27. Trump vs. Harris: What You Didn't See
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Hello and welcome to this extra edition of The Rest Is Politics US with me, Katty Kay. And me, Anthony Scaramucci. Good morning, Katty. Yeah, good morning. After a very long night for you, a very early morning for me. That's why we're a little late coming to you. But Anthony was up.

all night in the spin room in Philadelphia after the debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. And I want to get all of the details of what it was like down there, Anthony. So I think we're going to flip the tables a little bit and I'm going to revert to my journalism mold and ask you all the questions that I've been wanting to ask you about what it was like. I've been in that room so many times from the press point of view. What was it like for you last night being at the debate in Philadelphia, watching it

and then going back and talking to the journalists about it? I think the first thing I want to say, because I want to do a compare and contrast. Okay, 2016, I went to all three debates. I was in those rooms. We got the chance to be in the audience, and then we were immediately supposed to go into the spin room.

The Harris campaign ran it completely differently. It was unbelievably well organized. I got a tear sheet from the campaign on what their talking points were. I got a tear sheet on their positioning and timing of what TV hits I was going to go on. I thought they did something masterful.

last night that we never did in 2016. And maybe Trump's doing it now. I don't know, but we were assigned to the radio. So there were very large banks of phones and very large banks of microphones and

And I got assigned to Swing State Radio, Swing State Radio. And so that was Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, into Nevada, over to Georgia. And in probably one hour, I probably did six, maybe seven radio shows with different hosts. Drive Time Radio Caddy, 4.30 in the afternoon on the East Coast, 1.30 on the West Coast. But that's sort of

in the mode where people are driving around. So that was before the debate. So before the debate, they had you speaking to all of these drive. So we should back up a little bit. The campaign called you up a few days ago and said, would you come to Philadelphia?

to be part of their debate team? And then would you be a surrogate for them going into the spin rooms? I think it's okay for me to say this now. I didn't want to say this in prior podcasts. I fully disclose, and I've said this all along, so I don't necessarily have objectivity here, although I do try to be objective on balls and strikes. I'm also going to lay out some of the things that I think Vice President Harris needs to do better, frankly. Yeah.

She won the debate. I think she won that debate hands down. We can go through the tactics, why she won the debate. Listen, even Fox News is agreeing to that. Yeah. So she won the debate, but there's always room for improvement. I'm happy to go through that. I have it all written down. But they called me mid-August and they said, listen, you know, Donald Trump, we would like to sit down and talk to you. Would you be willing to do that? And I built a matrix for them

I think I sent you my notes and I think you responded to my notes that it's a study of how my mind works, which is a lot of bizarre things going on in my mind. These were handwritten notes that I was meant to be able to make sense of. I mean, it was nice of you to send them to me. They were more gibberish than much of what Donald Trump said on air last night. But anyway, yes. Okay, exactly. But I had a matrix and I spoke to them about what he does and how he reacts and

And he's in this false prism that his staff allows him to be in. He thinks he's respected by our allies. He thinks he's respected by these dictators. Okay. He forgets that he was laughed at at the UN when he was trying to give a speech about some insane thing. And so I said to her, to her team, not her, but I said to her team, hit him.

Tell him that you know from all these people that she knows that he's incompetent. And when she did that, he went up like a bottle rocket. But it just speaks to how well prepared she was. She took input from her campaign. She took input from the Biden people. She took input from former Trump people. There are 40 of us that have said, please can't have this guy return to the Oval Office. These are all the reasons why.

And she was rested. You know, she took input from her CNN interview. Katty, she looked tired that day. Her lighting was wrong. You know, I've said that. She looked fresh. She got there early. Okay. So just imagine these two people. She arrives the night before, goes to bed. She gets up early. She does some debate prep. She has a relaxing day. He shows up bombing social media with memes of cats, right?

