,

That actually gets built because there's a group of smart and thoughtful people that are trying to staff. These are the things he doesn't care about. But the stuff he cares about, the Department of Justice will put Mickey Mouse in charge of that. DNI, Yosemite Sam. You know, he's got the whole cast from Warner Brothers and Disney characters and these different posts because he cares about these things. Let me just say this. I know we have to break. Let me just say this. Dr. Oz, lovely guy.

On television. I know you beat him in Jeopardy. You beat him in Celebrity Jeopardy. God bless you. Okay. But Dr. Oz is going to be in charge of $1.6 trillion. Peter Hexeth, okay, the Fox News weekend anchor, he's in charge of a trillion. Okay. So we have two television hosts. Okay.

Okay. That have had no experience running organizations. And a NATO ambassador that has no foreign policy experience whatsoever. No foreign policy, but we're going to put these guys. But they look good. Okay. So, but 2.6 trill. Okay. They're going to be running 2.6 trill. So again, Donald Trump is the armchair quarterback. He's watching British football. The coach sucks. I don't like this player. I would switch that player. You know, me and my buddies from the pub,

We can run the match and we can run the game and we could own the team better than the owner. And the more disruptive these people are, the more liberals hate them. Yes. The more outrage there is that they're not qualified, the happier he is. But please answer this question because you are so much cheaper talking to every week than my therapist. So let me just ask you this question. Okay.

Elon Musk- I'm going to start billing soon. Yeah, no question. Okay. Elon Musk is worth $250 billion. Can't spend the money in 25 lifetimes.

Is he been a beneficiary of America or is he not been a beneficiary of America and the culture of entrepreneur? In other words, what is so bad about this system that we have to bring down the system and destroy the system? Do we have problems? Yes, of course we have problems. Do we have to slow down government spending? Do we have to right size the deficit? Absolutely have problems. I'm not saying that we don't. I'm sorry. No, no.

Not only has he been the beneficiary of the United States, he's been the beneficiary of the United States government specifically. He's had $10 billion in contracts in the last 10 years. This is the guy that wants to bring down the U.S. government, has actually benefited financially and built his whole empire on the back of the U.S. government. I don't understand. Someone's got to explain it to me. Someone's got to say, you know, I've lived a great life in this country. Is the country perfect? No. Does the country have...

pockets of discrimination and bigotry. Certainly it does. Can we make it better? Yes, we can. But do we have to destroy the whole place? You know, it's just nonsensical to me. So anyway, I'm sorry. We slightly glossed over me beating Dr. Oz, who is this celebrity doctor on Celebrity Jeopardy. But there we go. I didn't quite get the flex I wanted there. No, no, no. You can flex. We got to go over that. So before we go to break, tell me about the consternation

on Dr. Oz's face. Let me hear the whole thing. So Jeopardy is this kind of quiz game that I have to be honest, when they asked me to be on it a few years ago, I'd never actually seen it. And I agreed to be on it and then saw it and thought, what the hell have I done? Because there's no way I'm going to get through this. So I prepped and prepped and did mock sessions. I turn up and it's Chris Wallace, me and Dr. Oz.

And Dr. Oz is this celebrity doctor who's on television, who Donald Trump really likes. He has peddled a few conspiracy theories and he kind of sells diet pills or endorses them. And he's now being tapped to run a big health agency in the state in charge of government health programs.

And we get onto Celebrity Jeopardy and I beat Dr. Oz and he's not like you, Anthony. He's thin skinned. He didn't even stop and shake my hand and say, good game. Just walked off stage. Didn't even really say anything to me at all. Didn't even say hello at the beginning or goodbye.

buy at the end. He was intimidated by your genius. I love that this is somebody so wholesome and balanced and sure of themselves is going to be in charge of a big government agency. It's only 1.6 trillion, guys. Let's just make a rounding error. Between us. We're going to take a break and come back and talk about the Democrats in a second.

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Welcome back to The Rest Is Politics US with me, Cathy Kay. And I'm Anthony Scaramucci. So I had an interesting conversation, Anthony, this week. I met a member of Congress and we chatted for an hour or so about what Democrats are doing and how they're figuring out. And it was really interesting kind of listening to the thought process because obviously they've all been through Donald Trump once and now they're preparing for the second term. And I think they're trying to sort of be thoughtful about what they're doing.

