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Dumping the Trump Train With Anthony Scaramucci

2024/5/30
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Somebody's Gotta Win with Tara Palmeri

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Hi, I'm Tara Palmieri. I'm Puck's senior political correspondent, and this is Somebody's Gotta Win. We are in watch and wait mode for the jury to make up their decision in the Trump hush money trial.

By the time you hear this podcast, they may have already made a decision and we may have a former president as a convicted felon or he may be acquitted and be more politically powerful than ever before. Or maybe he'll be charged on some counts and not others. It's a wild ride. We really don't know.

Just hang in there. So in the meantime, I am going to talk about something that has always fascinated me. Why would anyone want to join the Trump administration? And I'm putting policy aside or politics. You can be hardcore right wing MAGA, agree with him on every policy.

But it just seems to turn out so poorly for everyone, even the ones who say they're going in there to course correct and stop Trump's worst instincts, as some of the people have said.

It's interesting, too, because as Trump's political power seems to grow and it seems to be clear that there is, you know, at least 50 percent chance that he could end up back in the White House. People in Washington are already talking about going back in. I was just talking to a former press aide who at one point begged me not to write about a new job that she had just gotten because she was worried that.

If it was revealed that she was a Trump aide, it would hurt her with this new corporate job. This was the time right after January 6th when Trump was toxic. So here's what I recall from covering him. Everyone who was really close to him, and they all wanted to be close to him because that's how he runs his operation. He's the closest to power. He creates division. I'm sure you've heard this all before. But everyone who was close to him ended up needing to retain legal services because there were inevitable investigations around him. So that's money you have to pay foreign lawyers.

or they were fired unceremoniously. It seemed like no one came out unscathed. Look at Rex Tillerson. He was the Secretary of State and before that, the CEO of ExxonMobil, and he was fired while he was on the toilet in Africa. Mike Pence, he was almost hung in front of the Capitol. And then there's the inevitable stink that ends up on these staffers, especially when Trump does something really reprehensible, like say incite an insurrection or praise white nationalists after Charlottesville. I

I guess the ones who denounced him quickly got book deals. But I don't know. It just doesn't make sense to me why people would start to line up right now to get back into the administration. I guess power is intoxicating. I met my next guest and friend of the pod, Anthony Scaramucci, when he was fighting to get into the administration in the early days. Maybe he didn't know what was ahead. This was when...

Trump's first chief of staff, Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon, were trying to block him from getting into the administration, even though he was a major donor and a friend of Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Scaramucci lasted for 11 bittersweet days in that White House. It was a wild ride. And he has a new book all about the lessons he learned from the process called From Wall Street to the White House and Back, The Scaramucci Guide to Unbreakable Resilience.

I always knew who Anthony Scaramucci was because you're a legendary on Wall Street, especially for your fundraisers and salt. Also, I worked at the New York Post. You were often mentioned there. So I always knew who you were. But then you had the privilege of meeting me. Yeah.

That's a gift that keeps giving, Tara. Yep, yep, yep. So our origin story is when you joined the White House or working on joining, they had really like blocked you out for a while. At the time, it was the head of the RNC, Reince Priebus and some other people, even though you were a major donor to both the RNC and Trump. I mean, the funny thing about Reince, I mean, he's such a baby, you know what I mean? All he had to do...

would say, hey, man, you know, I just actually hate your guts and I don't want you anywhere near the White House. I would have like totally respected that. That's like such a front stabbing move. Right. But it's politics, Anthony. You weren't ready for it. He's such like a sinister, duplicitous guy. You know, he's like he tries to pretend he's like Richie Cunningham.

you know, from like Wisconsin. I would have thought that by now you would have made up. I'm surprised that hasn't happened yet. Well, he'd have to apologize to me. He'd have to call me and apologize. I don't actually bear grudges and you brought him up. So I'm just bringing him up, but he's like such a big, I mean, grow up. I mean, you see, he's like calling reporters to drop bad stories about me.