I mean, it was some of the more bizarre stuff that he does. It's 6.57 when the plane lands. He's supposed to go on the air at nine. He probably had Macho Man playing from YMCA because he was trying to show his uber masculinity. I'm Macho Macho Man landing two hours before-

fly in at the last minute. Exactly. So I was in the spin room with the team. So who was in there with me? Governor Cooper, North Carolina, Tammy Duckworth, the Senator from Illinois. I don't know a lot of the names. I'm not a Democrat. So Gavin Newsom was with me. There were several members of the House of Representatives. And we had a very colorful discussion before the debate started. And then there was stone cold silence in the holding room

watching the debate. And then I'm just going to say a few more things quickly. She started out slow. She was trying to find her footing, trying to find her ground, a little bit too much explanatory about her background. I know she needs to get her narrative out there. And I know the polling suggests that she needs to

explain who she is more to the American people. I think that's upside there for her for those reasons. But she did start out slow. And then all of a sudden you could feel the explosion click in and she was completely on her game. And then she did something, Katty, that she practiced. And if you go back and look at it,

Her facial expressions while he was talking and her facial expressions while she was interacting with the moderator were pitch perfect, so much so that I took pictures of it on my phone and I sent it to my daughter, who's a stage actress and she's a singer. And I said, I just want you to study tonight how she's reacting to this.

the former president and how she's reacting to the moderators, it was literally pitch perfect because you know half of the thing is the mojo and the feeling that's going on during the debate. Yeah. And you had that comparison of her smiling, looking dismissive, putting her hand under her chin at one point. And if you had turned the sound down, which I often do during the debates, I turned the sound down for a little bit just to watch it.

And he's just looking crosser and crosser and crosser. And you're right, it was that moment where she accelerates and he starts looking crosser and crosser. Why was it, Anthony, that they wanted you to come? What did they feel you represented? I think she's made a decision. And it's interesting. And again, I'm not being critical of the Biden team. They made a decision. We don't want the Trump people involved. We don't want former people involved.

We're going to do this on our own and we got to worry about the hard left and we don't want the hard left to be upset. I was on a progressive talk show in Philadelphia and this African-American DJ said to me, you know, what do we say to the progressives about this Dick Cheney endorsement or even the fact that you're here? And I looked at him and I said, listen, you know, aren't we all Americans first? You know, there's probably stuff in the agenda that she has that I don't agree with as a center right Republican, but,

And there's probably stuff about me that you don't agree with. But don't you want to beat Donald Trump? Don't you see the existential danger of Donald Trump? Wouldn't you want her to build the biggest, broadest tent and broadest coalition possible? I think the Biden people just said, listen, you're a nice guy. We'll take your money, but we don't want to hear from you. And I think she's taking a different tact. I think she's decided that having Dick and Liz Cheney, having former Trump people like Olivia Detroit or myself representing her,

is a sign of the type of coalition that she's building. And she spoke to that from the debate. She said that she's building a broad coalition. She said from the CNN interview, she's willing to consider a Republican in her cabinet. She's trying to send a message to people that,

that we have to get over what she called the last decade. And this last decade of heavy tribalism, the last decade of Donald Trumpism. And I think it was an overture. And I think it was also a signal because they dropped it into the press, Katty. I think you and I talked about it the night before. I was told not to say anything. So of course I didn't. But sometime in the morning yesterday, they dropped it to the press because I got

Lots of calls and then lots of media bookings as a result of them saying that I would be down there alongside of Olivia Troy to represent her. And it ran on Politico, too. I saw that. But it's interesting also the strategy for them of getting you to speak to politicians.