Rather than the resistance, as it called itself, I hate that word now with these big protest marches and having their hair on fire every time Donald Trump says something, a little bit like I said in the first half, they're really trying to look at what he does, not just what he says or what he tweets.

but not let him kind of spin them out of control. This member said also, look, we're actually trying to see where can we work together because there may be overlap on some of the things that we can do and what can we achieve separately by ourselves. So there is a lot that Donald Trump can change, but there's also a lot he can't change. And Democrats in Congress are very keen to still have their role as the

opposition party that blocks some things. And it's a very slim majority. Now we see, I think, the picture we have today is a different picture from what it was on election night, where it looked like Donald Trump had won by 7 million votes in the popular vote. Now he's down below 50% of the popular vote. The congressional majority in the House of Representatives is only going to be like three or four seats. So I think Democrats actually, interestingly, are much more thoughtful this time around than

They also got plans to make sure between now and the inauguration that they have a sort of blanket the airwaves. This member was telling me, I thought this was interesting. This is something Pete Buttigieg has talked about, the transport secretary, and that they're going to try and take credit for the things that they have done, the money that they've spent on the CHIPS Act, the money they've spent on the infrastructure, and make sure that Donald Trump doesn't either come along and destroy that or take credit for it himself.

I just thought it was interesting listening to Democrats this week. And then they're having this kind of big sort of meta think about, you know, what does the party do? How do we position ourselves? And that's where I think there's still a little bit of delusion about what happened on election night and how much they really need to address that.

where the party goes, how they speak to working class voters, who could actually be the right kind of candidate to get them in a good position in 2028. What are you hearing from Democrats? Before I answer that, and I do have a couple of notes, I just want to ask you my proverbial question about strategy. You're the Democratic strategist that's going to build their blueprint for 26 and 28. Okay.

What are a couple of things you would say to them? You guys are delusional. Here's what you're delusional about. Here's what you need to do to fix it. So there's a very interesting guy called Patrick Ruffini, who's actually a Republican pollster, but who wrote a very good book on this.

on the realignment of the American electorate. And I spoke to him as well this week. And he says the one thing that Democrats have not understood, and he's particularly focused on Hispanic voters because that was the big swing, but I think it applies to working class voters in America generally, is that Democrats think that if you offer people help,

and programs and government programs to help them get out of poverty, that that's what people want. And Patrick saying actually in his work, particularly with Hispanic voters, but it does apply to other working class voters. And I think you have to just think kind of class, not identity.

What people want is not a handout. It's not the politics of redistribution, which the Democratic Party has been associated with. They're much more of a kind of pull yourself up by the bootstraps, upwardly mobile voters who want to feel they can get ahead. They aspire to be Donald Trump. That's what they want. They're both skeptical that government programs will work and won't be corrupt and will actually reach them.

But they find it sort of insensitive and patronizing when the Democratic Party comes along and says, right, here's a handout, you're poor, so we're going to help you. I mean, it's a very different model from the European model where there is a social contract that people rely on government, they pay their taxes, and it's perfectly okay to have the government help you. That's not the attitude in the States. And I think to get to your point, if I was a Democratic strategist,

I would say to the party leadership, stop thinking about identity and start thinking about this notion of what it means to be poor or working class or lower middle class in America and what people actually want and what helps them get ahead, because that's what this country is so good at allowing people to do. I think that's brilliantly said. And so I don't really have a lot to add, but I'm just going to say two quick things. AOC, AOC,

If I was a Democrat, I would want to have people speak with and talk to AOC because AOC gets it. AOC looked at her cross tabs and said, OK, wait a minute. Wow. Wait a minute. They voted for me, but they also voted for Donald Trump in my district. I have to understand why. And then she immediately pulled down her pronoun designation.

on her Twitter profile, her ex profile. And so she's saying to herself, hmm, I've got this wrong. I am missing a beat on the culture. And what I would say, the second thing I would say, which is a little bit of exactly what you're saying is go back.

to your breadbasket, which is the white, lower middle income, blue collar worker, voted for Jack Kennedy, voted for LBJ. The great grandparents or grandparents voted for Franklin Roosevelt. What are you guys doing? You left those people to Donald Trump. And remember something about Trump's base. They are social conservatives and fiscally liberal. They want the government programs.

One of the best signs ever, Caddy, and you know this famous sign, get your government hands off of my Medicaid. Get it off my Medicare. Excuse me, it's a government program. I just thought I would let you know that. Oh, I didn't know. And that's a big problem for the Democrats. They are toned up. They've decided we've got some power. Black and brown people have been abused in this country. We've got some power. We've got to go woke.

