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- [00:00]
Ryan Reynolds
Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same Premium Wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do@mintmobile.com
- [00:18]
Katty Kay
Switch upfront payment of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month Required intro rate first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms@mintmobile.com foreign. Hello and welcome to the Rest Is Politics. Us with me, Catty K in a beautifully sunny Washington in which anyone living here, Anthony, ought to be calm and Zen and in control because the city looks so lovely at the moment and we haven't hit the horrible humidity of summer just like President Trump is right now. Carmen Zen Anthony.
- [01:03]
Anthony Scaramucci
I mean this is probably as common as Zen as He gets like 100 tweets a night from, you know, 11:00pm to 3:00 clock in the morning.
- [01:11]
Katty Kay
I was sleeping.
- [01:12]
Anthony Scaramucci
Then on one Monday, and this is a few weeks back, he posted 160 times between 7pm and midnight. Yeah, I don't know what we're gonna talk about, but I do wanna talk. I do wanna talk about that and the fact that he's getting snubbed around by the judges. He's a big crybaby. Wah wah. I'm giving up on the Kennedy Center. Wah wah. Tell us what we're talking about.
- [01:37]
Katty Kay
Girl, you've hit the nail on the head. We're gonna talk about that. The crazy tweeting over the weekend and this idea that, you know, he's getting no's from a lot of people at the moment and as he does so, he clearly is not very happy about it. And he takes it all out on Truth Social, which does not make for a very calm and zen weekend emanating from the White House. In the second half of the show, we're gonna talk about California. There's a very important primary tomorrow for both the governorship and the mayor of la. And how are the Democrats managing to field such an amazingly lackluster crop of candidates? Okay, so let's start with those Truth Social posts he posted more than 50 times during the course of 14 hours on Saturday. It's a very good breakdown if you want to read it. And all the different posts, I mean I was scrolling through them non stop on Saturday, but it takes something and a certain amount of Dedication to be student like about this and sit down and actually make a note of all of the different posts that he put out there. And Harry Sisson, if you want to look at it, who is a liberal political commentator, has done it. I got a very nice printout. Here you go. These are all the different posts. They go on for pages and pages and pages of all the different things that Donald Trump was tweeting about. And, you know, sometimes I think, Anthony, it's tempting to blow this off and think, well, this is Trump just being Trump. But we've never had in American politics, or possibly in politics anywhere in the world, this direct conduit into a leader's brain and psychology and state of mind that we have when Trump puts out all of these posts. And so I think it is super worth. You can't just say, say, I don't want to deal with this. This is too much. I think it is really worth all of us going through them and looking at them because they give us a sense of where he's at. And I think it's what you suggested. Trump suffered two big legal setbacks at the end of last week. A Judge said, that $1.8 billion slush fund for the rioters of January 6th and any other of your supporters that you want to give money to, it doesn't fly. And another judge said the Kennedy center, which you have renamed the Trump, Donald J. Trump Kennedy Center. Mr. President, you have to take your name off the wall. It is not the Trump Kennedy Center. It is only the Kennedy Center. You cannot name it after yourself. And by the way, you can't shut it down for two years either. So he had a couple of massive legal setbacks at the end of last week, and I think it sent him into a tailspin. And his frame of mind was pissed off going into the weekend about this. And if you go through the tweets, it's one long list of grievance. Obsession with his legacy, anger at people saying no to him, nostalgia for the 1950s, a sense of grandiosity. I mean, it's all there in these crazy truths. Conspiracy theory, conspiracy theories. And you can see it's like he's lying on a psychologist's couch and we have access to his brain.
- [04:47]
Anthony Scaramucci
There's a great AI artistic rendition of Donald Trump on horseback wearing the ruffling uniform of a general from the Revolutionary War clip cloppeting next to George Washington while there's a NASCAR running in front of them.
- [05:08]
Katty Kay
It's just madness. And there's a space shuttle Right above them. We'll put it up on YouTube for people to look at. But if you haven't looked at some of the images that he puts out, take a look.
