Let's Find Common Ground - Let's Find Common Ground with Anthony Scaramucci

Episode Date: February 28, 2025

CPF Director Bob Shrum joins former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci for a discussion on current events and the first month of the second Trump administration. They discuss the state of the Republican and Democratic parties, the impact of Trump's domestic and international actions, and even touch on Bitcoin.   Featuring: · Anthony Scaramucci: Former White House Communications Director; Founder & Managing Partner of SkyBridge Capital; Founder of SALT; Author of four books · Bob Shrum: Director, USC Center for the Political Future; Warschaw Chair in Practical Politics, USC Dornsife

Bob Shrum, Director of the Center, and I'm Republican Mike Murphy, co-director of the Center. Our podcast brings together America's leading politicians, strategists, journalists, and academics from across the political spectrum for in-depth discussions where we respect each other and we respect the truth. We hope you enjoy these conversations.

I'm Bob Trump, Director of the Center for the Political Future here at USC Dornsight. Welcome to everyone in our audience, both virtually and to those attending our live watch party on campus. And let me welcome to today's conversation an old friend of the center. Anthony Scaramucci was our guest when he was a staunch defender of President Trump during the president's first term, and he was serving as the communications director

in the Trump White House, where he had served. He returned to the center after he became a Trump critic. In both incarnations, he has been one of our favorite people. He is always candid, lively, and refreshingly insightful. He's also the co-host of a terrific podcast, the rest is Politics US, and an entrepreneur who leads SkyBridge, a global investment management firm. And in connection with that, I'm going to have a bonus question for him at the end of our discussion, after which we'll take questions from our audience as well.

Anthony, let me start with this. Is the second Trump administration different than you expected, better or worse? Anthony Comegna I would say not. First of all, thank you, Bob, for having me and all of my different iterations and incarnations. And we've been all on the Trump journey. And since you're a political science professor, I'll say this and we'd love to have you react to it. I think Trump is the looming figure of our time. He's eclipsed other political figures. I would say in the last quarter century, he is the guy and he's changing the landscape

of American government for better or worse. And whether we like him or dislike him, we have to at least acknowledge his significance. But what I would say about him is that Joe Biden accidentally empowered Donald Trump. There was a shadow presidency going on for four years that was Trump's presidency, almost like a shadow cabinet like they have in the UK. And I gave Donald Trump an opportunity to organize. And that organization has led him to have different people. He always has a carousel of people because he burns through people.

But he's got different people and more of these people are political operatives and they're more cunning than his first team. And then the second thing that happened, which is quite ironic, he was indicted and he ended up becoming a felon. But I think the indictment changed the landscape of that campaign. And so he was more detached from the campaign defending himself in the criminal court system in New York. And he let people like Susie Wiles, who I know for a long time, and Chris LaSavita run

the campaign, organize the campaign. and obviously they were very successful. And of course, we have to talk about the missteps that the Democrats made, which led to his success, but it's more organized. And Susie, as an example, his White House Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles, she worked for him. And you may remember this, Bob, in 2016, she ran Florida for Donald Trump. And so she worked for him. She was sort of the head of his office when he was in asylum, if you will, or an exile, and he's sort of in exile in Mar-a-Lago. And so she goes back six, seven, eight years. That's very unusual. John Kelly didn't really know Donald Trump. Mick Mulvaney didn't really know Donald Trump. Reince Priebus didn't really know Donald Trump. Mark Meadows, these are his former White House Chiefs of Staff. None of them really knew Donald

Trump. She's got working experience with him. Yes, it's more organized. Then the last part of this And so, yes, it's more organized. And then the last part of this is the people at Project 2025 that want to alter the American government, expand the executive branch, its powers, and effectively on a relative basis liquidate and weaken the judicial branch of the United States and the legislative branch. They put out something called Project 2025. Trump disavowed it during the campaign, but he has been pushing it. If you go down his list over the 33 days, it's one Project 2025 initiative after the next. the 2025 initiative after the next. And so yes, way more organized, less dissent, less organized dissent.

