-
Unknown A
Welcome to Raging Moderates. I'm Jessica Tarlov. Scott is off today, but I've got the great Anthony Scaramucci on the show. Anthony, welcome. How are you doing? Thank you for joining me.
-
Unknown B
Well, it's very sweet of you to bring me on. And I haven't seen you in the flesh in a long time. We used to work at Fox together. People forget that because it's probably a decade now, but I hosted Wall Street Week for Fox Business, and we used to be able to share the set together on the Fox News Channel and also Fox Business. So it's great to be with you.
-
Unknown A
I can't believe how long ago that is, but also how long I've been there. Like, when I want to ask about it, I'm like, it's my entire media life has been at Fox. But that was great. In Wall Street Week was such a great. And I don't say serious. It was obviously serious. There was some levity to it, but it was so substantive. That's the word I'm looking for.
-
Unknown B
Maria, Look, Maria Borromo, very good friend of mine, is still doing that show. She calls it Maria Baro's Wall Street. And. And so the show had legs. And. And I got the education of my lifetime because I left FOX to join the Trump administration.
-
Unknown A
Yeah.
-
Unknown B
And so it's been the education of my life.
-
Unknown A
Well, we still talk about your tenure there. Scaramucci or Oscar Moochie is a. I don't say daily use. I mean, certainly on the Internet it's a daily use, but we think about it. And. But you have unique perspective. Not only the president.
-
Unknown B
When the president goes after me on his true social account, he does use 11 days. And I think he should be the official score because some of these journalists that don't like me, they use 10 days. And that hurts my feelings, Jess. I don't want to have my feelings hurt. Why jit me out of 9.1% of my federal career?
-
Unknown A
No, it's interesting that he's the one that's more generous about it, though.
-
Unknown B
Yeah, yeah, he knows. He knows.
-
Unknown A
He knows exactly. There are some things he does know. And he knows exactly how long someone worked for him.
-
Unknown B
He lies about a lot of things, but he's got my employment 10. You're correct.
-
Unknown A
All right. Well, I'm always searching for positive things to say about him. So now you gave a new one.
-
Unknown B
Yeah, well, I could say other positive things about him.
-
Unknown A
I was kidding. I have some good things. I have a list that I always go back to. I talk about the Abraham Accords. We'll always do that. But he's not always the most generous. He has tweeted and then posts getting kicked off Twitter. He's too social about me, but he never gives me an extra 9.1% of anything. It's always pretty brutal. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
-
Unknown B
At least you're in the space. You know, I want to, I want to be in Trump's head space and I want to be one of his irritants.
-
Unknown A
I think you're pretty effectively doing that. But let's hope that we can continue to push that goal forward. In today's episode, we are going to be talking about Trump's explosive meeting with Zelenskyy, the state of the free press and free speech in the White House. So, Anthony, let's get into it. Last week, I think saying it got heated as an understatement of what went on in the Oval Office. Donald Trump and Zelensky's meeting turned into a full blown shouting match. Trump berated the Ukrainian leader while Vice President J.D. vance questioned whether Zelenskyy had shown enough gratitude for U.S. support. Zelensky left early. The press conference was scratch. Trump later posted that Zelensky can return when he is, quote, ready for peace. Where do you think this leaves us? Ukraine relations. And what's your general response? I've seen some of your posts on social media, but for our audience, can you just talk about, you know, your gut reaction to what happened and where you think we are now?
-
Unknown B
Well, first of all, I maintain that that was a setup. And I maintain that the way J.D. vance, Vice President Brans, went after President Zelensky was a setup. And it was contrived. And I, you know, I watched it now several times. I think the one thing that President Zelensky did, which I wish he didn't do was he said, you know, you're protected by this ocean, but you'll see will happen. And that obviously antagonized Trump. But the outcome of that would have been the same. If Zelensky was Mother Teresa in that meeting and he was the combination of Keir Stormer and Macron and other people that have been lauded by the press for doing well with Trump. It's still, that would have been the outcome. They were trying to get that outcome. They were trying to eject him. For some reason, they've aligned themselves with the Kremlin.
-
Unknown B
They use Kremlin talking points when they're talking about the Ukrainian situation and the country, Ukraine, and that's fine. I don't agree with it, but that's them, right? So they went hard at him. Trump is a television producer. He even admitted that this is good TV and reality television, which Trump was a star of for many years. Unique conflict. And so this is, this is the, the conflict setup. It was sort of like watching the Real Housewives of the Oval Office when they were doing this to President Zelensky. And, and I think it has, it has real ramifications for the United States. I just want to give you this analogy and I want your viewers and listeners to think about this. Let's say you have a blue collar kid and he, he rises and his family, a lot of poor people in his family and he rises and he, he's wealthy now.
-
Unknown B
And so maybe he buys a few cars or maybe he helps out with some tuitions or pays some emergency medical expenses. That's one family. And then the other family, the same thing happens and the person builds this big beautiful mansion with a swimming pool, and then they say to their family members, okay, well, I'm going to, you can come over to my swimming pool today, on a Saturday, but I'm going to charge you admission into my swimming pool. And America has to understand something about itself. Whether they like it or not, the world sees America very different than Americans see America. And so how do, how does the world, at least when I was growing up in the world, the world saw America as a benevolent country generally. The world saw America as a peacekeeping country generally. Not that we didn't have failures in Vietnam or Afghanistan and so forth, but in general, we were trying to provide a security umbrella for the free world.
-
Unknown B
And, you know, Trump doesn't understand this. And I tried to explain it to in 2016, but he dismissed me. Eisenhower didn't want them to spend the 2%. Eisenhower was the first head of NATO and he told Marshall, don't let him, don't let him get to that threshold. The less military spending around the world, the better. We're a benevolent democracy. Wolf Spend. He didn't want Germany to rearm back in the 1940s and 50s. And so Trump wants them to, okay, world has changed. I accept all of that, but let's not pretend that we didn't have a thought process involved. Jess. We unevened the trading system with the General Agreement to Trade in Tariffs. Why did we do that? We were 2% of the world's population, 65% of the world's output in the late 40s, and we were trying to create rising living standards. So we accepted goods into our country unfettered.