- [05:19]
Anthony Scaramucci
There's an expression from southern Italy called goo goots. Okay. And it's derived from summer squash. Okay. But it really means that the person's crazy. You know, if you say goo goots. Tony Soprano used to use it in the Sopranos in the early 2000s. He used to laugh. But Trump is googuts. Okay. But he's doing something that people should really understand. He wants to trigger people with this. This is the AI generation, the conspiracy generation. Trump is telling you a couple of things. Number one, I want to control the news cycle. Nobody else. Number two, I believe, rightly or wrongly, but mostly right, that my base loves this stuff. If I'm sending out these tweets and it's triggering liberal media people around the world, my base is loving this. And I also think he's doing something that people prob see him doing, but I see him doing it. He's preparing his supporters for the post Iran conversation. This will be the next phase of his presidency. And caddy, if you look through those 40 tweets, this is the culture war presidency. He wants to go back to the culture war because he's decided that he can win the culture war. I'm going to say something. A lot of people are not going to like this. He is right about that. Caddy. The culture in the United States right now is not a woke culture. Are there 10, 15% of the population that wants a woke culture? Maybe more than that, but it's not the bellwether of the United States. And if you disagree with me, please push back.
- [06:58]
Katty Kay
But wait a second. First of all, let's get back to the framing of this, because on the one hand, you're saying this is go goots and crazy.
- [07:07]
Anthony Scaramucci
Yeah.
- [07:07]
Katty Kay
And non stop sort of. I mean, I.
- [07:10]
Anthony Scaramucci
It's. My whole goal of this show was to get you to say goo goots. My Italian brotherhood out on Long island is loving the fact that you use the word with an English accent. Okay. Google.
- [07:21]
Katty Kay
Yeah, Google. I mean, and I think you're right that this comes across as crazy. I was speaking to a senior international economist at the weekend who's said from a big financial organization who said serious people are asking questions about the President's mental health. Right now. We're going to be doing a whole series for our founding members which is coming out this week on the President's health. You can become a founding member and take a listen to it. But I think it is particularly relevant at the moment. This guy is super sober, had been quite a supportive of the President's endeavors early on in the administration, and is now saying, listen, people are seriously asking about whether he has the mental capacity for the job. But at the same time, Anthony, you're saying that there is a strategy behind this. And I think you're right. There is some strategy. Some of this I think is knee jerk grievances. I mean, the stuff about when the judge said to him, you've got to take your name off the Kennedy center and you can't shut it down. What's his reaction? It's hardly stay and fight. I mean, it's like, okay, I'm done. He's like a child walking away from a playground. Right. If you're not going to play by my rules, if I'm not going to win, I don't want to play your game anymore.
- [08:31]
Anthony Scaramucci
There's a tiny bit more to that. See, So I am doing something great for the Kennedy Center. My name on the Kennedy center is embellishing it, making it better. And I'm going to renovate the Kennedy Center. But now you've hurt my feelings. And so I'm taking these benefits away from you people.
- [08:48]
Katty Kay
Yeah, it's kind of petulance. If you won't say it's mine, if you won't do it my way, you can't have any of the benefits. But so which is it? Is it crazy, all the tweeting and out of control, or is it thoughtful political 9D strategy, which is what you seem to be suggesting, that there is a political strategy here.
- [09:10]
Anthony Scaramucci
Well, in Trump's mind, it's 90 trust. It's probably like one and a half D checkers, but in Trump's mind, it's 93 dominoes.
- [09:17]
Katty Kay
Right.
- [09:17]
Anthony Scaramucci
It's like, you know, you know, he's not playing, playing the game that he thinks he's playing because he's got a little bit of the Dunning Kruger thing going on. But I want to take you back, if you don't mind, to the all Scaramucci attended fundraiser June of 2016 10short years ago as one of his finance directors on the 2016 campaign Caddy, we could not fill Cipriani's on 42nd Street. And so I literally called every one of my cousins and nieces, aunts and uncles. If I can find the picture, I'll send you the picture that we took with Trump. It was literally every Scaramucci from Long island. And I sat in the front row, we were serving bagels and whatnot. And Trump got up to the microphone and spent 15 minutes describing his Twitter strategy. And I was listening to this rambling stream of consciousness Twitter strategy. And I said, oh my God, there is brilliance in this strategy. And he was basically saying, I'm going to come up over the top of the media. They have to cover it because I'm running for President of the United States. And I'm just going to let you know, we used to fly around on the plane and if he was watching, he was hate watching cnn. If he saw Anderson Cooper saying something he didn't like, he would fat finger his phone and he would send a message on Twitter. And then five minutes later, after it hit the satellite and bounced into Anderson's desk, Anderson had a comment on his tweet. So there is method to this madness when the people say, oh, this, that and the other. Look, he's aging and he's in cognitive decline associated with aging. But this is a design, this is a feature, this is not a bug of Donald Trump's politics.