The Democrats are in disarray. He weakened and effectively took out the former Republican Party. A historian years from now will say that Donald Trump actually was a third party insurgent. He hijacked the party formerly known as the Republicans. He decapitated it and he installed what I would refer to as MAGA in that party. That is not a party that I grew up in, Bob. That's not a party that I currently recognize. We can go down the list, whether it's tariffs, our attitude towards our European allies, the notion of we're going to wall off America literally and physically from the rest of the world will be repugnant to somebody like

Ronald Reagan. We're here now with this new party, the former Republicans, currently known as the Republicans but basically MAGA. He's more organized, he's more dangerous. And if you saw the AI rendition of what he would like to do with the Gaza Strip, and him calling it Trump Gaza, I would suggest that people go to Truth Social and take a look at the video that he posted, you'll see that he's not well. I mean, and I think that's something that we all have to be honest about. You don't have to be a psychiatrist to

know someone isn't well. If you watch an American football game and somebody's bone is coming out of the skin, you don't have to be an orthopedic surgeon to know that the person has broken a leg. And so he's just observationally not well. And yet first grade literature comes into play here, Bob, because we all read in the first grade, the emperor has no clothing. And now we're watching that play out in our political life with his courtiers. I want to follow up on that in a minute. But you said something that concerns me about the people around them. Ted Kennedy once told me that President Kennedy had said that you always have to have three

or four people, if you're president, around you who can tell you when you're being a dumb SOB. It sounds to me like he doesn't have anybody around him who's going to say that's wrong. And I think that might be perilous. Well, listen, I mean, I've gone through the roster. Again, I know most of these people, they were former republic, worked with them. He doesn't. There's nobody in his airspace.

I think that there are intelligence profiles of him, personality profiles of him that have been made by various intelligence agencies around the world. Everyone has a different formula in terms of how they want to handle them. I think Macron, the president of France, has taken the playbook that he's a petulant child. And so scolding him is just going to make things worse. Praising him, getting in his airspace and trying to make him feel better about himself is seems to be the launch codes that the French are using. Keir Starmer is coming into town. I think he's going to have a difficult

time dealing with Donald Trump knowing their two personalities. Yeah, there's nobody inside the wheelhouse. Macron, frankly, is the closest we've gotten so far to somebody publicly saying that the Ukraine did not start that war, publicly saying things that we all know is true. You can't get Hegseth or Walsh to say that now. That's his court. They know that.

I mean, Rubio looks like he's in a hostage crisis. If you saw the body language of Rubio on the couch in the Oval Office, and I know Marco a long time, I'm a former donor of his. It's almost like his tongue comes out of his mouth like a twisted pretzel when he's trying to explain Trumpism, which is totally diametrically opposed philosophically to everything that Rubio has stood for in the Republican Party. You know what I mean? Yeah. You recently retweeted or re-exed, I guess I should say, the following Liz Cheney

post. Quote, Trump with his devotion to Putin, abandonment of Ukraine, and lies about history is the antithesis of everything Ronald Reagan stood for. He's aligning America with the enemies of freedom. In your view, why is the president apparently pursuing a Trump-friendly peace in Ukraine? And what impact is this policy having on our allies or our erstwhile allies in NATO and elsewhere? Well, I retweeted that because I believe that and she said it better than I could say it,

so I retweeted that. I think that he's made a decision that he likes strong people. He has told people that he wants the universality of cheering that a dictator gets. He wants the lack of dissent. He likes the lack of negative public opinion. He wants that squelched. You know, he's brought lawsuits against various media establishments. He's bullied Jeff Bezos into turning the Washington Post, I guess, into a right-leaning publication at this point.

And so there's a combination of fear and intimidation and things like that. And so these are things that Vladimir Putin does to people, and these are things that authoritarians do. Trump in his private moments at this point in his life, I think he would like to have a North American sphere of influence, which would attach into South America. So we'll call it a Western hemispheric influence, but primarily North America. And he would like Putin to leave him alone in that airspace.

And he's more or less would tell Putin, we'll leave you alone. You can do whatever you want in Eurasia, except the part of Eurasia that includes China, we'll let China have that. And so if you see the way Trump thinks, it's a three poles, sort of a tri-polar world, perhaps maybe with Modi at some point involved

with it, but right now it would be those three. So he wants to break the North American, North Atlantic alliances, and he's sort of signaling to Putin that he's willing to do that for him, and he wants to cut a deal. Now I don't know what will be included in that deal. The decimation perhaps of the Iranian mullahs, obviously that could be included in the deal. A protectorate for Israel could be included in that deal. A takeover of Greenland could be included in the deal. I know this is a very dramatic thing to say and it seems unlikely now, but an absorption

of Canada at some point could be included in that deal. Again, I know it sounds unlikely now, but there's a lot of things that have happened that are unlikely with Donald Trump. He's much more sure-footed in 2024 than he was in 2017, or 2025, I should say. And you have to remember something, not taking him seriously, not taking him seriously has been a perilous idea for Democrats, former Republicans, and people in opposition. If they were really taking him seriously, Professor, what they would do is team up with each other. And you

and I both know the death of the Whig Party, which took place in the 1850s. You got the Republicans that were created in 1856. They peeled off some Democrats that were abolitionists. They peeled off Whigs that were abolitionists, and they weakened the Whig Party and effectively put the Whig Party out to pasture. Obviously the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, rose to power in 1861. They should do that. If they were smart, they would give up their grievances towards each other and their ideological differences and AOC would team up with a Chris Christie and a Liz