-
Unknown B
And we were willing to accept some form of tariffs on our goods to protect those labor markets so that we could protect freedom around the world. Trump now wants to go to reciprocal tariffs everywhere. A lot of his trade specialists, I won't go into which ones because they'll be mad at me. Don't, don't like it. They think, they think a more surgical approach would be better. And so now he, he wants to hijack Zelensky. Zelensky's country was invaded 1994. We entered into a security guarantee with Ukraine. They had the sixth largest nuclear arsenal. We're trying to end nuclear proliferation now. We're trying to increase nuclear proliferation. We know that that can't go well, so we're trying to slow it down. And so then we had something called Operation porcupine where we were providing all this anti ballistic missile defense, anti tank defense. Trump slows down the armed shipments.
-
Unknown B
He creates space for Putin. Look, you know, we've got to be fair, right? We're raging moderates on the Biden mishandled the 2022 situation. He mishandled it. They, they're too surgical. They should have said to Putin, look, I'm sorry, that is a neighbor. You're trespassing on their land, you're going to get hit. Like what happened with Bosnia and Herzegovina. We're not going to hit you in your sovereign territory, but as your troops cross into their sovereign territory, you're going to get hit. That's our security guarantee. So if you want to negotiate something and you want to have a 10 year impasse on NATO or, or by the way, you want to try to get back into the G8, no problem, but you can't come into that territory. And he could have made a speech like Roosevelt made. Remember, Roosevelt said, well, I'm going to lend, my neighbor's house is on fire.
-
Unknown B
I'm going to lend them my garden hose. And then the people of the United States said, okay, that's lend lease. We're good with it. Biden should have said, hey, look, I'm sorry, they're trespassing on our neighbor's yard. That goes well in Texas, by the way. You're trespassing on yard. We're going to take the gun out and shoot the guy. Okay, no problem. Okay. But we didn't do that. And we set the seed for this equivocation. And what we've done with our military the last 60 years is exactly that. We take measured steps. Measured steps and measure steps never work. And now we've got a good portion of Ukrainian territory taken by the Russians and we have an American leader now that wants to, I guess, let that happen. I, I don't, I don't know, but I'm, I'm against it. And I think we have to get backbone in the country.
-
Unknown B
We have to get organized dissent. And we have to explain to the American people why we're against that. We're against that because we are for freedom. We're against that because 5.7 billion people live under totalitarianism. We're against that because we understand our history and we know if we band together we can protect ourselves. So we're against that. But if you're telling me now Trump wants a sphere of influence and he's going to, I guess, annex Canada and take back Panama Canal and by, or an ex Greenland and he's going to have a North American sphere of influence and Putin's going to have a partial Eurasian sphere of influence with the Chinese. And we're going to be indifferent to Europe and Eastern Europe and for the Western European democracies. Okay, but if we're doing that, we got to litigate that, Jess. We can't, we can't just say, okay, we're going to let that happen.
-
Unknown B
How are we going to let that happen?
-
Unknown A
I agree with you. I just also happen to think that the last few years, we just had the third anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. There's been ample time for people on both sides of the aisle who feel the same way that we do about protecting democracies and giving Ukraine the chance not only to be a sovereign nation, but to even get into NATO and to be part of this group with us, have had the opportunity to litigate that to the American public. Right. There have been, you know, everyone, you know, high up on either side, the Chuck Schumer's of the world, Mitchell Connells of the world, President Biden. President Trump used to be speaking a lot more fondly about Ukraine certainly than he has been in the last couple of weeks. It seems like some sort of switch has flipped. But the American public is not as open to that argument anymore.
-
Unknown A
Obviously Republicans more than Democrats, but over 40% of the American publicans we just give too much aid to Ukraine. And we are in an enormously selfish phase in American history where people are saying, well, what about me? What about my life here? And that's a result of the fact that our leadership has never been able to properly explain why USAID is a good thing, why it makes sense to keep people safe and fed abroad because it pumps money back into our economy anyway. But being in a safer, more prosperous world is better for a safer and more prosperous America. And I fear that it is too late for that. I was particularly struck by the scenes out of the meeting in London on Sunday with all the European leaders and the NATO leaders. And you think while we were a major topic of conversation, the US and getting us back to the table and that maybe Zelensky just has to sign that minerals rights deal, which seems like a big loser for him since it has no security allowances.
-
Unknown A
But you see the rest of the world or our friends or who I thought were our friends going about their business without us. And it doesn't feel like, at least for the next three and a half years that the US is going to want back on that ramp. Right. We are choosing a different path in it. So do you actually think it's possible to make that or argument to an American electorate that doesn't seem that interested in it?
-
Unknown B
So I think our failure has to do with political service and public service indifference born from the laxity of getting reelected. And just hear me out for a second. So Ross Perot enters the race in 1992. He gets 19.9% of the vote as a third party. Scares the life out of the Republicans and the Democrats. They strengthen the duopoly. They strengthen it. How do they do that? Tougher restrictions for third parties, tougher operational procedures, more signatures, lots more money. Can't form a third party last three decades. Second thing that happens is they go after the gerrymandering with a vengeance. Both sides do. And I submit to you, are we in a real democracy if the politicians are picking the voters? I thought the voters are supposed to pick the politicians. And so now we have a 14% approval rating for the Congress, just above Kim Il Jong.