- [11:06]
Katty Kay
I mean, I get that, I get all of that. What it doesn't get round is the fact that on several fronts just last week and more broadly in this time of his presidency, that we're in, the walls are closing in on him. The system is working, it's constraining him, the courts are constraining him. He's getting no's from other areas of society. He's getting no's from all of the performers who were due to perform at the 250th birthday celebrations that he's having on the Mall because they've realized this is basically a pro Trump rally. And so they've all said no. At least five of the big names has said no. And so now he's going to have to give a speech himself. He's getting no from the Iranians who aren't taking him, revising the terms of the deal at the last minute that he's trying to put forward. He's getting no's from the American people who don't like gas prices as high as they are at the moment. So he may have a strategy. I just don't know where that strategy certainly between now and the midterms will get him or the Republican Party or maybe they're two just very separate things.
- [12:16]
Anthony Scaramucci
I just think, Caddy, that he is looking at a post Iran agreement positioning for his presidency. And if you read through the tweets, that's where he is. Moreover, he's now decided that no sustainable artist wants to be in a Trump associated concert on the 250th anniversary of the country. And so rather than making this a bipartisan sort of folksy American celebration, and I'm old enough to remember the bicentennial, which was exactly that under Gerald Ford, she doesn't want to do that. And so now it's going to be a MAGA rally. But listen, I don't want people going away saying, hey, this guy's crazy and he's this, that, the other thing. Yes, he's not well. He's not a well guy. We all know that he's already threatened war crimes, which is a war crime. And he's not well. And he should have been removed from, from office. But he's not going to be removed from office because he's got the Republican Party completely paralyzed. And he's proven, as you and I have spoken about over the last couple of weeks, that he not only has power over that party, but he has power over those primary voters. Okay, so they're stuck with him. And this is the strategy. But make no mistake, he is doing this to trigger people. He wants people to talking about this day and night. And one last piece, Caddy, that Twitter feed is a money maker for him, that social, whatever it's called. There's a kid at Citadel, he's a trader at Citadel, which is a big hedge fund and broker dealer that he has one computer on his trading platform. It's dedicated to a 79 year old elderly man's truth social post. All he has is he has it right there. And then he has oil prices and general stock prices and other times that Trump has named stocks like Palantir or Dell Computer, et cetera. And he trades off of the information because he knows that Trump and his buddies are trading off the information. So make no mistake that this is a valuable asset for the president and he's using it in that way.
- [14:41]
Katty Kay
You're totally right. The paradox is that he has never been able to show as much control of the Republican Party as he has shown in the primary races in the last few weeks. By ousting the people in Indiana who didn't want to redistrict the way he did by ousting Bill Cassidy in Louisiana, by ousting John Cornyn down in Texas, he's shown that he has a huge amount of influence over the Republican Party. And at the same time, he's getting pushback from the courts, he's getting pushback from The American people. His approval ratings have never been lower. And I, I get that he likes to trigger and he's done it before and he likes to invoke, you know, weird Wokery on the left and he likes to show that he can own the libs. That's a huge, big part of MAGA has always been owning the libs and it was a very successful part of their election strategy in both 2016 and in 2024. I'm just not sure, Anthony, whether it has the same pull as it does. I mean, you're right. There's a big part of the American public that thinks wokery went too far. There's probably a similar sized group, 20% that think that Donald Trump can do no wrong and who love this, who love watching the images and think that that makes them laugh a lot and it's super funny. And he is owning the libs still. But I think for the majority of the American public, aren't they bored with this by now?
- [16:11]
Anthony Scaramucci
I think so.
- [16:12]
Katty Kay
There's a huge rump of like 60% of the population that A is not following. Every post he puts out is focused on other things and finds this sort of same old. I mean, at some point the shock factor goes just by virtue of the fact that, that we've seen this show before.
- [16:32]
Anthony Scaramucci
Katie, it is prediction time on Trip Us. Okay. And so I'm the host of Prediction time on Trip Us and you are making a guest appearance and you have to make predictions about the following situations. Okay.
- [16:45]
Katty Kay
Yeah.
- [16:46]
Anthony Scaramucci
So we're going to start with US Freedom, the 250th anniversary event on the mall.
- [16:54]
Katty Kay
Yes.
- [16:55]
Anthony Scaramucci
What is going to happen, Katty Kim, Tell me what you predict on 4th of July 2026.