Everyone's got to wake up to the trials and tribulations of black and brown people in this country. And if you don't do it, we're going to cancel you. And so people have said, hey, sorry, man, we don't like it. We don't like that.

You know, I've had Italian immigrants say to me, you know, I know there was slavery here in the 1800s and 1619 to 1865, but my family didn't get here until 1923. Right. You see what I mean? And a lot of that goes on in this country. That's increasingly what Hispanic, we've spoken about this before, Hispanic voters who came over in the 1960s.

The first generation spoke Spanish, came across the border. They were focused on immigration. Now it's three generations later. With time, people move on to other issues, right? That's no longer their primary issue. And Donald Trump in 2016, he figured out that the Republican electorate was not as economically hawkish as the Tea Party and the D.C. elites and the country club Republicans would have had you believe.

They liked their social welfare programs. And now the Democratic Party has to do the opposite in a way and has to realize that the public is not as socially liberal as the left would like to have you believe. But the only caveat in all of this, and I don't know how they square this circle, is that politics is a game of addition and not subtraction. They need to add voters, not lose voters. They can't afford to throw out.

They're liberal voters under the bus in this process. So I think they still have to be, and you've spoken about this, they still have to be inclusive of social liberals, but also tolerant. And I think that's what this congressperson said to me is, you know, we speak at people, not to people.

We have to be much less censorious, much less scolding. But they can't at the same time lose the young voters who care about climate change or the black voters who care about police justice or the suburbanites who want

gun control, or the gay voters who care about trans issues. I mean, they can't lose those people in their bid to become more socially conservative. And I think that's what they're kind of figuring out. Maybe some of this isn't even in their hands. I mean, some of this may be down to kind of media types and influencers and actors and people who make a loud noise about these

social issues on social media or on television. And then the democratic party gets associated with that. This is what they need to figure out. Thank God I'm not a strategist because going in and saying, I don't know, it's not going to get me paid very much, but I can see the problem. You know, you know, you know a lot. And you said something that I want you to go back to, if you don't mind, you said that some of these people want to be like Trump. So what did you mean by that? Well,

I think they want to feel that they can be, and this is something we saw in 2016 as well. They want to feel that they can be rich and they want to feel they can have a swanky apartment, you know, in Trump tower or a private plane or aspire to anything is possible. That's a positive thing. And what they want is it's the old thing. They want government to get out of the way of them getting there because

Patrick Ruffini was speaking particularly about Hispanic voters. He said many of them come from countries originally in Latin America where corruption is very prevalent. So they just don't trust that when the government comes along and says, we're going to help you get to that position, they just don't buy it. And they would rather there was less regulation and less bureaucracy and less taxation and that they could do that by themselves. I thought it was

It was really his his analysis is really interesting. His book, by the way, is called Party of the People inside the multiracial populist coalition remaking the GOP. He brought it out before the election. He saw this coming. I will read the book. I know him and I'll read the book. I guess the thing I would say is if I were a Democrat.

Be a little bit like Trump. And they're going to throw up me saying it, but he wants to be liked, Katie. Did you know that about Trump? He has an insatiable need to be liked. He says crazy stuff. He acts nuts, but he does know how to hug the baby. He does know how to serve the French fries at the McDonald's. He knows how to be charming to people when he walks into a diner. And he wants to be liked.

Okay, so get off the high horse. Stop being pedantic. Okay, which was an SAT word that I learned in 1981. Stop being pedantic and let's go here. I have to ask you before we go, because this is a bit of a mystery to me.

What's J.D. Vance up to these days? So I'm so glad you asked that. Anyone would think that we discussed this beforehand. No, I am telling people. God forbid, dear listeners. J.D. Vance, to me, I have totally and wholly underestimated. Whatever IQ points I thought he had, I'm adding 30 IQ points. Where is J.D. Vance? Let me hold on a second. Let me just look under the desk. J.D., J.D., are you down there?

J.D., where is this guy? It's unbelievable how smart this guy is. This guy is like, you know what? This is the Trump show.

He won the election. He's basking in the glory. They're throwing laurel wreaths at him. I got to get out of the way. J.D., do you want to do CBS Morning News? I don't. J.D., do you want to do Face the Nation? Not me. J.D., meet the press? No, no, no. I'm good. My man, I know you don't listen to the Resist Politics U.S. with Catty Kaye.

Okay. And her side gig, Anthony Scaramucci. Well, let me tell you something, my man, that is some brilliant stuff that you're doing. Stay out of it for right now. Low profile. I am so impressed with that. I had him at a 10 out of 10 going into the Trump wood chipper and ending up like Mike Pence.