-
Unknown B
But we have a 95 plus percent reelection rate for the incumbent. So it's almost like having a chef got horrific Yelp ratings for the restaurant, but the chef is still employed because it's the only restaurant in town. And so what ends up happening is they become very lax, very complacent. Third thing that happens is Citizens United. Lots of money gushes into these people from big business oligarch's Big Pharma. Go look at the legislative agenda over the last 15 years. January 2010 was Citizens United decision. It's all skewed towards them. It's not skewed towards a little guy. And then let me weave in one more thing. And Bush would tell you this. George bush made a mistake. 9 In 2008, we made a decision to put a trillion dollars of TARP money into the banks. What Bush would tell you is he accidentally created Occupy Wall street and he accidentally created the Tea Party movement because there was nothing in there for the little guy.
-
Unknown B
So little guy said, what the hell is going on? You're saving the banking executive's job. I'm losing my house. Okay? And then those two movements morphed into the MAGA movement. What about me? I was once in a blue collar aspirational family. Over 30 years of bad policy, I'm now in a blue collar desperational family. Okay? And so you have to. Everything you just said at the top line is true. But we have to understand how we got there. Okay? And this is politicians laps. You know, your raging moderates who used to vote for Jack Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, their grandparents or their great grandparents, Franklin Roosevelt. There was nobody there, nobody there to help them. And so in comes Donald Trump in 2016 with his message and they're like, hey, I'm a white lower income voter. No one's speaking to me anymore. He is, I'm with him whether he shoots somebody on fifth Avenue.
-
Unknown B
So. So unless you're telling me you're going to find a leader that can go to the American people, explain to them what happened, and then tell them why where we are now is wrong and we have to reset the table for ourselves and reset the table for our lower middle income people, but also stay integrated into the world. You know, we got a problem because Trump doesn't care. He's very transactional. Trump is using Putin's talking points. Why is he doing that? Okay. I don't know. I'm not going to say that he's an agent for Vladimir Putin, but he acts like one.
-
Unknown A
So.
-
Unknown B
So why is he doing that? And then what you're saying is absolutely true. 50% of the country says, I'm done helping the world, I need help in my own backyard. And my response to those people is, you're right, you do. But we also need to help the world because we don't have the world. And a fire breaks out somewhere in the world, we're going to get drawn into it, you know. You know, usaid, you mentioned that. Let me just point this out. When we were pumping USAID into Guatemala and into the lower part of the Yucatan Peninsula, we had less border traffic because it's like an ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of Cure. You put 1, 2, 3 billion dollars into those economies and people have jobs and they have some satisfactory living standards. They don't run with their newborn baby 800 miles to the border.
-
Unknown B
Right. But we're now going to cut the usaid. And so you're going to cause more problems, more stress. But by the way, if you've got medical illnesses and you've got viral activity in Africa or other place, parts of the world, are we breathing the same air, Jessica? Are we? I think we are. So what's going to happen? What's going to happen? You're going to, you don't want to stop the illnesses in Africa. You want them to transfer to everybody around the world. Is that we want to do. Okay, but again, it's the rich mansion holder. Is he going to help the world or is he going to charge them to go to a swimming pool? You got to, you got to make a decision and you got to, you got to educate your people. Yes, yes, we left you out. We left you out due to our ignorance and our apathy.
-
Unknown B
But we've got to integrate you back in.
-
Unknown A
Well, that brings me to a point that Scott has been making for the last couple of weeks, is that this all has to be framed around economics. Everyone is sick of the moral argument. They're done with it. They're not interested in like, well, we're nice guys, right? And this is what nice guys do. They see something terrible and they want to go and help someone. You have to hear about the brass tax of what's going on, like how our farmers are benefited by those USAID contracts. And a lot of Republican senators have been standing up and making those arguments. Senator Wicker, Senator Moran, for instance, though I'm in complete agreement. You said so many things that were interesting to me and I'm sure that I'm forgetting some of them. But I wanted to add to the, you know, the Occupy Wall street and Tea Party having a baby and we ended up with maga and you said we need someone who can speak to this.
-
Unknown A
And I've been thinking a lot about Bernie Sanders, who I have never been a supporter of. In 2016, I was a big Hillary person. That was who the base wanted. The base of the Democratic Party has consistently been black voters. Bernie Sanders has never appealed to black voters in any sort of consistent or large way. But when you look at how the coalition got scrambled in this election, you say like white working class people like Donald Trump. Well, look at the 2024 results. Now it's black, Latino and white working class people and some Asian as well. Liked what Donald Trump was selling. Now, do I think that they are permanently Republicans? No, I think Donald Trump is an incredibly special talent and has an appeal that cannot be replicated. But obviously they are open to someone that is going to be making an argument along the lines of the ones frankly that Bernie Sanders is making.
-
Unknown A
And he has been out there. He's on an, you know, fighting oligarchy tour, you know, packing arenas. His spillover rooms are sometimes even bigger than the main room that he's speaking in. And you see his Republican states as well, that people are hankering to hear this message from someone who isn't Donald Trump. There is an understanding that Donald Trump has conflicts of interest built into him inherently by being a business person. Not to mention the fact that his grift is so obvious. I'm gonna get into this crypto strategic fun later on in the conversation. But people are very open to someone who has that economic populism to the way that they speak. Bernie is filling that void at the moment. But Bernie Sanders is not a sustainable option for the Democratic Party. He's 83 years old and he's already tried this a couple of times.
-
Unknown A
So I'm very focused on who can possibly fill that void. And a very smart friend of mine who works in Democratic politics wrote an op ed over the weekend that he put on Fox, which I appreciate it because you should be talking to people who disagree with you. And he's arguing for us to stop talking about rebuilding the Obama coalition. It's like it's done. We have to find a growth strategy at this point. And looking backwards to what worked for a generational talent in 2000, 2008 is not going to get us anywhere in 2028 when we have to fight this fight again using the Kremlin talking points. I cannot even imagine how good they feel in Moscow right now. You see Dmitry Peskov, Putin's spokesperson, out saying, you know this. The rapidly changing US Foreign policy configurations coincides with our vision. You had Medvedev saying something similar.