okay, well, first of all, we're on the same team. I thought we were rowing the boat in the same direction. It's politics. You're right. You're telling me not to be naive and you're right. I, I, I'm not, I'm not really that naive, but grow up. He should pick up the phone, admit what he did and apologize to me. And then that would be the end of it. But he's not capable of doing that because he's got a little bit of Trump in him. You know, these people that are wrongdoers, they sometimes have a hard time apologizing and admitting what,

what they're capable of because they want other people to think that they're not capable of the things that they actually are capable. How's that for insight about politicians, how they think? You know, for me, looking at it with hindsight, obviously, and just looking at that time when I was covering the White House and everything was about palace intrigue and personnel, it was just that like Trump allowed all these fiefdoms to be created. I think they saw you as a threat and

as someone who was close to his family and, you know, he was already struggling to hold control against Steve Bannon and Steve Miller at the time. Right. Well, you had teamed up with Bannon. Eventually, but not in the beginning. Yeah. He was really being honest. He, he formed this unholy alliance with Bannon. He had to survive, but that wasn't the beginning. In the beginning. I don't, I don't see it. They say I'm an executive, right? I run a company, right? Yeah. Say there was a,

R&C group in there and there was a MAGA group that started on the campaign and they hated each other. When I got there, I was like, okay, this is like a really bad merger. This is like, you know, Citibank merging with PayPal. Yeah.

You got renegade innovators and you got corporate institutionalists that are going to pee on each other. And so what you needed to do is you needed to get them all in a room and you needed to force the merger. You needed to force a culture mixture and you needed to go to the president and say, OK, look, if you want this to work, this is what has to happen. And you have to empower me now.

with the ability to do this. But Reince was not capable of doing that because he didn't have executive management skills and he didn't trust anybody. And the number one, the number one thing about politics in life, I can't see about politics in Washington because I failed, but politics in life, you want power, you give power away, Tara. The more power you give away, the more powerful you are. But anyway, you brought up, you brought up Reince. I didn't bring him up. No, no, no, no.

This is a story to the White House. The last time I thought about Reince was like 2017. Yeah, I get it. So I do think there were other factors too. I think you have the kids, you have these other people coming in from New York, which obviously Bannon called the globalists. And there was just so many different types of factions. That's my proudest achievement though, politically, is that like,

Bannon, who's literally one of the most malevolent people on Earth, this is probably one of the things that Reince Priebus and I could actually agree on with a hindsight test. Literally one of the most evil people that I've come across. And it's like astonishing. And this is the disaster of Trump that a guy that evil and that manipulative and that dangerous was that close to

He was advising him on how to speak to the base. That was Bannon's role. Terrible. And let me, and Trump didn't need that. And Trump had already won the nomination after Bannon got in, you know, but, but, you know, he got fired on the same day as me, but he was such a baby. You know, he talked Kelly into staying in the white house for two more weeks. He didn't want to leave on the same day as me. I am very, very proud. I know, I know Kushner takes credit in his book for getting Bannon out of the white house, but,

But if Kutcher is really being honest, if you invite him on the podcast, he'll say, yeah, yeah, I take credit. But Mooch was like the fucking dynamite that blew his ass out of the seat. You know? Yeah. You were, you were brought in to clean up. Because I explained to Trump, I sat down with Trump in the study off the oval and

I said, okay, see this reporter? That's one of Bannon's buddies. Look what they're writing. This is what they're writing. Bannon is manipulating in this whole web of lies and hysteria, and he's causing you a severe problem six months into your presidency. But anyway, we're here now.

What an experience. What a life experience. It seems like a madhouse. And honestly, covering it was like covering a madhouse. Why the American people want to go back to that nonsense is beyond me. I hope I hope it doesn't come to pass. But, you know, if it does, we'll deal with it. It was surreal covering it every single day. It was another wild story out of the way. President, he has no executive management skills. He he's a good showman. He's a good reality star. He's a good communicator.

He does have good political instincts, but he can't run a process. You've got to run 5,000 people in the executive branch of the United States government. You have 14 million people that are employed by the government, either directly or through contracting. It's the most powerful entity in the world. And you have somebody that has no executive management skills going back in to run it. It'd be a disaster for the world, disaster for the country.