But I'm now 8.5 out of 10. He has impressed me with his disappearance. Listen, at some point, as everybody recognizes, and even Republicans are saying, this could go sideways because the people that have been nominated to the cabinet are being called the island of misfit toys in the Wall Street Journal. So this could not work out very well for Donald Trump. And if you want to be J.D. Vance, who wants to run for president, which he absolutely does in 2028, you

he's gonna face the Kamala Harris problem. If this does not work out, if there's inflation, if the tariffs hit,

If there's chaos in the bureaucracy and people don't get their prices down, then how is J.D. Vance going to run against the Trump administration of which he's part? He's going to face exactly the Harris-Biden issue in 2028. So he's smart. Quickly before we go, the Mar-a-Lago visit by the Morning Joe hosts. What's your read on that? I feel there's so much going on. This is a little bit of a navel-gazing media distraction. I get the criticism of how critical they have been of Donald Trump.

And then going down to meet him as a journalist, I'm always interested in talking to everybody. But what's your read on it? What I would say, the 15, 16 year run of Morning Joe has been interesting because there's always been an edge to their reporting and there's always been some insight. You feel like you're in a Washington briefing room.

And there's a lot of edginess to the reporting. And I just would want that to be maintained. And so they had their own personal reasons why they wanted to go do that. It's a free country. I have no problem with them doing that. But I guess what I'm worried about is that if they lose their edge or they get deflated from their positions as a result of doing that, I think it's going to hurt the show. Just so you know, I'm never doing that.

Okay, I'll just let you know, okay? You know, they can come after me and we can have a show trial or whatever they want to do. I think the guy's nuts. I'm on the record saying that he's nuts. Multiple times in multiple ways. Mark Cuban erased every one of his tweets. God bless him. And somebody said, aren't you going to erase every one of your tweets? I said, no.

I let you know the guy's nuts and there's a surgeon general's warning label out there on my Twitter feed. And if he does an amazing job, you and I, I will say, Hey, this guy's done an amazing, this guy's done an amazing job. I got that wrong. I'm already telling you, you know, I put out a tweet that Tony West, Kamala's brother-in-law loved. I said, I just want to thank JD Vance for being the worst employee ever.

Yeah, that Mar-a-Lago visit, the discussion more broadly interests me because I think it gets back to what we started this conversation about.

half of the program with how Democrats are figuring out how to deal with Trump. Do they talk to him? Do they resist him? Do they negotiate with him? Are they afraid of him? I think there are a lot of people who are more afraid of Donald Trump the second time around than they were the first time around and some of the cabinet picks.

If Kash Patel, who is a Trump acolyte, is put in charge of the FBI and Trump has said he's going after his political enemies, then I can understand why people are more afraid of him the second time around than they are the first time around. Just to be clear.

I never think it's a great idea to use the word fascism with Dominic Sandbrook on this. I think fascism and comparing Trump to Adolf Hitler, which Mr. Kennedy has done, feels for Europeans like a very specific thing that is a bit, just doesn't feel accurate. That has a specific ideology that is related to that period. And there doesn't seem to me to be a specific ideology underpinning Donald Trump. You can go ahead.

I'd call him whatever you like. You told me I was glib. You told me I was glib. I didn't use the word glib. You did. You did. It's a bit glib. It is a little glib. I feel it's a little glib. You didn't call me a popinjay, and I have been called that before. I actually thought it was much worse than I thought. But I feel so much better because I have Dominic on my side now. Our rest is history, compatriots.

I'm very jealous of Dominic's ad reads on top of other things. I know. I like those a lot. I'm very impressed with him. So, Katty, let me just say this to you before we go, because I know we do have to go. Trump world has not had an earthquake. Okay. And I am telling you that is surprising again, too. Meaning, yes, we're putting bozos up for the cabinet, sort of as expected, no earthquake. But I'm just wondering, is there an earthquake coming?

OK, is there somebody that's getting put up that, you know, really surprises people? Or is there a policy initiative that they're going to start? Or is he going to sign an executive order on day one to revoke birthright citizenship and have it get challenged all the way up to the Supreme Court? I don't know. We'll see. Well, the good news is we have four years to cover him.

And as I said, let's cover what he does and not always just what he says. And if that earthquake comes, we'll be there to tell you about it. Amen. We'll be back next week. Thanks so much for listening to The Rest Is Politics US. Thanks for listening, guys. We'll see you next week.