-
Unknown A
You know, Putin probably thinking, how did I get this lucky? And you said, I don't know why he's doing it, but I need someone to be able to tell me why. Honestly, I get it that he wants to pick on the small guys he thinks he can control Canada and Greenland and Panama has, I think, more respect for the big powers in this, you know, China and Russia, Iran, maybe North Korea. But it feels as if we are now living in a full on gangster state where there is no moral code to it. And I look at someone like Marco Rubio, and he has been a meme many times before, but now that picture of him sunk into the couch, right, during the meeting with Zelensky, his suit boxing up basically over his head. Where you think, has a man ever wanted to disappear from somewhere more than what's going on with Marco Rubio?
-
Unknown A
And then you hear reporting that he and Mike Waltz, who has a similar view of the world, the National Security Advisor, were the ones that executed the Taking Zelenskyy out of the White House, right, And essentially saying, we're done for the day and all of this. And what do you think has happened to these traditional neoconservatives that have found their way into the Trump administration? Because I do not believe, and I know some of them, that they have just wiped the slate clean of everything that they have believed for decades. Some of them who sacrificed, you know, have veterans that have gone to fight for us and protect this new world order. I don't think that they had a lobotomy. So what is going on with the people who are working for him? And do you think there's anyone that is going to stand up like there was in the first administration?
-
Unknown B
So Curtis Yarvin, who is a philosopher out on the west coast, who believes that the democracy is obsolete, and Curtis Yarvin believes that we should no longer have a democratic process. There should be some type of oligarchic monarchy. Very smart people should run everything and leave everybody out. And obviously, you may remember this from the remains of the day, right? There was an allegory there where they were asking Anthony Hopkins, the butler, questions. He didn't know the answers. And then the aristocrats scoffed at him and said, well, why would we give him the vote in the meantime, they're bringing the Nazis into the front door, right? And the allegory was, even though you may be rich and think you're smarter than Anthony Hopkins, the mundane butler, you need everybody, you need the democracy to have this sort of wisdom of a collective crowd, right? So there was an allegory, there was a warning there.
-
Unknown B
But let's give Trump the benefit of the doubt. This is a Curtis Yarvin thing. This is Peter Thiel, Acolyte of Yorvan, J.D. vance, Acolyte of Yorvan, Elon Musk, the same follower of Yorvan and Trump, who's less organized than them, more transactional. They've bandied together with him and they wrote something called Project 2025. And they're going to dismantle and Weaken the checks and balances in the system and expand the executive power due to this ideology that the democracy is obsolete. And Thiel has publicly said that to people. So that could be the best case. The worst case is that they've laundered money through Trump and they've laundered money through the Trump Organization, and he's tied to the Russians and he owes the Russians something, and he's trying to deliver to them what they want. That's the worst case. Okay, so that's Trump as it relates to Walsh and Rubio.
-
Unknown B
I understand that perfectly because I live that and it doesn't reflect well on me as a human being. But I did live that. I was a George Bush, Mitt Romney, garden variety establishment Republican. Actually, more to it than that, Jess. I was a Rockefeller Republican. I was agnostic to social issues, and I helped Andrew Cuomo with the gay marriage initiative in 2008. But I was sort of a right of set to Republican as it came to business and free markets. And so now Trump wins, or Trump is about to win, and people like winning. And so I start to shade myself to accept Trump's point of view. Trump is messaging something to blue collar people. I grew up in a blue collar family. I relate to that. And then Trump wins, and then six months into his office, he offers me a job. And then my ego kicks in, and my ego and my pride.
-
Unknown B
My wife hates Trump almost as much as Melania hates, And I'm telling you, that's like way up here, okay? And she begged me not to do it, but I did it, okay? And that was ego based. That was egocentrism. That was pride based. And Marco Rubio wants to be the Secretary of State of the United States, second or third most important job in the world or most important job in the country. Mike Walsh wants to be the National Security Advisor. He served in the US Military, and he wants to be that. And so what ends up happening? You start shifting your views because you want the power over your principles. I did it. I'm embarrassed to admit that to you now. We were fighting in the White House. I got summarily fired. I remember there was one day, and I got fired. About 24 hours after that, Trump called me a deep stater.
-
Unknown B
And I laughed and I said, I haven't even been to Washington on a field trip from elementary school. I mean, how could I be a deep stater? But he was implying because I was saying to him, hey, we work for the Constitution. You know, he told Paul Ryan that he worked for him. Paul Ryan looked and said, I don't work for you. I'm in a totally separate article of the Constitution. And these checks and balances are in place to preserve the sanctity of the system. It's the reason why we're so free and prosperous. Trump didn't want to hear it. And so Rubio and Walsh are now there. They're now there. They are in the barrel and they are going over the waterfall. Now they could say, hey, my personal power, my personal ego, I'm going to subordinate that to the greater good. I'm going to get out and denounce what Donald Trump is doing, or I'm going to twist myself into a pretzel.
-
Unknown B
I'm going to speak to Caitlyn Collins on cnn and my tongue is going to come out like a twisted bow tie, and I'm going to lie on behalf of Donald Trump. That's what I'm going to do. And they have to make a decision. They want to do that. Now, if you're telling me Rubio, in eight years, has completely morphed into Donald Trump light, I don't believe that. But I believe that he is selling pieces of his soul. McCarthy did it. McCarthy wasn't there, but McCarthy said, you know, I got to be the speaker of the house. He lasted 24.5. Scaramucci. That's it. But I got to be the speaker of the House. Uber alles, it doesn't matter. Ok. No, we should. He, he was calling Trump and saying, what the hell are you doing? We need help up here. There's an insurrection that you premeditated.