- [17:01]
Katty Kay
Okay. It's not going to be January 6th, 2021, so let's take that off the table. Okay. But it is going to be a big MAGA rally with a ton of Trump supporters will show up because he manages to get the faithful out there. There'll be a lot of Trump flags. There'll be a lot of Trump hats.
- [17:20]
Anthony Scaramucci
Mobile campers everywhere.
- [17:22]
Katty Kay
Mobile campers everywhere. No, they don't allow those on the, on the mall.
- [17:26]
Anthony Scaramucci
All right. But they'll be close enough. They'll be in walking distance.
- [17:29]
Katty Kay
Exactly. The reflecting pool will be a fantastic shade of Mar A Lago blue and will be all sparkly. They'll find some D list singer. They always manage to. Some Kid Rock will come out and perform and that'll be about it.
- [17:45]
Anthony Scaramucci
And Trump will make a 45 minute speech.
- [17:49]
Katty Kay
45 minutes. No, no, no, it'll be much longer.
- [17:51]
Anthony Scaramucci
Okay. Much longer. Okay.
- [17:52]
Katty Kay
He'll be an hour and a half, I reckon.
- [17:54]
Anthony Scaramucci
Okay, that's prediction number one. We got two more to go. Catty K Question.
- [17:58]
Katty Kay
Are you going to be there though? Anthony Scaramucci, Am I going to be there?
- [18:01]
Anthony Scaramucci
No, I'm not going to be there.
- [18:02]
Katty Kay
The 250th birthday of your country, shouldn't you be there to show your patriotism?
- [18:06]
Anthony Scaramucci
I'm going to tell you where I was on the 200th anniversary, though. My dad, who's passed, who was a fisherman. We had a small 20 foot boat that he used to fish on and he took us at 6am in the morning through the Throg's Neck on the 4th of July out into New York harbor and we had this Operation sail going on and all these tall ships sailed into New York harbor from around the world to celebrate. We didn't stay for the fireworks that night, but they had this beautiful fireworks display. But he wanted us to see those tall ships. And there I was as a 12 year old remembering that very, very fondly.
- [18:46]
Katty Kay
I was to able in the. I was living in Saudi Arabia. My parents were posted there and we got invited to the American Embassy and it was, it was one of my early memories of America. I'd never really come across America very much growing up as a kid in England. And we went to the American Embassy and there was Coca Cola and hamburgers and hot dogs and flags and a band. And I just thought this was kind of nirvana. I thought the, you know, a country that had that kind of exquisite food. I had to go and live there one day. Betty Crocker's Devil's food cake. My first introduction, 200th anniversary. There you go. I still remember it. And that was when everyone loved America and thought America could do no wrong as well, by the way.
- [19:29]
Anthony Scaramucci
Well, we're here now and so we're, you know, somebody took a picture of the White House overhead with the demolition of the East Wing. And then they're building this structure for the UFC fight, fight. And then the meme said it looks like a crystal meth family has entered the White House. They've blown the place up. Okay, so, but Katty, we got two more predictions to go.
- [19:52]
Katty Kay
Yes.
- [19:52]
Anthony Scaramucci
Okay. The Kennedy center, formerly known as the Trump Kennedy center, okay. Is now gonna be known as the Kennedy center again. So what happens there? Will the Kennedy center recover? As you and I both know, since he put his name on it, artists have dropped, ticket sales have dropped. It's become a non existent performing arts center to the point where the president, to spare the embarrassment of it, was closing it for renovation. But when does it rehabilitate, if ever?
- [20:23]
Katty Kay
Look, I feel really sad about the Kennedy center because I've gone many times to this Kennedy Center. Amazing ballet, great music, wonderful symphony orchestra, wonderful visiting productions. I've seen a lot of shows there. I've taken my kids there often. And at the moment, it's like the walking dead. You go in and there's nobody there. It's a shell of itself. And even if now Trump gives up this idea of shutting it for two years, they have no programming, Anthony. And you can't run a performing arts center with no programming. And you know how long it takes to get Hamilton or Cats to come and perform at your theater. You've got to plan these things years in advance. You've got to book the slots, you've got to book the artists, you've got to book the companies, you've got to sell the tickets. They can't turn this around. So this is a total mess up. He may have destroyed the Kennedy center, at least for the short term. Even if he doesn't get his name on the front and even if some judge says no, it can't close for two years of renovations. It's going to be destroyed by the fact that it has no revenue. So in many ways, I think the Kennedy center is a metaphor for willful destruction of something that actually was doing just fine. And I don't think that it recovers very easily. And meanwhile, other performing arts centers in Washington are picking up the audiences and picking up the donors grants that the Kennedy center used to have. This is a real mess up.