So the one thing that I will say, the through line through all of this is that at the time, everybody still wanted it and they saw it was a mess. People still want to be a part of the administration. Yeah, that was my mistake. Yeah, because power is, you know, very enthralling. People want to be a part of it. They think that they can change the president. They can change policy. They can change the world. Closer you are to power, you can do these things.

But everybody wanted in an aphrodisiac. I agree. That's a moral weakness on my part. I have to own for the rest of my life. I, you know, I had a buddy of mine. I'm not going to mention his name, but he was offered a job. He got interviewed by a lot of people. He talked to Trump, maybe spent six hours on to say, you know, it's not for me.

And you got to think of that. Okay. He put his ego aside and he made a correct decision. Not me. I got sucked into it for the reasons that you're talking about. And so I do write about that in my book. It is a cautionary tale. Get your ego.

And get your pride out of your decision making, make the decisions more clinically and more rationally. But there is a dance that goes on around Trump. OK, people at times want in and people at times want to be distanced from him as far as distance as they can be. Right.

For example, after January 6th, I remember writing that people who had worked for Donald Trump were worried that they weren't going to be able to get jobs after they had left the administration. They were worried that the corporate world was going to reject them. Even the RNC officials were worried that if Trump was involved in any way in the convention, that they would have a hard time raising money. Right. Corporates didn't want to give to Trump.

aligned people, candidates, et cetera. For a while, he was in this exile, right? After January 6th, he was in exile after Charlottesville. I mean, there were multiple times where he was deemed too toxic. And then he proves his political might again. He proves that he's back and people are drawn back into him. And it's exactly what's happening right now. Temporarily. Yeah. But can I, can I explain that to you though? Cause I think it's important. This is the 50 years from now, a, a,

political historian will write back and say, wow, what a bunch of cowards, unbelievable. What a bunch of moral cowards in the Republican Party. So McCarthy had Trump lights out. He could have knocked him right through the ropes, right?

On the 7th of January, he could have been the apex predator of the Republican Party. He could have said, hey, look, homie, that does not work for me. You tried to get the vice president killed. You premeditated the assault on the Capitol. Mark Meadows knows this. He's the chief witness for the prosecution. He's not a thorough sponsor, D.A. And I've got Pelosi and I've got Schumer. And believe it or not, I also have McConnell involved.

you're impeached. We're taking you to conviction. It's January 7th, 8th and 9th. Get out of Washington. Never be seen from again. And then McCarthy could have been the vicar of the Republican Party and he could have rebuilt a center right coalition. And he could have gone to the Trump supporters and said, hey, you can't have this.

You know, if you believe in MAGA and you believe in this sort of like you can have people running through the Capitol building, this disgraceful act that was just perpetrated that he helped to sponsor. He tried to do that. But the party chose Trump, not the party. Sorry. I mean, the grassroots chose Trump. All you had to do is say, hey, this is not right.

And I stand on principle and I have courage and I can get to Schumer. I can get to McConnell and I can knock this guy right through the ropes. You don't think he would be resurrected by the grassroots? No, he's done. Once he's impeached and convicted, he could never run again. He's done. Okay. He's politically exterminated by a moral leader, but McCarthy... He's not reincarnated by someone else that's just like him? How is he going to get back? He's...

Can't run for president again. If you're another MAGA character, say like Matt Gates, Matt Gates. Okay. Max, give me a break. Oh,

Okay. All right. Come on. You know, it's a cult of personality. Donald Trump, give him his due. He has a cultish personality. He's attracted a cult. God bless him. But you could have knocked him out and McCarthy could have got to a podium and said, okay, we don't stand for this. This is un-American. He's gone. If you want to rebel, God bless you. But I think you should follow me. You should follow a center-right coalition that

that loves human beings and is connected into what it means to be an American, not this sort of traitorous nonsense. A guy that doesn't even accept the election. He knows it's a big lie.