-
Unknown B
McConnell and McCarthy could have impeached and convicted Donald Trump. They blinked and McCarthy told his buddies, well, he's finished. He's finished. After a fiasco like this, he's finished. We don't need to do that. Let's, let's stay in our partisan bucket. Did Barry Goldwater do that? Did Bob Dole do that? No, they didn't, because they were from the World War II generation and the Constitution was more important to them. These guys, power is way more important than the principal. And by the way, by the way, I get it because I did it. I have to live with that for the rest of my life. I moved my principles to serve Donald Trump. And then I said, okay, that's a bridge too far. I have to tell people the truth about what I'm seeing. And I, and I have to explain to people now, will Rubio do that?
-
Unknown B
I don't know, but he's a politician. Politicians Want power. You remember what Jack Kennedy said about the profiles of courage? They. They said to him, congratulations, you won the Pulitzer Prize. Yo. Thank you. But the book is so thin. Senator Kennedy, why is the book so thin? He said, well. He said, well, there's not a lot of courage out there. I can only find, you know, 10 or 14 situations. The book Profiles of Cowardice would have been the Encyclopedia Britannica, but I could only find a few stories, and that's why the book is so slim.
-
Unknown A
I love that. And I didn't know that I wanted to pick up on something because you mentioned the separation of powers. Right. And Paul Ryan, you know, essentially being told that he worked for Trump and what's going on with Elon Musk and Doge, and watching that Cabinet meeting play out where you could tell that at least half of the people in that room were doing a, you know, dying Marco Rubio inside, you know, watching Musk parade around in the tech support shirt and having an understanding that not only do the American people not want this, they want waste, fraud, and abuse cut, but they don't want an unelected billionaire serving himself over serving the American people, but that they might not be able to do anything about it, which I think is folks who have gotten into public service that should at least be part of the concoction of what motivates you to do it.
-
Unknown A
Even if you are someone like Alinda McMahon, you know, or Howard Lutnick, et cetera, I think that they understand that public service, at least in its prior form, used to be about making the country as good as possible for the widest amount of the largest amount of people. And so where do you think the Musk of it all shakes out? You know, people say they're gonna have some huge fight, they're gonna break up. Trump doesn't like not being in the spotlight, and it feels like Musk is increasingly taking it as someone who, you know, was on the inside of all this. How are you viewing it?
-
Unknown B
Well, so I have this contrarian view on the situation because Musk is the richest person in the world and lit Trump up with $300 million during the campaign. And he has a $44 billion megaphone known as Twitter or X or whatever you want to call it. And I think Trump is afraid of Musk, if I'm just being brutally honest. You can even see it in the tentativeness when he talks to Musk. Now he wants Musk to burn out. He's told people inside his inner circle, who I still speak to, that Musk will get bored and Musk will burn out and go back to his job. Let's let him burn out on his own without us pushing him out. And Trump, I know his personality well, was projecting in the Cabinet Room. Anybody that doesn't like Musk, speak out or forever hold your peace. That's him.
-
Unknown B
He don't like Musk. He's trying to tell you that with his projection. And so Musk will burn out. You'll find that the Doge thing may save some money here or there. A lot of that. USAID will get restored in a follow up Democratic administration will have to be. This is good sense for the American people and there are. People have to understand it. But Musk will flame out. He'll return to Tesla and X and SpaceX, et cetera. And Trump will not have a Pyrrhic debacle with him like he had with me or Kelly or Mattis or Mark Esper. He won't because he's afraid of him. He'll want it and it's in their mutual best interests not to do that. You see what I'm saying?
-
Unknown A
Yeah.
-
Unknown B
And so, but that will end and I predict it'll end quickly. I see Musk as Bannon and Bannon was president. Bannon. Bannon was co president with Donald Trump. And Bannon lasted eight months. He actually got fired on the same day that I did. He's such a baby. You don't want to leave the White House with me. So he asked General Kelly could he spend two more weeks in the White House before he walked out the front door. And so I think that this will fizzle sometime by Labor Day, Musk will be back at his job. And Musk has hurt himself here. He hasn't helped himself, he's hurt himself because by inserting yourself in public, I've hurt myself. This is your job. So this hasn't hurt yourself. I've hurt myself. You insert yourself. Warren Buffett was on CBS Sunday Morning News this week and they asked some political questions.
-
Unknown B
He said, sorry, diplomatically, I'm not going to answer those. Okay. George W. Bush has said, hey, no, I'm good. Okay. So you hurt yourself because if you tell somebody what you think, 50% of the people don't like you, they stop buying your sneakers. Quote Michael Jordan. Right. But Musk is hurting himself because people are slowing down their Tesla sales or doing certain things now because of his political leanings. And so I believe he, I believe this ends. It doesn't end pyrically. And Doge, like the Grace Commission under Reagan, like the something under Obama. There was a, you know, the guys, it was a Alan Simpson Bowles.
-
Unknown A
It was called Simpson Bowles Commission. Yeah.
-
Unknown B
It didn't go anywhere. Okay, this won't go anywhere. It turns out we do have some fat and double spend and maybe even possibly some fraud in the government. There's possibly some Medicare Medicaid fraud. I get it. There's fraud and lots of different things. And we can trim it and maybe we will trim it. But the best thing that we could do is to go back to what Bush and Clinton did, which was pay as you go. We had pay as you go legislation in place to regard rails put up. This is the amount of money you can spend. If you're going to tax somebody, that's fine. You got to cut spending. If you're going to increase social expenditures, you got to raise taxes. And if we do that and we hold the line, the economy will outgrow the deficit. Okay, Bush and Clinton adhere to that.
-
Unknown B
We were running a budget surplus by the end of 2000. George W. Bush unclipped us from pay as you go because of what happened with the Iraqi war. And by the way, he cut taxes in March. Bush and we went to war in October. It was the first time in U.S. history that we went to war without a tax increase. In fact, we had a tax cut. And that really started the wild trajectory of deficit spending. So it's all healable, it's all solvable. But you need a long term approach. You need a 15 or 20 year plan to right size the deficit. You're not going to do it in two minutes. Okay, but your points are musk is there. It's a good idea to cut things, it's a good idea to cut waste, but the way they're going about it is hurtful. It's not going to help anybody.