- [21:51]
Anthony Scaramucci
Okay, so it would have to be a major renovation of the board, which would mean a major reinvigoration of the donations there. And then you would have to get some very high profile artists, which he's
- [22:03]
Katty Kay
not going to allow to happen for the two years that he's staying in office.
- [22:06]
Anthony Scaramucci
Well, no. So this is a post Trump presidency then?
- [22:09]
Katty Kay
Yeah.
- [22:09]
Anthony Scaramucci
Okay, Last 1. The 1.8 billion, let me rephrase it. The 1776, the 1.776 billion weaponization anti weaponization fund. Is that going to go through Katty K. Or will that be blocked?
- [22:28]
Katty Kay
So I was talking to a Republican today who said to me it gets pulled this week, that no, it's, the judge has already blocked it. It's got, by Trump standards, an enormous amount of pushback from within the party. I think it quietly gets pulled this Week.
- [22:46]
Anthony Scaramucci
You know, there is something called disloyal Republicans gaddy. Because I also read Trump's Truth Socials and there are, believe it or not, disloyal Republicans. There are. And Trump posted a picture of him shooting rhinos saying, no more Rhinos, Republicans in name only. So Caddy, I know I said three, but this is my last one. So predict that. Is he going to go after those guys?
- [23:12]
Katty Kay
Of course he's going to going to. He's already gone after them. He's gone after Cassidy, he's gone after
- [23:17]
Anthony Scaramucci
Tillis, he's going to demolish those guys. Yep.
- [23:20]
Katty Kay
He's tried to demolish Mitch McConnell. But let me give you one what is Anthony, a YOLO Republican. These are no longer the Rhinos. These are the YOLO Republicans. Have you heard of them?
- [23:32]
Anthony Scaramucci
I haven't heard of them, no. Who would be a YOLO Republican?
- [23:36]
Katty Kay
The YOLO caucus on Capitol Hill are the Republicans who are leaving. They're the you only live once Republicans who are out of there.
- [23:45]
Anthony Scaramucci
Oh, so this is like the Tillises
- [23:47]
Katty Kay
and who are retiring, the Cassidy's and even the good soldier Senator John Cornyn, who put out, I don't know if you saw this, he put out re. He tweeted out of nowhere a lovely what he called old but apt fable of the frog and the scorpion. Do you know that fable, Anthony?
- [24:06]
Anthony Scaramucci
Yes, I do. Where the. Yeah, of course.
- [24:07]
Katty Kay
Where the scorpion asks the frog for a ride across the the river. And the frog says to the scorpion, why would I give you a ride? You're just going to sting me and kill me. And the scorpion says, yes, but if I do that, we'll both drown. And so I have no interest in doing that. And so the frog says, okay, hop aboard Mr. Scorpion. They go across the river and halfway across the river, guess what? The scorpion stings the frog and they both drown. And here is how Senator Cornyn ended his tweet of the old but apt fable, as he called it. I am sorry, but I couldn't help myself. Cornyn wrote, it's my character. That tweet, Anthony, has had 4 million views so far. So John Cornyn is not actually necessarily a very outspoken person who's going to turn into a Thom Tillis. But he's finding a way to send a message to the Republican Party that Donald Trump is the scorpion who will sting them and they will both drown.
- [25:04]
Anthony Scaramucci
So Caddy, what does it say about people and about politicians? I'm no longer running for reelection or I have been emasculated and eviscerated by Donald Trump. So now I'm going to tell you what I really think.
- [25:20]
Katty Kay
There's a reason Profiles in Courage is a very slim volume.
- [25:23]
Anthony Scaramucci
Why do they do that, Katty?
- [25:25]
Katty Kay
Because of the fear. Because of, look what happened in Indiana and look what happened in Louisiana and look what happened in Texas. I mean, I, I would think that at some point, and I'm talking to Thom Tillis, who I know you know well, who voted to confirm Pete Hegseth even though he had all but said he wouldn't, to somebody who had said that she had been abused by Pete Hegseth. And he voted to confirm Pete Hegseth even so, and didn't pull his nomination. Because they can't imagine not having power because they will tell themselves the body politic will be better with me in it acting as some kind of bulwark against Donald Trump. And in order to get into the body politic, I have to do a certain amount of sucking up. You've spoken to Thom Tillis. You know better than I do. That was a very painful episode that he went through.