battleground radio stations, which we know. I mean, radio stations in this country are a huge way that people get their news. That is what a lot of people are listening to, particularly drive time. Like you say, before the debate, it was as people are driving back from the offices, as they're driving to pick up their kids and they're listening. And I can't help but think that one of the things that the Harris campaign is thinking is, you know, you get somebody like you on or you get Olivia Troy, who is also a former national security member of the Trump administration on, and you can speak to people

wavering voters, voters who might be leaning Republican, a little bit more conservative, but who don't like Donald Trump's character in a way actually that's, it's a smart move from their point because you can speak to those people, Anthony, in a way that a Democrat can't necessarily. It's just a different relationship that you would have with those listeners. And I appreciate you saying that, but there's another thing going on. Okay. These Republican surrogates

they hate Donald Trump. Let's just put it on the record. Whether it's Chris Sununu, Tim Scott, you pick the person. They behind the scenes hate Donald Trump. They hate him. They're sitting there saying to themselves, because their political consultants have said, you got to go out there and support Donald Trump or you're not going to have a future in the Republican Party. You go through the people, DeSantis campaigned against him, Haley, Tim Scott, pick the people.

And so they're all there and now they got to try to defend this guy. And so he gets destroyed in the debate last night. We can talk about how badly he got destroyed in a second. I've got three things that she said that I think were winning things that they're going to use in advertising. I got two things that he said that,

which was very Joe Biden of him, by the way. He was talking in a way where if Donald Trump was listening to him talking, he would have said, I don't know what he just said. And I don't think he does either. Remember he said that to Joe Biden in the first debate? Yeah. That's how he was talking last night. It was rambling. Kind of rambling. Yeah. Nonsensical. And then he does something, another tell for Trump, I'm in trouble because

I'm going to lean into the microphone and I'm going to go on blast. I'm going to scream into the microphone. I set the timer on my phone. Well, when she sent him up like a bottle rocket, he started screaming into the microphone. And it was about 19 minutes when he was on that he was screaming into the microphone, including after the commercial break. But what I want to just mention to listeners is how does this work for the American public? And how does the American public see this?

This is a UFC match. This is an ultra fighting cage match of verbal sparring. This is something people are sitting down and it's a gladiator event, except they're not physically beating each other up, but they're tarring each other with their words. And this is who's on point, who's well-versed, who understands the issues and who looks presidential.

Okay, Governor Christie, close friend of mine from New Jersey, texted me 45 minutes into debate. She looks like she deserves to be there. She sounds and looks like a president. Okay, that's from a Republican. You know, he's a Trump detractor, but that's from a Republican. I just want you to imagine these guys, though. He's getting destroyed. They're in their spin room. We're in our spin room. I'm writing notes about what I'm going to say to the media when the thing's over. Okay.

And they come up with what? It was three-on-one, Hattie.

Okay. The moderators were siding with VP Harris. So the moderators were instructed that they had to do some fact checking when he's spilling lie after lie into the microphone and saying that we're having abortions in the ninth month and we execute babies after they're born. The moderator has to say, geez, I'm sorry. We're not, we're not doing that in the United States. So, so I have found in my life in sports,

When the other team is complaining about the refs, they lost the game. Okay, whether it's British football, American football, American baseball, as soon as the guy says they called the balls out of the strike zone and this, that, and the other thing, you know the other team is in trouble. There was a Trump person on CNN shortly after the debate last night who said, you can't blame the ref when you can't even make a goal of your own. Right.

Right. When you don't even take a shot. It was the same thing. And you're right. So they, that was their tactic clearly was to say, blame ABC News. Trump was actually on Fox News this morning saying that ABC News should have its license revoked and that the two moderators should be criminally investigated for their role in that debate. So that's the tactic that he's taking. Okay. But that,

Okay, but let me just say this to you because that has worked for him, by the way. And so that's why he's doing that. He's doubling, tripling down. It's a feared thing. You bully people into submission. Yes, yes. It's a bully thing. And you undermine the confidence in the media by saying, so I was, you may have seen this, but actually you saw something else. It's kind of jujitsu. You think you saw this, but it wasn't fair. And so actually I won. There's another thing. I had an American baseball coach.