-
Unknown B
Trump was right about the border. I know this is raging moderates. Trump is right about the border, but he did it in such a vicious way that it turned off a lot of Democrats. So when Biden got the job, he reversed the decisions. We're not Trump. We're more humane than Trump. But it was wrong. And the people poured over the border and the Americans got upset. Go look at the exit polling.
-
Unknown A
Yeah.
-
Unknown B
So we gotta be very careful. Like we talk about crypto. If it's a Trump crypto reserve, then when the next Democrat gets in and rip it up, throw it out. It's gotta be bipartisan and we gotta stop with the left and the right and look at what's right or wrong and to say, okay, is this right or wrong for our society? And what Trump is doing right now with UK is wrong. It's wrong for our society. It's wrong for the average American. Well, why is it wrong? It weakens the cause of freedom and liberality around the world. That's bad for our markets. It's bad for the risk profile of the American capital market system. It's wrong. We don't want to live in an imperialist world. We don't want to do it. Living in an imperialist world will lead to a disaster. And what do we learn about the imperialists?
-
Unknown B
Great Britain got hurt, India got hurt, Africa got hurt. Nobody benefits from colonialism. Trump wants to take Canada and Greenland. Okay, let's take Canada and Greenland. Let's see how that goes for the United States. It's absurd.
-
Unknown A
People are already hearing it at the hockey games about how it's going to go for the United States.
-
Unknown B
It's absurd, Jaz. And so for me, you know, I get it that a lot of riled people, your network does a good job at riling those people. There's a good chant about nationalism and us first and we're tired of carrying the world. But whether you like it or not, Roosevelt said it better than anybody. We're integrated with the world. Whether we like it or not, we are integrated. It's connected. It's the rich person with the house. You're going to charge people to come into the swimming pool or you're going to help them with their college tuitions. Which family is going to do better? Or what about your, your son here in the United States? Can you help? Yes, we have to help him too. But we have to think like that. We're 4% of the world's population, 26% of the world's output. Okay? The more benevolent we are, the better it's going to be.
-
Unknown B
When I was growing up, when I was in Europe in the 1980s, people were buying me drinks. Ask American servicemen in Germany in the 1980s, Ramsted they were getting drinks for them. Thank you for helping us. Thank you for being part of the cause of freedom and protecting us. Now you go to Europe and say, you guys have lost. Are you guys okay over there? Why have you lost your minds? Why have you flipped into this proto authoritarianism? Why have you done that? And the answer is, well, we have shitty democratic leaders and we had a really bad intergenerational transfer of leadership. And so Orange man bad. But a lot of people held Their nose and voted for Orange man because of what the Democrats were doing. You gave this poor woman 107 days to try to figure it out. You know, Joe Biden and Barack Obama caused this.
-
Unknown B
Barack Obama said to Joe Biden, no, you can't run against Hillary Clinton in the primary.
-
Unknown A
Okay?
-
Unknown B
So Hillary Clinton wins. She doesn't go to Wisconsin. She goes one time to Michigan, twice to Pennsylvania. Trump outworks her and beats her in the Electoral College. Okay, now we're gonna let Joe Biden run. Okay? He beats a sitting president, but he's 78 years old, not 78 years young. He needs to drop out in September of 2020. Joe Biden is the Marco Rubio of the Democratic Party. So what do I mean by that? He let his ego get to him. I got the job. I want to stay in the job. Lady Macbeth, Shakespeare. Well, Joe, you can't remember people. If Jessica Tarlov walks in your office, you don't remember her. Okay, well, that's okay. I want to stay in the job anyway. Okay? And so he embarrasses himself with the June debate. Now the party's in flummox. They could have resolved that in September of 2023, had a formal primary process, and had a young he or she Democratic candidate wipe the floor with Donald Trump.
-
Unknown B
Think about how close that election was.
-
Unknown A
I know, okay?
-
Unknown B
And it was. They had an unmitigated disaster in terms of intergenerational situation. So when I'm in Europe, we've got two things going on. Yes, we have a bozo movement of proto fascism that we need to put down, and we need to just help people economically. Galloway is right. Professor Galloway. It's an economic thing, and we need to make sure that these people feel restored and aspirational and then they won't care about fascism. And we need to fix the democracy. We need to end gerrymandering, end Citizens United. Right. Size the deficit, do really smart, powerful things to help the American people.
-
Unknown A
I'm totally with you. And I, you know, I was young during the 90s, but I talk a lot about the Clinton years and how it feels like we are ripe for something like that to happen again. If there is a charismatic leader with that kind of common sense approach to everything, I just want to say, and I want to move to a conversation about the free press. But what you're describing as what happened here in America, which it certainly did, is happening all over the world. The liberal order is failing. You know, across Europe, far right parties are getting larger shares than I certainly ever envisioned. I lived in London from 2006 to 2012. So, you know, peak Obama years was there to your point about, you know, during the Bush era, everyone kind of banding together but thinking, you know, you guys need somebody else.
-
Unknown A
I was there on election night in 08 and London was as jazzed about Obama being elected as they were back home. But something has shifted. I know the AFD underperformed what Elon Musk and JD Vance wanted in the German elections, but they still got a bigger share. And this conversation specifically about immigration is really what's fueling it, because everyone has lost any semblance of an idea of what borders or national character means to the average person. And while they might be benevolent insofar as thinking that we're pro immigration and that people should, you know, have rights to some goods and services, we all basically laid down and just said, you know, come on in, that will be Angela Merkel's legacy, which is sad for her and everything that was accomplished during that time, but that's what I'll be remembered from. And you just have to look at what the CDU looks like now to understand how badly she messed that up and the lessons that that sent through Europe.