- [26:12]
Anthony Scaramucci
Yeah, no, I've spoken to Tom. Tom was negative prior. In fairness to Tom, he was outspoken beforehand, which is why he decided to leave. This is sort of what Paul Ryan did. You know, Paul Ryan, the former speaker that said, okay, I can't really be with Trump. The party's moved towards Trump, so I'm going to leave and go back to the private sector.
- [26:33]
Katty Kay
He's not leaving before having endorsed Pete Hegseth, who he was vehemently opposed to.
- [26:38]
Anthony Scaramucci
Yeah, well, he said he had death threats. He was worried for his family. And I appreciate that. I understand that on, on December 4, 2021. And I'm going to ask our production staff to throw this up on our YouTube channel. And then I'll, I'll describe it to people. Thomas Massie posted a Christmas photo in front of the Christmas tree. He was sitting on a couch and they were all had AR15 rifles in their hands. Do you remember this Christmas photo caddy? It was five years ago.
- [27:05]
Katty Kay
Yeah, I do.
- [27:06]
Anthony Scaramucci
And so Thomas Massey was gun ho for Donald Trump. Now they're hanging out together in an anti. They're, they're in an interesting camp. I don't know how you would describe these, but these are like yolo, but still MAGA people. Right?
- [27:23]
Katty Kay
Molo.
- [27:24]
Anthony Scaramucci
Molo. I'm still America first, but I'm also telling you the truth that Trump sucks. Right. And so, but I just want to point out that they were heavily, heavily in the tank. Okay. And Massie put this out literally a couple of weeks after a school killing.
- [27:42]
Katty Kay
It was pretty gross. I'm going to be honest, and shot children.
- [27:45]
Anthony Scaramucci
Right. So. So yeah, we just have to remember what's going on here in the country and how dysfunctional it really is.
- [27:52]
Katty Kay
Talking of the country being dysfunctional, Anthony and I are taking a tour of the country in October. We would love to see you. We're doing a live tour ahead of the midterm elections because these are clearly such critical elections that we're going to be in Minneapolis, Chicago, Atlanta, New York, Boston, D.C. and then we are also going up to Canada to see our friends in Toronto. So if you're in any of those cities or, or you'd like to come and see us and ask us your questions. We'll discuss the news of the day, but we'll also take your questions as well. You can get tickets@therestispoliticsus.com we do hope you'll come and join us. It'll be a lot of fun. Okay. We're going to take a break and come back and talk about California.
- [28:35]
Anthony Scaramucci
Welcome back to the Rest IS Politics, Us with me, Anthony Scaramucci and me, Caddy K. So Caddy, we've got quite a primary going on. We have a governor's race and a LA mayor race. But these primaries are interesting because of the way the votes decide who's actually going to be the candidate. So take us through that, Caddy. Take us through the procedures in California and tell us about this sort of jungle primary.
- [29:01]
Katty Kay
It is a very interesting race in California. It's wide open on the mayor's side and the governor's side. And I was speaking to a Democrat who's a strategist who knows a lot about California, just before we did the show, who's saying that there has never been a time when you've had a wide open race on both sides for the governor's mansion and the mayor's office. And there's so much apathy about the candidates. And this is the paradox of California. You've got enormous wealth and innovation. I was out in California last week. Every time I go, I'm reminded what an extraordinary state it is. And yet this is a state that also can't fix basic problems like housing. This huge homelessness in Los Angeles has been in San Francisco as well. They can't get their disaster response right. They've got terrible fires as they had last year. That kind of makes it very difficult, I think, for Democrats to make the case, which is what they need to do in 2028 that look, we have a model. California for Democrats should be the model. They control the state, they've controlled the state for years. They ought to be able to go and say, look, we've got this great state, great economy. Here's our proof of concept. You've had four years of chaos after Donald Trump and now we can show you that we can govern. And look at California, that's our example and that's what we're going to follow. And instead they've got a state that has a huge number of problems. They've got a really lackluster a crop of candidates both for the Governor's Mansion and for the LA Mayor's office. And because of this weird, as you said, the weird procedure of what's called a jungle primary where basically anyone can run in the primary, Democrat or Republican, and the top two go on to run off against each other, whether they're both Democrats, both Republicans, one Republican, one Democrat, then they go to fight it out in the election. So in theory you could have two Democrats running against each other or two Republicans running against each other. And the Republicans are making a run of this. They've got a compelling figure in the Governor's race, Steve Hilton, who's actually by birth, a Brit, a Fox News commentator who's been endorsed by Donald Trump. And you've got a similarly sort of maga ish populist MAGA likes this character, Spencer Pratt, who's running for the LA Mayor's office. But really the story of the California primary I think is the disconnect between what the Democrats should be able to offer and what they are offering in the state and the low turnout that this election is producing. They've already had early voting on both sides, but particularly on the Democratic side because the Democrats are looking at their candidates for governor and candidates for mayor and saying, ugh, is that all you can offer us? I don't understand this, Anthony. California is such a dynamic state. Democrats rule the roost there. Why on earth don't they have better candidates for Governor or for mayor?