Cheney for that matter. And they would reform a new party coalition that would put the current Whig party, this current nativistic, raciously tinged party out to pasture like the Whigs were put out to pasture in the 1850s. But it would require people to drop their egos and hold their noses and get on with each other the way Churchill did in the war. That was a coalition government that Churchill formed, and the Tories didn't agree with the labor on everything, but they got together to make it happy. You know there was a moment when the king was deciding, and those days the king could decide, who was going to be prime minister. And there were large factions of the Conservative Party that wanted

Lord Halifax. And Clement Attlee, the leader of the Labour Party, was called in by the king and he said we will not serve under Halifax. We will only serve under Churchill. So I think your point is a very interesting one. Some of Trump's supporters, I think, would say that what you're outlining, with maybe the possible exception of Canada, is not a bad future for the United States where it reasserts its power, claims that we live in a world that can't live any longer by the rules of the post-World War II international order, and so he is trying to establish a kind of American, if not dominance, at least predominance in a large part of the world. What do you

say to that? I say that it's tremendously misguided as somebody that studied history. And unfortunately for me, I'm accidentally an aspirin into politics. I've been a lifelong entrepreneur. And I think I told this story to some of your classes over the years, I got accidentally involved with politics

because I didn't have a network. And I knew if I went to these political fundraisers, I could meet wealthy and successful people and develop relationships and bring them into Goldman Sachs in the early part of my career as clients. I wrote my first check to Rudy Giuliani in 1993, Young Republicans for Giuliani, and that started my political fundraising, which ultimately led to me having that ill-fated stay in the White House where I was fired after 11 days. But I would say to you that to understand our history, to read the writings of Jefferson

or Abraham Lincoln, whatever the flaws were in these men, or what Reagan would say, or your colleague Ted Kennedy or his brother Jack Kennedy would say, or your colleague, Ted Kennedy, or his brother Jack Kennedy would say that America represents something to the rest of the world. America is this huge experiment. It's a multi-ethnic, multiracial idea. It's not a idea or a country that's tied to a bloodline or to a border, it was a created country and it got created during the enlightenment. And the idea behind it was that we would have a decentralized form of government and protect

ourselves from autocracy and tyranny. And I would just suggest to the people listening right now, we have 5.7 billion people around the world that are living under some type of authoritarian structure, some type of autocracy. And the great leaders in the West, Franklin Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, Jack Kennedy, Teddy Kennedy picked the people, understood that America needed to stand shoulder to shoulder and alongside of the free people around the world to protect those people and to protect the light of that liberty and the light of that freedom. And so I would say to you that that

strategy would be a disaster, particularly at this time in our nation's history. Also, that strategy would require a suppression of the free press, a disorganization, disambiguation of the press. It would cause the fear factor, the intimidation factor. These are things that are unnatural to Americans. When you take away the free press, you actually also lose your economic innovation because you're stymieing young people. I always tell people the free press is there to protect us from tyranny, but it's also there to tell our second graders that they can speak and think freely.

They go on and create Facebook or they create Google or they make an Apple iPhone. All the things that we're talking about, Trump would be moving us much more towards a Russian way of being governed as opposed to the way America's been governed. Let me leave you with this thought before you ask another question. This is a rhetorical thought. But let's say you have a blue collar family. Everyone is poor in the family. But because of America, one person rises in the family and becomes wealthy and a result

of which they take care of people. They pay some college tuitions. They buy a house for somebody or they buy a few cars or they look after people if they get hurt in a labor accident. That's one family. Then the second family, you have the same situation. One person rises to a high level of riches and they have a big mansion and a beautiful swimming pool and they want to charge their family members to come to their swimming pool. So I say to you and the people listening, which family would be doing better, family

number one or family number two, where the person is going to charge you to enter the swimming pool? And I think you get the point. We're too big to not care about others. We're 4% of the world's population, 26% of the world's GDP. And we primarily, we've made mistakes, Vietnam, Iraq, we can list all of our mistakes, segregation, but we have primarily been a force for good

over the last 250 years. And I would reject wholeheartedly what Trump is trying to do with Putin and with possibly President Xi. Yeah I want to turn to domestic policy because you touched on it in an important way but I have to say I think that when you describe family one you're describing yours and to a lesser extent you're describing mine because many many families and I'm not patting myself.