-
Unknown A
But we need to take a quick break, so stay with us.
-
Unknown C
Support for the show comes from Poly AI. Sometimes calling customer service can feel like more trouble than it's worth. Most automated voice assistants don't understand what you're saying, and you're often calling for a problem that's too complicated for the menu options, so people end up sitting on hold for ages. Well, now there's a way to make phone support smoother, faster, and more enjoyable for you and your customers. It's called Poly AI. Poly AI offers lifelike AI agents that give actually helpful phone support worthy of your customers. So when people call your brand support line, they're immediately met with an AI agent that can resolve the call while delivering your best brand experience. And you get invaluable data about why your customers are calling in their own words. According to their data, poly AI customer service agents can handle 90% of customer needs successfully and at scale, authenticating calls, completing transactions, answering questions, taking reservations, making recommendations, and much more.
-
Unknown C
Turn your contact center into a CX command center. With Poly AI, you can go to Poly AI Prop G to request a demo and Explore how the AI agents work for your industry. That's Poly AI ProPG.
-
Unknown A
Welcome back. I wanted to quickly talk to you about the state of the White House press and free speech under the Trump administration. You were there for your 11 days during his first term. And we need your inside sources. The AP filed a lawsuit against the White House after restricting access to the Oval in Air Force One. Following this, the White House announced that they'll choose which journalists have access to the press room. All this is happening while Jeff Bezos told the Washington Post staffers that he'll be making changes to the publication that align more with the right, leading to opinion editor David Shipley's resignation. What do you think is happening with the Free Press issue vis a vis this White House? I've heard people on both sides of it. Fox News has been steadfast in standing up in support of keeping things the way that they have been with the traditional press pool and with the ap.
-
Unknown A
But what do you think the game is here for the Trump administration?
-
Unknown B
Chill the press. Trump hates it and chill the press. You know, we were talking about Viktor Orban and JD Vance has a lot of fear of Viktor Orban. He was very happy with the way Viktor Orban took over the schools and the press. And they want to chill the press and they want to intimidate people into not speaking. And Yevkash Patel has openly said he has an enemies list. A lot of the enemies are the press. I got into trouble with Donald Trump in April of 2019. I wrote an op ed for the Hill and I said it was an open letter to the President. Dear Mr. President, the press is not the enemy of the people. And obviously I went into the rendition of it being the fourth state and checking people in power. But there's something else that's elemental to the Free Press, and that's our economy.
-
Unknown B
We teach our second graders to speak and think freely. They go on to think creatively. And they create Facebook and Apple Computer, and they create things like Bitcoin and other technology and great ideas and entrepreneurship. If you tell somebody in the second grade that they can't talk about certain things and you'll put them in a reeducation camp. If they talk badly about Dear Leader, then they can't create. They got to steal our intellectual property. And so I said that the press is very important. Trump called me on Easter Sunday 2019. Last time I spoke to him, I thought he was calling me to wish me happy Easter. He was not. He was calling me to berate me, you know, and he said that I was wrong. The press is the enemy of the people and he wants to chill the press. My first meeting as White House Communications director in the Oval Office was, can we break up Amazon?
-
Unknown B
Excuse me. Well, you went to law school. Can we break up Amazon? I hate Jeff Bezos and I hate the Washington Post. I want to break up Amazon, okay? And I looked at him, said, actually, you can't break up Amazon. It doesn't meet the checklist that's in the Sherman Antitrust Act. Not the thing that he wanted to hear. So. So he don't like the free press, and his team doesn't like the free press and follow Viktor Orban. What Viktor Orban is doing, Trump would like to do. And so now you've got guys like Bezos who, you know, Khashoggi got lost at the Washington Post. Democracy dies in darkness. Something that Bezos's team came up with that he sponsored. And he's like, wait a minute, these guys could threaten my lifestyle. They could threaten me, they could threaten my family. And, you know, there's threats going on everywhere in Washington.
-
Unknown B
You're not. You're part of the press. So you know that the senators are getting threatened if they don't vote for certain cabinet members and stuff like that. And so basically, I got a great Life and worth $200 billion. What the hell am I doing? Let me lock and load on Trump and spend some money on him. Let me show up at the inaugural, have dinner with him, and let me tone down the Washington Post. I don't need this headache. And so. But that's the reason why he's a billionaire, and that's the reason why you and I are never going to be billionaires. Okay? Because. Because, you know, he's transactional, and he's decided that the principles of the democracy not dying in darkness are not as important as him maintaining his lifestyle.
-
Unknown A
Then why doesn't he sell it? Because, I mean, he has enough money and it doesn't make money for him. Right? And subscriptions are way down, so there are plenty of people who want to buy it. Why doesn't he get rid of it versus compromising his principles to this level?
-
Unknown B
Well, maybe he will, but maybe he won't. And maybe, maybe, you know, people are. People are funny in their own brains, you know. When I was compromising my principles to work for Donald Trump, do you think I thought I was compromising my principles? You know, maybe in his own.
-
Unknown A
Maybe like in your, you know, like in the shower, right, when you're sitting here and you're like, I was.
-
Unknown B
I was bullshitting myself. Let's just be honest about it, okay? And maybe Jeff saying to himself, I've really had a change of heart politically, and the wokeism you know, that's a.
-
Unknown A
Huge piece of this though. I mean, the, the reaction to the left going too far left has been massive. The amount of times in regular conversations, my friends are all pretty normie Democrats where they talk about the Charlemagne, the God ad, right? About he's, you know, she's for they, them, I'm for you. And all the stuff that Bill Maher is talking about all the time, you know, that's pretty deeply felt by Bill.
-
Unknown B
You should get him on your show. Bill is a raging moderate.
-
Unknown A
That's what Scott and I met. Bill Maher, that's our me. Cute.