You know he knows he lost the election. I know he lost the election. He's perpetrating this big lie. It's completely and totally un-American. But McCartney didn't have the guts to do that. And neither did Mitch McConnell. That's what I'm saying. There's a profile in cowardice. This is a book not written by Jack Kennedy, but maybe it could be written by somebody else. It's called A Profile in Cowardice. Here is a group of spineless cowards who

that couldn't stand up to the orange maniac, who couldn't stand up to the bully, and couldn't present the interests of America and the world ahead of their own personal political expediency. But they didn't do it. I agree with you, but I don't think they are that powerful, to be honest. Like, I don't think people listen to Kevin McCarthy, and I don't think they listen to Mitch McConnell. Sure, they could have impeached him. They didn't need to. Exactly. They could have gotten rid of him. They could have convicted him. Boom, gone. He's gone. Bye-bye. You could have done that. And, Link,

Lincoln would have done that. FDR would have done that. Reagan would have done that. I'm sure they would have. I'm in no way defending these people. I just want to fast forward because, you know, in 2022, they decide...

Ron DeSantis is our guy. The whole party gets behind him. He raises like an ungodly amount of money for a primary, $200 million. They're like, he's our MAGA warrior. Mitch is behind him. Kevin would never say it, but like they're all hoping that he can take out Trump. But in the end, the grassroots didn't want DeSantis.

And in the end, they didn't want Chris Christie and they didn't want Nikki Haley. And now all of those same people are coming back around and kissing the ring. You want my opinion on that? Sure. Okay. So you're not going to knock a cult leader out in one, one chunk of the arm. So, so DeSantis is a very smart, very capable guy, but,

But he should have taken that money and he should have gone after the non-voter. He should have created a whole new market for himself. He should have thought like an entrepreneur. Yeah, he just went after evangelicals and the same old like Ted Cruz voter. Exactly. So, you know, what did Henry Ford say? If I listen, if I listen to my customers, they wanted faster horses.

What did Steve Jobs say? No one wanted a smartphone. They didn't even understand what it was. I had to show it to them. And what DeSantis needed to do with that money is think like an entrepreneur. He had 20% of the party. All he had to do is go pull in people who weren't voting anymore. And he could have put a real threat and a real hurt on Trump. And let's say he even lost and Trump got the nomination. Then he could have stood in a position. He could have said, hey, I'm sorry, I don't stand for this.

If you want, we got to build a new center-right coalition. But he's not center-right. He just put forward a six-week abortion ban. So then how about hard-right position? He's hard-right. Yeah. Well, so then he's not going to get there. But, you know, Nikki Haley's not hard, hard-right like that. She could have done it. She has the courage. She just said last week she's going to vote for Trump. Everybody says they're voting for Trump. Chris Sununu is going to vote for Trump. I'm not voting for Trump.

You're not voting for Trump. All Haley had to do was say, you know what? I got 20% of the party. I'm going to go after these non-voters. I'm going to take a position. The Whig party died in the late 1850s and the Republican party

It was a it was a new party. And Lincoln became the first nominee of the Republican Party. The Whigs were around for 70 years. The Republican Party is dying under Donald Trump. It's become the MAGA party. Yeah. So it's a different party now. So create a new center right party.

And go after the voters that are tired of the hard left and hard right nonsense. You have to change the primary schedule and everything. You can't start in Iowa. But Tara, you're in Washington too long with all due respect. You got that cynicism. Okay. Think like I live in Brooklyn now. I know, but you cover Washington. You cover Washington. Sure. Entrepreneurs are zero to one. How do we take something that's a zero right now and turn it into one?

You're not going to be able to do it in one election cycle, but you could do it. People are very, very frustrated in this country. They've had enough of this nonsense.

85% of the people don't want Trump or Biden on the ballot. Yeah, but you have to get past these primary voters in Iowa, which is why you probably have to change the schedule. Trust me, there are things you could do. Okay, they're entrepreneurial, creative people that could come into the mix. DeSantis had the opportunity to do it. But to your point, he went right after the Trump voter and the Trump voter wasn't ready to end their love affair with Donald Trump. And, you know, also between you and me, right?

ron is not that great of a retail politician okay nikki is no he's not or he's a nick nikki is a much more formidable retail politician which is why she did better maybe if the party put their money behind her first they would have had a different outcome maybe but the party to your point the party despises donald trump okay yeah they still do they hate him okay they think he's a nut job

But then speak out, be honest about it so that we can clear the party of the nut jobs. But he's completely become normalized at this point, especially within the party. He has not. Sorry. They'll say nice things about him and they'll show up with a red tie and a white shirt outside of the court case.