We grew up in an America where there was opportunity. And I think one of the things that has helped Donald Trump is this sense of hopelessness in whole swaths of the country. I mean, I was born in Southwestern Pennsylvania. My parents moved to California when I was young, thank heaven. And that area which my grandfather actually represented in the Pennsylvania legislature and he was a New Deal Democrat is now solidly Trump. So there is something wrong in the

country in the sense that we left a lot of people behind. And I think that's become an important base for what Trump has been able to do. Well, if you don't mind, because I've done a lot of work on this, I'll just share with you my theory and get you to react to it. I think that there was a seismic change in the public servants at the federal level after Ross Perot entered American politics. You know, say, what the hell does he have to do with it? I'll tell you what he did. He scared the daylights out of the Republicans and the Democrats.

And for the young people listening, Ross Perot ran in 1992, 33 years ago. He got 19.9% of the vote. Bill Clinton became the president with 43% of the vote. And I don't know, maybe it was an even split where he took the votes from, but he took enough votes from Democrats and Republicans where they got scared. And if you look at the law changes after the 1992 election to suppress third party movements, they went up exponentially. Lots of more signatures, lot more code and process to start a third party.

So that protected the duopoly. When you have a protected duopoly, you have some indifference to your consumers. Second thing that happened is we went very hard with the gerrymandering. And I submit to everybody here listening rhetorically, are we in a real democracy when the politicians are picking the voters? I thought in the democracy, the voters are supposed to pick the politicians, but in our democracy, they create these jigsaw

puzzles of districts. They used to look like geometric shapes that you and I could recognize from ninth grade geometry, but they don't anymore. And so we've rigged the system. We've solidified the duopoly. Now let me just provide more evidence. You've got the House members. There's a 14% approval rating. They're down by Kim El-Jong in terms of the North Korean dictator in terms of their approval rating. Okay. But yet 95% of them are getting re-elected. So it's like having a chef at a restaurant in LA. He has one-star Yelp ratings, but he never gets fired. So what's happened here, they've grown indifferent. That district that you were talking about, if it was a competitive district of Democrats and Republicans, people would return to the

district and talk to people and try to figure out what it is they need. And so the Democrats left those people behind. The Republicans left those people behind. They both in many ways championed those people, Bob, and they've now left them behind. You then had Citizens United come into play in January of 2010. And so I'll just take a look at the legislative agenda, sir, over the last 15 years. It's skewed to big business, big pharma, the protection of monopolies, no breakups of the Mag-7. And it's created a separate but equal democracy. Okay. And there's haves now in the society and there's have nots is a very stark contrast.

And those people you're talking about that voted for Jack Kennedy or their grandparents voted for Franklin Roosevelt, they don't vote for these people now anymore. They don't know who to vote for. In comes Donald Trump. Now adding to everything I just said is the global financial crisis where the fat cats were paid out by TARP. And even Bush has admitted at this point, George W. Bush, that he should have hived off some money for lower and middle income people in the bailout. He didn't do that. All the bankers kept their jobs. Nobody went to jail. All

the low income people got their houses taken away. And it started the Occupy Wall Street movement that morphed into the Tea Party movement. And then you had sort of a Frankenstein concoction of those two movements creating MAGA. And so all of this has happened on our watch over the last 15 years. And if I could be very, very honest with you, there's been a dereliction of duty by our public servants, not seeing this and not filling that vacuum. And your pal, Joe Biden, frankly, was trying to do that with legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act. He was trying to do that with the CHIPS Act. He had that reshoring, the $250 billion of manufacturing.

And so he actually had some pillars of legislative and executive policy that were working for those people. But unfortunately, the president was too frail. And he was, let's just be honest with everybody, he was cognitively impaired in the middle to late part of that term. And he was not able to artfully articulate the value that he was adding from the legislative process.

And so the inflation was actually coming down a little, things were getting better, real wages were up during the Biden administration. There was a compelling case to be made, but you didn't have an advocate. Of course, he bombed that debate and he looked very frail in that debate, sir. They swapped him out and they didn't give the vice president a long time to build her network, a long time to get verbally trained for this fight, because this is a real fight. And even with all that, sir, they only lost by one and a half percent of the votes.