-
Unknown B
Yeah, Bill and Bill. Bill, Bill. You know, I'm a huge fan. I've been on his show many times. And I would say that Bill gets it and I would say that, look, if I were the Democrats, which I'm not, and they would never accept this because again, it's all ego based. But I would team up with the former Republicans. I would, I would go to the Christie's and the Kissingers and isn't that.
-
Unknown A
What we did though? I mean, you're sitting there with Liz Cheney, you know, the day before the election or whatever.
-
Unknown B
And it really happened though, because the, the hard left didn't accept it. They derided it. And there were certain trips that were supposed to be on the campaign plane and the hard left says, nfw, you can't bring Christie, you can't bring this person, or you can't bring Rapper. You know that and I know that. But what I would say is that democracy is at stake. So let's have a pro American, pro Democratic, pro democracy party and let's expand the tent. And even though you may not like Chris Christie. I do. I was one of his donors. But even you may not like Liz Cheney, hold your nose. And even if you don't like aoc, hold your nose, get in the boat together and take out the Whig Party. Let's go to who the wigs were. The Whigs were taken out by a new party formed in 1856 known as the Republicans.
-
Unknown B
And they went after the abolitionists in the Whig Party and they went after the Abolitionists in the Democratic Party and they formed a new party. And their first Republican elected president was Abraham Lincoln. And they destroyed the Whig Party. They weakened it to the point where it disintegrated. You could do that to the MAGA party. You know this, this party known as the Republicans was a hostile takeover by an insurgent third party known as MAGA or Trumplicans. They call themselves the Republicans. See, Trump couldn't run as a third party because he knew he couldn't win. But he had to take over one of the two traditional parties, which he did. There's been a full decapitation and a full hostile takeover of that party. But the other people, the Lincoln Brown, whatever they are, merged them into the other party. They're all pro democracy people. They all understand that the Constitution and the democracy is more important than any one individual policy.
-
Unknown B
I may disagree with AOC on XYZ or the Amazon situation along Island City, I may disagree with her, but so what? She's pro democracy, I'm pro democracy. Let's team up like we did in the 1850s and knock these guys out of the boxing rink.
-
Unknown A
I like it. It's a good slogan. Let's make the 1850s cool again.
-
Unknown B
Well, maybe the 1850s were a terrible time. Listen, James Buchanan, terrible president, caused a civil war. A lot of things could have happened to not have that happen. You know, we could kill 600,000Americans. The backlash. The John Wilkes Booth assassination totally botched the reconstruction. I mean, we've gone through very tough times in this country as we're reordering the country to try to make it a more perfect union. But, you know, so this is, this time we're going through right now pales in comparison to the Civil War or the advent of the Second World War. But let's fix it. But we gotta, we gotta stomach each other. Oh, I can't work with Anthony. He was once with Trump. You know, my 32 year old son has a great line. Jenny's like, hey, dad, you're killing me. The Republicans hate you because you left Trump. The Democrats will never accept you because you were with Trump.
-
Unknown B
You're just killing my networking opportunities. Dad, maybe I'm getting close to the.
-
Unknown A
Truth, you know, and I would say I feel like the Democrats are very happy to have you talking the way that you are talking about being pro democracy.
-
Unknown B
They don't put me in their tent. Trust me, they won't put me in their tent. They let me help Vice President Harris on the debate because I understood Trump and I was able to get some fun lines into the debate. But they won't, they won't, they won't, they won't bring me in because I'm not a, I'm not a Democrat.
-
Unknown A
Well, I used to even have that much so less since I started co hosting the Five. But people, Democrats are suspicious of me because I work at Fox.
-
Unknown B
Right? Exactly.
-
Unknown A
Like it makes no difference what I'm saying or to how large of an.
-
Unknown B
Audience, you're helping Fox prosper. But by the way, you know, I applaud Fox for supporting ap. I applaud them for that. And again, you know, there's opinion people at Fox, there's journalists at Fox, and that's a point of view, and we should have that point of view, and we should have a healthy, rigorous debate about it. But the Trump stuff has taken it to a different level. Trump thinks like a Viktor Orban. He doesn't think like a traditional American president. Okay. The president since Roosevelt were grounded in some bipartisanship and grounded in some democratic principles and were committed to the idea of containment and the promotion of freedom and raising living standards around the world. Okay? They weren't. Hey, it's my swimming pool, and I'm now going to charge you to come into the swimming pool.
-
Unknown A
Yeah, I think. And it's a whole other episode, and we'll have to have you back to talk about this, but the defining distinction between what's going on right now and in the past, and I'm surely not comping this to the way that we were split during the Civil War, but is the information game in all of this and the disinformation, because, you know, it used to be people looked at maybe one paper, right? And odds are that you and your neighbor were looking at the same thing. And today, people are living in diametrically opposed information cesspools, and we do not have a common language as to what truth is, what right or wrong is. You know, is the sky blue? I got 10 people within 50ft of me who feel differently about that.
-
Unknown B
And to compound that, our adversaries are doing that to us.
-
Unknown A
They're thrilled by it, and they're doing it to their own people. Thank you so much for joining me. That's it for this episode.
-
Unknown B
Great to have you on. Please give Professor Galloway my love. You know, I'm a huge fan of his as well.
-
Unknown A
Yeah. And you guys have been talking as well about young men, right?
-
Unknown B
Yeah, we have a. We have a thing we're working on where we're trying to raise awareness of the crisis of young men. You know that your esteemed colleague is very big champion of that, as am I.
-
Unknown A
No, it's great. I'm looking forward to hearing more about that. Thank you all for listening to Raging Moderates. Our producers are David Toledo and Shanaynae Onike. Our technical directors, Drew Burrows. You can now find Raging Moderates on its own feed every Tuesday. That's right, its own feed. And exclusive interviews with smart voices and politics. Please follow us wherever you get your podcast and stay tuned for my conversation with Governor Pritzker.
-
Unknown B
Satisfaction.