But he's not normalized. No way. He has become normalized by the party. And it's reflected by the fact that some people want to work for him right now. It went from no one wanted to touch him. They were toxic. You got to move out of Brooklyn. You got to move like the Montreal. You need to be further north. You got to get. Oh, I'm supposed to leave the country now to understand. No, I don't know. You got to get further.

Go to Maine then. Go to Bangor, Maine. You're too close to Washington. Explain to me, why is Elon Musk flirting with Donald Trump now? Why is David Sachs willing to admit that he's hosting Donald Trump at his house? Why are all these tech entrepreneurs now saying we love Donald Trump where before in 2020, no one wanted to touch him? So clearly there's a shift happening. Yeah.

And that's not the party. Those are your entrepreneurs. No, I can answer that. The best thing Trump has going for him are the Democrats. And so you have hard left policies.

The Biden administration, rightly or wrongly, will not embrace Elon Musk despite overtures by Elon to the administration. I listened to David's podcast all in. I'm not saying I agree with all of it, but hard left policies have failed in these inner cities. Hard left policies have failed in the state of California.

And so whether you like it or not, there's only two choices. There's a binary choice. And so guys like David Sachs are willing to take all the negative baggage of Donald Trump. And despite all of that negative baggage, they're willing to support him because they've seen the wreckage that's perpetrated by the hard left. It's not just tax breaks or, you know, it could be it could be elements of that. But look at what's going on in these cities.

OK, they got to put stop signs up now because people are taking the electric boxes out of the traffic lights. You've got a crazy situation going on where the stores are closing. The left leaning mayors are saying the crime is down. The crime is down. You get 25 percent. Your stores have closed. Yeah, the primaries in California definitely reflected that unhappiness with the progressive. It goes through whiplash. We go too far to the left. We go too far to the right. We go too far to the left.

But I also think David Sachs, you know, I don't like Trump and I would never support him. But hopefully people like David Sachs are providing a wake up call. Look at what the crypto community did. OK, they they they've shaken the Biden administration. Now, you had a situation where Gary Gensler was going to negate the ETF last week. He approved it.

Because they don't want to be in a situation where all the young voters are with Trump because Trump is all of a sudden pro-crypto and Biden and the fossils around him like Elizabeth Warren are anti-crypto. Kind of makes sense to the TikTok thing that I've been reporting on about the fact that there's two to one more pro-Trump content than pro-Biden content on TikTok. Well, come on. They changed the algorithm because they know Trump's saying that. But this is why TikTok shouldn't exist, though. You see, this is spyware in the country. Right.

And this is very, very damaging to the country. And we, the double standard is ridiculous. We would never be allowed to have this type of algorithm in mainland China.

This would be like USIA, which we used to broadcast Radio Free America into the Soviet Union. And they used to try to block the signal. Yeah, exactly. Voice of America. We're allowing the Chinese into the country, manipulating an algorithm that's creating havoc in our youth and is supporting them.

I don't want to actually say voice of America is propaganda. I used to intern there. It's a good place to work. I mean, it is obviously government funded. Well, whether you want to call it propaganda or not, it's pro-American, uh,

We don't want pro-Soviet Union voices in America. All of a sudden, we're letting the Chinese government dictate what's going to happen in a huge social media platform like TikTok. Come on. And Trump knows better. Trump knows better. But Biden would have been smart to say to Schumer, OK, listen, here's what we're going to do. I'll sign that bill on November 9th. Give me a couple of days after the election. But let me stay neutral on this until I can get through the election, you know.