He said to me, once every 30 games, I'm going to get thrown out. What do you mean? You're going to get thrown out? Well, once every 30 games, I'm going to march into the field. I'll start screaming at the umpire behind home plate. He's going to throw me out. Okay, what the hell are you doing that for? Well, I'm doing that because I want to intimidate the son of a bitch. And I want him to, next time he comes to this stadium, he's going to, and he's going to give my players a little bit more laxity on the strike zone so he doesn't feel my wrath.

You see what he's doing? He's doing that for the next debate. Okay, so he has to debate her. One of the funniest lines that he had last night was post-debate. I saw Sean Hannity, even though Sean and I are on a different side of this. Sean and I grew up together here on Long Island. We're good friends. We know each other a long time. And so I watched Trump go over to Sean Hannity. So two things. One,

If he had won the debate, he would have never came into the spin room. Not his personality. He would have jumped on the plane, headed back to wherever he was going. But he knew he lost the debates. We had to go into the spin room and spin on his own, right? Because he thinks he's the best person to spin from himself. No question. He's the best communications director. He's the best chief of staff. He's the best secretary of defense. He's smarter than his generals, smarter than his virologists. And so who better than him to go spin after a debate? Which is, by the way, for people listening...

I've covered now, I must have been to 16 of these debates. I have never seen the principal, the candidate themselves come into the spin room afterwards. You leave that to people like you, Anthony, or to your surrogates or to members of the campaign. Obama never turned up in the spin room. Bush never turned up in the spin room. Nobody's ever turned up in the spin room. This was super unusual. No. And the only time Trump did turn up in the spin room was during the primaries because he was a new candidate. Right.

And we said to him, get into the spin room. But during the regular presidential debates and stuff like that, he never did that. But he went into the spin room, talked to his buddy Hannity, and the Harris people told us halfway through the debate that they were requesting another debate. Okay. And you know, and I know, Cady, if Trump had won that debate, he would never debate her again because he would want to stick to that one and done, one and done. Right.

Why would Harris, even though she bested him last night, want an additional debate? And this is the genius of their organization. They know that she needs more national exposure. They know that she needs millions of viewers to see her exactly as she was last night. Yeah, because the polls are still showing people don't know her very well.

Exactly. And they also know, and they're confident in her. They know she's going to come prepared. They know she's going to build the case like a good prosecutor would. They know that she's going to react to him beautifully. And he could not figure her out last night. And I'm going to explain this. And if you went to tapes of Hillary Clinton debating Donald Trump, and you saw her debate last night, let me see if I can try to explain this to you. She was very tentative with Trump.

Clinton was trying to be the school valedictorian that was going to go through everything she knew about policy into debate. When I was in debate prep with these guys, I said, don't do that.

Do not be the schoolmarm. You can't be Charlie Brown's teacher calling him on every one of his lies. He's had seven presidential debates. He's told on average about one lie every 97 seconds. Okay. If you calculate all the lies he told over the course of seven presidential days. So don't be the school teacher, the headmaster calling him out on that.

The second thing, it is not your job to be a professor in the room explaining policy. It's your job to get the vibe right. And what was the vibe last night? I'm here for everybody. I represent everybody. These are the three things that I wrote down that I thought were fantastic. Okay. As a prosecutor, I never once said to a victim, are you a Democrat or a Republican?

Because I'm for everybody. And my only client has always been the American people or the citizens of the state. Second thing she said, which she got very high numbers on. So I walked up. It was interesting. Gavin Newsom, never met him before, got on with him well. There were two rooms. I was in the large holding room. I saw Gavin get up and go into this smaller room. I'm like, okay, what is he doing? I'm curious. I went into the room to follow him.

And they were- This is while the debate is playing. This is while the debate is playing. And they had focus groups that they had, I guess, paid or they were sitting around and they had these meters. You've probably seen them, right? So I'm saying something about immigration and these focus groups like it, they'll turn the meter on and the thing goes up. I'm saying something that they don't like, the meter's going this way because the people that were analyzing her and getting her ready for her next debate or for the campaign, they wanted to know what was working, what wasn't.