- [32:03]
Anthony Scaramucci
There's a number of different reasons, but the main reason is that people feel in a one party state that the system is sort of rigged. One of the questions I was going to ask you is if Vice President Harris ran, do you think she would be the front runner here given the weakness of the, of the candidates? I could tell by the expression on your face by the way that no,
- [32:25]
Katty Kay
I don't think she would be.
- [32:26]
Anthony Scaramucci
She'd be in the muddle of mediocrity.
- [32:28]
Katty Kay
She'd be in the muddle of mediocrity.
- [32:30]
Anthony Scaramucci
Yeah. So I think what happens here is if you're a big personality and a big business guy, I'm talking way back. Al Checky, who was a brilliant guy, brilliant entrepreneur, spent gobs of money running the Democratic machine, took him out. He actually ran as a, as a Democrat and they took him out and they, they went with the, the hoi polloi Democrat. And so what ends up happening in a state like California is you're into what I would call one party sclerosis. This is the same thing going on in New York. It's a one party state. 20 plus years without a governor. As a Republican, I think the last Republican governor for California, you could correct me if I'm wrong, was Arnold Schwarzenegger. And he was running as liberal as you could run as a California governor.
- [33:25]
Katty Kay
But New York City managed to produce like his politics or not like them. You have to say that Mamdani is a very good political athlete and rises above the fray. He's certainly not mediocre. So New York could do that despite the fact that it's been one party rule in that state for even longer, possibly one. Why can't California do it?
- [33:43]
Anthony Scaramucci
Mondani is benefiting from the anti incumbency moot and this is something that Steve Hilton is going to try to benefit from. Right. He's a different politician. Of course. He's a right leaning politician considered to be somewhat maga, had his own Fox News show for a number of years. He's a fellow Brit. He, he actually worked for David Cameron many years ago.
- [34:08]
Katty Kay
Always sounds weird hearing him campaigning in California. I don't know why it sounds weird, but it does sound kind of weird. But.
- [34:14]
Anthony Scaramucci
Well, I mean that's the thing about America. Look at Arnold Schwarzenegger with his Austrian accent.
- [34:19]
Katty Kay
You've interviewed Steve Hilton. What do you think of him?
- [34:21]
Anthony Scaramucci
Well, look, I don't agree with Steve on a lot of political things that I've debated him on his show. And you could find the nasty tweet from Donald Trump one Saturday evening in the summer of 2020. I was on the show debating Steve about Trump and Trump was obviously watching and fired off. You know, I was big loser or whatever he called me. He's never called me low IQ though. Caddy. I feel sort of disappointed that I, I haven't received that invective yet. But with Hilton and with Mandani, and Mandani is a very clever young man and he's done a Very good job on social media. Hilton's more of our contemporary. So I don't know if he has the same edge related to the social media, but they are, they are riding this anti incumbency wave. But you know, here's the thing. Mandani ran as a Democrat. The Democratic Governor Hochul supported him. And away you go. Hilton's going to have no support from that machinery.
- [35:18]
Katty Kay
And that's going to be his problem. That even if it's Hilton and Javier Becerra, who is the former head of HHS under Biden, those two are the most likely to get through. So they'll be number one and number two, a Democrat and a Republican. But then California is a Democratic state. Democrats will rally around Becerra and it'd be very hard, I think, don't you, to see Steve Hilton being elect. I mean, he could get through this round, but I don't see him becoming governor realistically. The problem for Becerra is that there's a. I was being told this morning by this California strategist that there is a campaign finance skeleton in his cupboard which is being investigated at the moment. There's a trial going on at the moment concerning some of his aides. And there is a chance some top Democrats in California are afraid that he could be the person who's elected governor and then get indicted after he's elected, which would be kind of a disaster for Democrats. This is an election that risks blowing up in the Democratic Party's face.