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Here's another question from having been inside of the White House and then left. How did people treat you when you left? Did they treat you differently? What do you mean? Like White House insiders or what do you mean? No, no, no. I mean, your colleagues on Wall Street clients, were they unhappy that you worked for Trump? It's a great question. So,

I'm going to answer it this way. I'm sure that there are people that still hate my guts for working for Donald Trump. My 32-year-old son, who was 25 at the time, went to Stanford Business School and said, Dad, you're killing me, man. Killing my networking opportunities. The Republicans hate you because you left Trump.

The Democrats hate you because you were with Trump. You're just killing my networking opportunity. Did you hurt his dating prospects as well? I don't know. I probably didn't hurt his dating prospects. He's a pretty good looking kid. I don't think I hurt the dating prospects. But the point is that I got into politics.

And when you get into politics, you polarize. You got a group of people that hate you. You got a group of people that like you. The people that will fire you because of it. Right. But Trump was particularly toxic with his Muslim ban. No question, but here is the big lesson of all of it. OK, be nice to people, Tara.

Because I got my ass kicked leaving the White House and people came to my aid. I was overwhelmed by the it's a wonderful life feeling where people that were friends of mine came out of the woodwork to help me, help me rebuild my business, help me regrow my career. Because, you know, what your grandmother told you is true. You got to be nice to people because you're meeting them on the way up. You're going to meet the same people on the way down. And so, yeah, this group of people that dislike me, but so what?

You know, I mean, that's life. Right. If he loses, do you think all the people who are surrounding him right now will go back to being considered toxic for having worked with him? Or will they be absolved by his electoral power or whatever's left of it? I mean, what do you think happens to all those? So I see him as like the wicked witch of the West. We can call him the wicked witch of the West Wing. OK, so if you remember the scene in The Wizard of Oz, when the water hit the witch,

all of the troopers, all the soldiers that were working with the witch, they turned to Dorothy and said, geez, I'm sorry, Dorothy. I'm sorry that we did this. So the witch had this powerful, uh,

weird control over her soldiers. And that's Trump with his minions. And so when Trump loses this election and he will lose the election, he'll try one more time in 2028 because I don't see him going to jail. He'll be 82. He needs the money. So he'll be out there trying again. But I do think his base will have withered by that point. So, no, those people will be fine. People have very short memories in our country.

You know, McCarthy goes down, though, as a real spineless guy, unfortunately. You know, he's a nice guy, nice enough. But man, you really sold your soul out. You could have put that he could have been the leader of the Republican Party and he could have reformed the Republican Party. And but he didn't have the guts, you know, and that's a shame. Well, he didn't last for very long anyway. 24 and a half Scaramucci's made 24.5.

McCarthy. Oh, my God. Which is longer than Liz Trust, which is four point one Scaramucci's. But if only I could add and do math, I might be able to actually use Scaramucci's in my regular conversation. No, I have like I have like a Scaramucci calculator in my head. I'm like the official scorer of this shit. How many days is it again? Eleven or nine?

Okay, cool. Yeah, I remember you were kind of angry. I said 10. Don't shit me out of this valuable. I mean, I got fired on that last day. I think it's an important day. Right, right. Well, if Ryan Spreba is that big baby listens to your podcast, he's got my number. Tell him to pick up the phone and apologize. You guys can reconcile on this show. No, it's all good. I'd love to oversee it. He's been invited to conferences where I've been a speaker at and he won't come. He's like a big baby.

Don't be a baby. Oh, wow. He gave up speaking fees. I don't think they were paying him for it. But I mean, look, don't be a big baby. Pick up the phone and acknowledge what you did. And let's move on. OK. OK. One last question. Trump, his electoral power, if he wins, it seems to absolve him and the people around him, you know, of all the dangers. Right. Dangerous time. You'll be.

You'll be you'll be reporting on another gun. Do you think everyone's going to be rushing to work in the administration? Are they going to try to, you know, people who left after January 6th and resigned and, you know, saying that they were ashamed of what happened? Do you think they'll be back lining up trying to work for him again? No, no. They'll they'll necessarily be back. But they'll be. Trump has been fascinating with this. He's had a.

new train of people that jump on the train. This guy that ran for president, Todd Burgum, or whatever his name is, he seems like a very smart guy. He's on the Trump train, man. He thinks he's going to have success with Donald Trump. He's going to get buried by Donald Trump. And so he has this fascinating rotisserie of people that will come in. They'll do the same thing I did, the same stupid stuff.