The line that worked the most, according to the meter people, she casually said, "I am here for everybody." She said, "I know that we have way more in common than what separates us in this country. We have to move to unifying the country again."

And that meter was up here. Okay. Okay. So that was the second thing that she said that I was blown away by and very impressed with. That was in the response to the question that they'd asked Donald Trump about why did you say she wasn't black? Yeah, exactly right. And the third thing was something she didn't say. So, Katty, there's a really memorable moment where he's talking about eating cats and dogs and people's pets are being eaten. And have a listen to this and-

Let's look at her facial expressions for YouTube, and then we'll explain them in audio. In Springfield, they're eating the dogs, the people that came in. They're eating the cats. They're eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what's happening in our country, and it's a shame. Do you remember that moment, Katty? Were you watching? Did you see her face? Oh, yeah, yeah. Her face where she's like, are you really going to do this? She's destroying him with her face.

Okay, you got to go back. So there were two things she said, and then there was one thing where she looked at him and she was like, you are one crazy son of a bitch. I mean, that's literally- Are you seriously going to go there? Okay. Because body language in life is everything, right? You can tell when people like each other. You tell people, oh, fuck, I don't like the guy. The body language is everything. And she looked at him and was like, you are a crazy son of a bitch. And it was no words.

And all it was was her face and her smile and the way her head cocked when he said that. And so those were the three things. There was something else that happened and it totally unraveled him. And I think it came from David Muir. He said, so you've been saying for the last three and a half years that the election was stolen, but you finally admitted to Lex Friedman on his podcast that

that you lost. And he was like, what? And he showed the face and he makes the big mushroom cloud face of his. And then he said, I was being sarcastic. And I thought it was very interesting that he said that he lost by a whisker because everything goes back to these cats for some reason in the guy's mind. And by the way, that was one of the moments where David Muir then came back and said, I watched all the videotape and I didn't pick up any sarcasm.

Okay, let's take a quick break and we will get more from Anthony and his night in Philadelphia in the second half.

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Welcome back to The Rest Is Politics US with our debate analysis and Anthony's night that he spent with the Harris campaign in Philadelphia. Were there any moments before the debate started where the team or anyone that you spoke to on the team said,

seemed nervous or had things that they felt nervous about? Or from the moment you got to Philadelphia, did you get the impression that they knew how this was going to turn out? Because, you know, debates can be unpredictable things, right? Just ask Joe Biden. It's a great question. So I think that the vibe was some level of uncertainty. The vibe was a little cautious by the surrogates. This would include the senators and the members of the House of Representatives.

And it would include the governors. But I would say her team seemed very put together. You know, a couple of the things that Fiona wrote about our producer that I want to bring up because it was also relevant. I own a gun. Governor Waltz owns a gun. Stop with I'm going to take the guns away from people. Okay. It was another cut that I think really hammered home. And here's the other thing. They wanted the mics unmuted. So mid-August, they said to me,

Mike's unmuted or muted. And I said, well, probably want him unmuted because he'll go on ends and you'll be able to see that. But they benefited from the mics being muted. I think so too. I said that to those people last night. I think so too. They wanted the mics unmuted. I want to hear what you say. And I will confess to you because I get a lot of things wrong in life. They asked me, Mike's muted or unmuted? I said unmuted.

But in reality, in hindsight, they benefited from the mics being muted because he was so nuts that they had to cut him off because they had to get the conversation back on it. Now, this morning, he's doing something that is classic to Donald Trump and classic to most bullies.