So I don't understand why the Democrats are in this much disarray. Trump's telling you that he won by a landslide. He's very good at confabulation. He tells so many lies. You can't even keep track of what the truth is anymore because he's moving. He's literally playing a shell game with you every day verbally. And the Democrats are sitting there.

He didn't win by a landslide. He won narrowly. He's got a fractious situation going on in the House right now. He's got people returning to their districts and going to town hall meetings and they're getting lit up by their constituents. And the Democrats with the right narrative and the right person could seize the advantage on him and put Trumpism out to pasture. But you know, they've got to move.

It's not clear to me that he's leaving. Okay, so I think it's very important that people know that. Okay, it's not clear that he's leaving. Okay, so I think it's very important that people know that, okay, it's not clear that he's leaving. And if you say, well, it is clear, no, it isn't, because you don't understand what happened on January 6th of 2021, if it's clear to people that he's leaving. You see, there's a certain complacency in America, because we've done things a certain way nobly for so long. This is not a noble person. This is not some of the things nobly about our traditions or our customs. And just think about what he perpetrated on the 6th of January, 2021. You're thinking about, well, he's leaving on

January 20th, 2029. Is he? Maybe he is. But look at what happened. You know, I'm a securities analyst. I get paid to analyze permutations of potential outcomes that happen. There are certain outcomes that are unthinkable that would make people that are listening to me scoff at those outcomes. So I would just submit to you, they're not zero percentage. Okay, he is, he's, he circulated out the. He's circulated out people that are loyal to the Constitution. He's going through people and personnel, not with a loyalty to the Constitution, but a loyalty to him, whether it's our FBI director, the secretary of defense, the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

And so, you know, we can't sit there and look at him and say, okay, yeah, we'll hold our nose and we'll get through this with him. Yeah, well, I hope you're wrong about this. But I know you're right about a couple of things you just said. I want to be wrong. You know, you and I made a bet in 2016. I told you he was going to win. You told me he was going to lose. In hindsight, Bob, I wanted you to be right about that. The world would have been better off if he lost. I want to be wrong about what I'm saying. But here's the thing, by not saying it and not putting it into the public commentary, it increases the likelihood that it could happen. There's reflexivity in the world. We have to say it, we have to say,

okay, is there a 1% chance, a 5% chance? I don't know what the chances are, but we have to say it and get people like Adam Schiff and others to think about it, and then think about what they would do to protect the country, the traditions, the norms and the constitution of the country. But what I was gonna say is you were really right about a couple of things there that I

think are important. One is that Richard Neustadt, the Harvard professor. Presidential power. And presidential power, right, wrote that the greatest power of a president is the power to persuade. And I think what happened to Joe Biden was that while he was passing all these bills, he no longer could persuasively communicate to people what they meant. Pete Buttigieg might do it,

but he didn't have the bully pulpit. Yes, that's correct. Secondly, you took me back 65 years because when JFK was running for president and thought he was gonna lose in West Virginia because he was Catholic he was back in Washington DC didn't want to be in West Virginia for the defeat went to the movies there were no cell phones so no one could call him and say by the way you won by a lot but that day he told Ted Sorenson, one of his closest aides, I have never

seen anything like I've seen in West Virginia, the poverty, the hollows, the terrible conditions in which people live. I've been down in the mines. And if somehow I get to be president, despite what I think is going to happen there, I'm going to help those people. And the first thing he did as president was propose the Area Redevelopment Act, which put lots of money into Appalachia. And he talked about it.

He went back to West Virginia. And West Virginia for all the way from then until 2000, with the exception of Ronald Reagan, a sovereignly democratic state. I mean, people thought he cared. And somehow or other, Democrats lost the capacity or the willingness to communicate with people how much they cared about them, which is the single most crucial question you can find on a poll.

Who cares about people like you? But I would say that it was reinforced by these mechanisms I'm talking about, the tighter duopoly, the gerrymandering. And they just decided, hey, we don't need to be as focused on this anymore. Let's focus on where the money is. We're getting lit up with unlimited amounts of campaign financing from fat cats and big business and let's do their bidding legislatively.