They'll think they're helping. They'll think they're helping the country. They want to serve. And then, you know, through the transactional nature of Donald Trump, they'll go through the Trump meat grinder. But it'll be a more dangerous time in America. It'll be a coarser time in America if he wins this.

And he'll be taking America in a direction that I don't want to see the country. He's talking about deporting 15 million people. He's been talking about that forever, though. He talked about that before you joined the administration. So we're going to ride around, but he's going to have more power this time. He's going to ride around on the handmaids. I agree with you. He'll have more power because he'll know what he's doing. He'll also be a lame duck at the same time. All right. Well, we'll see what happens. It'll be...

I think it matters what the Senate looks like. And if Susan Collins has fortitude, I, you know, I understand he's going to be persecuting his adversaries. I look forward to it. Yeah. That's a frightening. I want to be on your podcast on record saying he is not going to win. And it's just the strange nature of America. But when America needs things to happen for America, it happens.

And Trump's defeat is one of those things that needs to happen. And it will. If he does win, will you leave the country? I'm not going anywhere. I'm not going anywhere. I'll enjoy the persecution. I don't care. I'm not going anywhere. I'm a New Yorker.

I'm a kid that grew up with nothing. If I had to go back to nothing, big deal. I'm not going anywhere. By the way, I will stand in opposition and in resistance to his nonsense. Okay. So he told two of his defense attorneys, he's going to use the FBI as a Gestapo against his adversaries. He's going to pull FCC licenses. Okay, go ahead. Let's do it. Let's go in that direction. But before that happens,

We will get out there. We will explain to the American people. There are 40 of us, including the former vice president of the United States. We will explain the systemic danger of this man. And we'll see if we can find courageous people, okay, to stand against him alongside of us and beat him. And I expect that we will. Okay. Well, we'll see. I have to have you on though before that. And then...

And then after hopefully not in a jail cell after, so you better, you better have me on before Tara. I don't think you can bring recording equipment in there, but I don't even want to joke about this right now because it's dark and it's scary. But, but, you know, you know, the fact that we're talking about it semi-seriously is,

It's an expression of what the danger is. Right. And so this guy, he's already, yeah, he said he's going to enact retribution on his enemies. You are one of his enemies. The press is what they are considered his enemies. So, um, yeah, I think you have to take him seriously. I'll enjoy it if it comes to pass, but I predicted it won't. Okay. He'll be soundly defeated before that happens.

But thank you for having me on. Good to be on with you. Of course. Thank you. Move to Maine. Get away from these cynical Washingtonians. Okay. And I want to give you one last opportunity to plug your book. Okay. So my book is from Wall Street, the White House and back. It's a,

It's a fun little book. It's about lessons that I learned when I was getting my ass kicked after getting fired from the White House. And so if you ever had a bad day or you're having a bad situation in your life, buy the book. There's lessons in there. I think you'll find yourself in the book if you've ever had a bad day. And here's how you pull yourself out of something that's not going well. Well, I remember that time. I do remember when you were fired. You never attacked me or the press when you got fired.

And I appreciated that because a lot of people can sometimes on their way out, be really angry and take it out on the messenger. Listen, I, I own my mistakes in the white house. I get fired. I never blamed Trump or general Kelly. I became personal friends with general Kelly and his wife, Karen. I'm a big boy. I know how to take my lumps. Not everyone can. Got stories for days on that. That'll be my memoir that you can read one day. Okay. Will you be well? Thanks. God bless.

That was another episode of Somebody's Gotta Win. I'm your host, Tara Palmieri. I want to thank my producers, Christopher Sutton and Connor Nevins. If you like this podcast, please subscribe, rate it, and share it with your friends. If you like my reporting, please go to puck.news.com and sign up for my newsletter, The Best and the Brightest. You can use the discount code TARA20. I'll be back next Tuesday.