And this morning is a very solemn day for the United States, but also specifically here in New York. 23 years ago was a 9-11 tragedy. I lost friends, friends of mine that were on Wall Street with me. I was in the city that day when the towers came down. And on

All of our political leaders are at the 9-11 memorial service this morning, including Donald Trump, Joe Biden, J.D. Vance, and obviously the senators from our state. And Trump leaned over to her in a signature moment, and he did the thing that Trump does. He grabbed her hand, and he put his other hand on top of her hand, and you could see the conversation that he was trying to have with her there.

which is I'm really not a bad guy sort of a conversation. It's the classic bully getting exposed with sunlight and antiseptic. And she shook his hand. She pulled back from him. She looked over at Senator Schumer, who's the majority leader, and started laughing. She couldn't help herself. She's got his number. He's got his number. And he's unraveled a little bit. Now, he'll pull it back together. He's a formidable political candidate, right?

He knows he got destroyed last night. He told Sean Hannity they asked for another debate. He said, well, the reason they asked for another debate is because she lost the debate. OK, but that's not why she asked for another debate. She needs more time with the American people. He's going to give her that. OK, so you had even Lindsey Graham, who is clearly a Trump surrogate, who was in the spin room last night after the debate.

who was pretty blunt about this. And he said, you know, there was a moment where she said, we inherited a mess. And Graham says, well, I was yelling to myself, he should have come back and said, no, you didn't. You inherited low gas prices. You inherited a secure border. You inherited a vaccine for COVID and you messed everything up. But he didn't say that. And then Graham was asked by a reporter, well, you know, is that, you know, does he think there should be any personnel changes in the team because of the way

Trump handled the debate last night and Graham said, it's not the debate team's fault. He couldn't quite say it was Trump's fault, but he realized. I mean, you know, you got somebody like Lindsey Graham, you've got people on Fox News immediately afterwards and again this morning saying that Donald Trump lost the debate. I mean, it's pretty clear he lost the debate. The thing that struck me, and we will talk more about this in terms of the analysis, is that

She came across as prepared. She'd done her homework. She'd done her prep. She gave answers that were coherent. It was very clear, as you had said to me beforehand, Anthony, she'd rehearsed a few lines and she delivered them well. I mean, she went tick by tick by tick through that you could tell. She'd had a briefing book on it.

On abortion, say this, bring in the personal stories. On immigration, say this. On Afghanistan, pivot to something else. On prices, do this. On small businesses. And she just went through it, tick by tick by tick. And she had the memory. She'd rehearsed it enough. And he came across as somebody who was totally unprepped.

had not done his homework. There were moments she didn't have a great answer on inflation and the cost of living, which is a huge issue for American voters. It was not a particularly strong answer that she gave. She still hasn't honed that economic answer, but he had nothing to come back with.

He let it slide. He let the openings get away. Turns out that if you want to be president of the United States, you might as well prep. It does turn out that way. But I want to say this to you. This is a terrible thing to say. And so I don't know, but I'm just going to say it. You and I have said this to each other. Are we in a sexist country? We are. Most of the world is sexist. But here's...

He stereotyped her. Now I'm going to say stuff that he says, and forgive me, I know it's our podcast when I say it. He called her stupid. He was denigrating her. She turned black. All of this nonsense. Yeah. He prepared himself for who he thought she was. Okay. All the things that he was saying about her in his interviews, he said, okay, that's her. Let's prepare for that. And she's nothing like that. As you and I have said from day one of this podcast, I said, hey-

Vice President Harris, she's way more talented than people want to give her credit for. She's way smarter. She's on her game. Now, she benefited here. If someone writes 50 years from now, if she wins the presidency, how did she win the presidency when she only got 1% of the vote in the 2020 primary? She benefited people.

because she wasn't going to get through the primary sausage factory, but if you were going to get it down to two people and put her on a podium, she's talented for that. She may not have been the best glad-handing retail politician ever,

in the room working against other retail politicians to get to the top post after an exhausting primary. But if you put her there, she's coming prepared. She's going to be presidential. She's going to act presidential and she's got great instinct. I'm going to build a very broad coalition. Okay. So Bernie Sanders, Anthony Scaramucci and Dick Cheney walk into a bar, Katty Gay. Okay. Now I'm going to give you the punchline after the election because I got to think of what the punchline is. Okay. Okay.