- [36:22]
Anthony Scaramucci
But again, you know, the Democrats control that state. You know, there's a woman by the name of Meg Whitman. Do you remember Meg Whitman?
- [36:30]
Katty Kay
Whitman was the businesswoman, correct? Hewlett Packard, Right.
- [36:34]
Anthony Scaramucci
Meg Whitman went to Harvard Business School. She became the CEO of eBay. She did the transaction with Elon Musk and Peter thiel and bought PayPal. She then left eBay. Bay became the CEO of Hewlett Packard, very close friend of Governor Mitt Romney, an incredibly accomplished businesswoman. She spent $142 million $2010. So you know, that's like almost $200 million today given inflation on her campaign. And she lost to Jerry Brown, who had been governor once before and returned to the governorship in California. But she had a whole set of reforms she wanted to put in place in California that never materialized. But to Jerry Brown's credit, okay, he did take some of those reforms. He embedded them in his policies and he ran a budget surplus. You know, Newsom, Governor Newsom did inherit from Jerry Brown a budget surplus which unfortunately, cause of COVID many other issues got squandered. But you know, California is in a rough spot. Tom Steyer, we know him from the presidential campaigns. I know him way back from Goldman Sachs when he worked there. Very successful hedge fund manager. He has spent so far $213 million on his campaign and he's running on progressive policies. He's gonna tax the wealthy and the corporations. He wants a billionaire wealth tax going to tax big tech and he's going nowhere. Caddy. $213 million spent going nowhere. Vanity project for Tom Steyer. So to me, I don't know where you're going to reform this state of California, unless you're going to have constitutional structural form at the federal level, meaning we're going to allow for, for demographic proportionality in districts. We're going to end gerrymandering. Because let me tell you what happens. You end gerrymandering, you'll get more Republicans in the House. You get more Republicans in the House, you'll have more Republican power in the state of California. It'll help prop up a candidate. So again, it's a domino effect. They're all, you got to hit one domino to click into the other dominoes to make it fairer. But we know about one party systems and you can ask President Xi about this, the President of China. One party systems develop lots of corruption because you don't have the turnover of the elites. And so you've got lots of corruption going on in California as well.
- [39:08]
Katty Kay
Well, and you've got exactly that in the three biggest voting states, Texas, California, New York, in the country. You've basically got one party rule. California is interesting. It has been, you know, like you said, it's been Republican, obviously. It's produced very famous Republican governors. Reagan, Schwarzenegger. It's been had more moderation at the top. It just needs some very good strong leadership. And unfortunately, in neither the LA race nor the governor's race are you seeing particularly stellar candidates. So the kinds of reforms that you're talking about would take somebody who is a very good leader. And I don't see that in any of those candidates. Okay, we'll be watching that race though, because that's going to be an important one when it comes about November.
- [39:50]
Anthony Scaramucci
But your prediction is what, Katty, before
- [39:52]
Katty Kay
we leave, my prediction is that Javier Becerra becomes the governor of Californ and Karen Bass becomes mayor.
- [40:00]
Anthony Scaramucci
Yeah, she gets reelected as mayor. Okay. All right, so we're in, we're in sync on both of those. We'll have to see what happens. But man, we're in major need of governmental reform, not only the federal level, but the state and local elections as well.
- [40:12]
Katty Kay
Guys, we haven't had much time to talk about it on the program, but we, we are going to talk about it more in our founding members episode because one of the things that Donald Trump tweeted about in that tweet storm we mentioned in the first half of the show was the medical exam showing that he was in excellent health. He also tweeted about his cognitive tests too. The fact that the President keeps needing to bring this up is something in and of itself. So we have decided, and we are getting asked about it constantly, both his physical and his mental health and capacity. So we've decided to do a two part miniseries exploring the truth about Trump's health and making sense of the claims that are flying around on this subject. Is his health actually in serious decline? And another episode on what can and should be done about it, not perhaps just for Trump, but for future presidents as well. If you want to hear the first episode, it's going to be released on Wednesday. Sign up@therestispoliticsus.com and become a founding member.
- [41:12]
Anthony Scaramucci
And Donald Trump is not the first president to hide his health.
- [41:14]
Katty Kay
Cateche clearly not. Nope, nope. We're going to talk about that too. And perhaps unless they can change the age of their presidency, won't be the last either. We'll see you here later this week.
- [41:26]
Anthony Scaramucci
Okay, we'll see you later in the week.