But Bernie Sanders and Dick Cheney and Anthony Scaramucci walk into a bar. Okay. And who's the bartender? That's Vice President Harris. Okay. You got to think about how exceptional he is. By the way, the only one of the four people that actually drink something is probably Vice President Harris, who enjoys a glass of wine occasionally. Right. Right. Okay. Yeah. But he's not an alcoholic like the hard right was trying. It was just totally nonsensical nonsense. Throwing everything at her.

But one of our producers is asking, did Anthony meet with any Trump people that accused him of disloyalty for helping Harris? And so the short answer to that is no, I won't go into the names, but there was more than one Trump person that sought me out last night to say hello. Okay. And I'll mention one name. Okay. Brian Lanza, you may know Brian. Okay. He ran over to me to say hello. He put his arm around me.

He goes, you are really one little tough son of a bitch is what he said to me. And he was laughing. I said, hey, hey, Brian.

I don't care. One of the things that my grandparents taught me about life, you got to live with no fear. I don't care about Donald Trump. I'm an American. I'm going to have a voice in a debate or a voice in the discussion. If he's hurting our country, and I believe he's a dangerous guy, and I've said that on our show, I'm going to explain it to people. I'm not going to sit there and when someone's going off the rails and say, okay, I'm just going to be unilaterally loyal to him. It's a terrible mistake these people are making. I have a prop, Caddy.

Okay, I just want to show you this. Yeah, this is- I like this. So, okay. I mean, and you know I'm loving this thing, okay? And you called it a lollipop and we'll just leave it there. For any of you who are listening, what Anthony is holding up right now is a very long, tall, blue signpost with the name Scaramucci written vertically down it. Scaramucci is not a short name, so this post has to be particularly long. And I just want to point out that I had the longest sign, Katty.

Okay. Obviously, it was at this moment, I was like, geez, I wish my last name would just be slightly longer. You had all those Anglican names out there. Give to your extra height, of course. Yes. I want all you Anglicans to be super jealous that I did have the longest sign. And this sign, for people who have never been in a spin room, what happens is the surrogates come in after the debate and they've got a kind of page person for an intern role.

from the campaign who walks around in front of the surrogate holding up what I have always thought of as a lollipop, but you have now described as some kind of phallic object. And they walk around holding this around the spin room. - I didn't do that on the air. Oh my God. I mean, you're, I mean, look, you're just breaking out of your shell. - Finally, I might actually have made Anthony blush. - This could be the first time. - I'm getting my own back. - Okay, yes.

There's a little perspiration on my forehead after you're saying that. The nice journalist can see, you know, I want to go and talk to Anthony Scaramucci and they make a beeline. And because Anthony's name is so goddamn long, the lollipop phallus is even taller. My wife Deirdre gave the big eye roll when I came into the house like this. I was like holding it up. Thank you, Deirdre. Keeps you down to earth. She's like, you are a ridiculous person. Go to bed. Okay.

Anyway, the child in Antony is very, very happy to have a lollipop with Scaramucci written on it. There's no question. It was really a lot of fun. But here's the other thing, okay? Trump team, not having as much fun. They just got to be honest about it. They're just not having enough fun because they are with a leader that has a fight. He wants grievances. He

He wants to divide. He wants to find memes, right-wing memes on the internet. And he wants to say that they're true. He wants to say that people are eating dogs. He wants to say that there's millions of people committing crimes. That was the most crazy bit of the whole debate. And he'd clearly...

gone into it deciding that he was going to repeat this totally erroneous story that there are Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio who are eating dogs. That was one of the moments. There were only three moments for all that they've complained about the fact checking. There were actually only three moments in the whole debate where

The moderators, the ABC News moderators fact checked Donald Trump. And this was one of them where they said they had called the town manager and there was no evidence that these Haitian migrants were eating pets. And the last one was Aurora. I was with the member of the House of Representatives from Colorado, Aurora, Colorado, where Trump said that the Venezuelan immigrants, these gangs had taken over several apartment buildings.

There were five Venezuelan gang members, unfortunately. We do have this issue in our country. And there was an incident in Aurora. They were arrested and they're on their way to being deported.

but they didn't take over three apartment buildings as was suggested by right-wing social media. So what's happening now is there's people out there blowing the whistle, calling timeout and saying, that's unsportsmanlike conduct. Here's the yellow card for you saying things that are not true.

Two more things, and then I promise I'll try to stay silent. 27 minutes after the debate, a young woman in this country that has over 284 million Instagram followers sent out a two-paragraph endorsement of Vice President Harris. And Taylor Swift wrote about being a childless cat lady. So there were two cats last night. There were the Trump cats, which

which I was like, all right, the guy needs medication. And it was bookended by the Taylor Swift cat where she was letting people know, not only am I endorsing the vice president, but you're going to go out. If you're a Swifty, you're going to go out and register to the vote. And you saw an explosion in those numbers for Joe Biden in 2020. She's starting earlier this time. And I think that is a very big, significant thing for her. I think it's going to really help her.

One of your friends was down there who adores you. Her name is Claire McCaskill, former Senator of Missouri, 16 grandchildren, lovely, lovely woman. The two of us sat on a set together. We were being interviewed by Nicole Wallace yesterday. And she said something that I want you to think about. The registration numbers for African-Americans weigh up. The registration numbers for young people weigh up.

Are they being accounted for in the polling? She believes they are not. And I will say to you right now, as I sit here on the 11th of September, if she continues to execute, this will be the Reagan-Carter campaign. It'll look very tight, Katty. And then sometime in mid-October, it's going to break towards her.

because she's amassing the voters, she's amassing the money, and she's incredibly well-organized. I had a great conversation with David Plouffe this morning on Morning Joe. I interviewed him about what he thinks the impact of this will be on the election and which voters might have been reached last night by what they saw, who it was difficult for the campaign to reach. We can talk more about that on Friday.

Certainly, if this was a job interview and you had to choose between these two people who to make CEO of your company, just on the basis of who was better prepped and who had the better temperament and who was more lucid and calm and gave more cogent answers, I think it's hard to deny that you wouldn't have given the job of CEO to Kamala Harris. But I do want to put Trump up for senior comedian at the nursing home, though. I do think...

I do think I could watch that. If I'm like 80 and I got to be in the wheelchair, I'm drooling a little bit and I've got that guy up at the mic, I'm probably going to enjoy that. So I want to put him up for that. She won the debate. And the question now, and we'll talk about this on Friday, is...

How much is the debate going to change the race itself? I think we don't quite know the answer to that yet. We'll have to wait a little while to see what other events could come in over the next few months. And we're going to keep our eye on those polls because whatever happened last night, whatever happened at the DNC, the polls are still really, really tight. Historically, the polls have underestimated Donald Trump. Perhaps this time around, they're underestimating, as Claire McCaskill said to you, some of the more democratic voters. But

The polls are tighter than many Democrats would like them. It's a margin of error race. It's going to be decided by about 50,000 people in five different states. And you need to peel away just a few of them to win the election. I would say to you that that's a brilliant insight. And that is exactly how the campaign, the Harris campaign feels about it. It's a margin of error election. They know it's razor thin. And this is why they're broadening the tent.

And I expect to be, if there is another debate, I expect to be there. Okay. Thank you, Anthony. Great to get all your insights from the night in Philadelphia. We're going to leave it there and we'll be back on Friday with more on what this debate means for the race. Okay, guys, we'll see you Friday. Katty, thank you for being the questioner today. I hope I wasn't overly dominating the conversation, but I was obviously very excited to be there last night.