And again, I would implore your students to take a look at the legislative agenda from 1965, back in the Civil Rights Act, the Kennedy Legislative Agenda. Go look through presidential legislative agendas, get to 2010, and then go look at the legislative agenda and what you'll find it's heavily skewed last 15 years towards big pharma, big business, big tech, big oligarchy, big, big. I think the, not to press constitutional law into this conversation, but I think the Citizens United case is the Plessy versus Ferguson for the democracy. And so just to remind people, in the Plessy case, the Supreme Court said that blacks and

whites, you can have separate but equal facilities. And that damned blacks to eight decades of harsh segregation in the South. It wasn't until Brown versus Board of Education repealed effectively Plessy that we started to see some more equity and more fairness. And I submit to you tonight that the Citizens United case is the Plessy versus Ferguson of the democracy. That case has created a separate but quote unquote equal democracy. It's fairer for Elon Musk. It's also fairer for Bill Gates. Pick the

plutocrats on either side. Because I don't want to be hypocritical. There are billionaires leaning on the left and there are billionaires leaning on the right and they're getting favors done as a result of their riches. And the little guy who represents a vote but doesn't represent billions of dollars has been stiffed by these politicians and they feel it. They feel it. And Donald Trump, again, liking him or disliking him has resonated with those people. Now, the great irony, Bob, is he's done nothing for them.

The great irony is he's favored tax cuts for the rich. The great irony is he's further hollowed out the mechanisms and the platforms of safety that the American government has provided and things like Medicaid, Medicare, et cetera. He's hurting those things. And we can talk about this, but I'm for equal opportunity in our country. I didn't pick my birth. I didn't pick my location of the birth. I didn't pick my family. It's a rich enough country where we should have a platform of opportunity for people

where we get people to the starting gate with a base level of health care, a base level of education. I'm not for equal outcomes. I have no problem having Elon Musk's and Jeff Bezos's in the world. I'm not for equal outcomes. I have no problem having Elon Musk's and Jeff Bezos's in the world. I'm not a socialist. I am a capitalist. I want these people to earn excessive economic rent for their hard work and their risk taking and their job creation. But we've got to help people that weren't born. We have to help the West Virginians metaphorically, the West Virginians that you're describing in the 1960s.

We have to help those people metaphorically here in America today. And the irony is those people are voting for Trump and Biden wasn't competent enough verbally at the time. A 65 year old Joe Biden, Bob would have been, but a 79 year old Joe Biden wasn't. And he wasn't able to articulate what he was doing and the facility of what he was doing and why it was beneficial to them. And he lost the plot. And it's a shame because had there been a proper intergenerational transfer in the American Democratic Party, had that been a proper transfer, had he dropped out in September of 23, opened up the primary process. And I'll say two more things provocative

before you ask another question. How the hell do you let Elon Musk and Bobby Kennedy go from the party? And whether you like those people or you dislike them, you know, you keep your enemies closer than your friends, don't you, Bob? It's politics. How do you let Elon Musk go? Because the UAW president tells you not to invite him to the EV summit? How do you do that? You got to know that he's got a $44 billion bullhorn. He's a sensitive, self-admitted autist. How do you let him go? And he single-handedly helped Trump win Pennsylvania. The strategies he designed, the money he deployed, and Bobby Kennedy helped Trump.

These were extra drops in the bucket that helped Donald Trump. And the Kennedy-named lifelong representation of the Democratic Party, they could have figured out a way to keep them in the party and they didn't. And they don't like them. And I got, he says some crazy and kooky things and things like that. I know, I know Bobby for 30 years. I like Bobby. But I'm just saying they, they dropped the ball on those two in my opinion, among other

things that they did. And so the rise of Donald Trump is concomitant with the misfiring of the Democratic party. How does Barack Obama tell Joe Biden, you can't run in 2016? How is the Democratic party, the full robust champions of the democracy when they're curbing their primaries and then Biden drops out and then there's no democratic process to replace him. There's a hand-selected process. And again, by the way, I get that, I get the rationale for it, but you're helping Donald Trump with that. Now, he's way worse than them, but you are helping, you're providing space for him. When you rapidly pardon everybody in your

family and conditionally pardon people for past crimes going back decades, you are creating the appearance of some unfairness and some arbitrary capriciousness in the system. And of course, somebody like Trump that doesn't have any morals at all will blow a bigger hole in the system and use what you're doing as fodder to enable them to do that. So we gotta get, we gotta restate what we're doing and we gotta recoalesce an oppositional party to Donald Trump. They're way more organized, sir.

And they're way more dangerous. Right. You know, I would, and I mean it, respectfully disagree with you about Bobby Kennedy, who I think is utterly unqualified for the job he's been appointed to. And that kid who died from measles in Texas today because he was unvaccinated, I think is a real warning signal to us.

But I'd like to ask you about- But let's agree on that for a second, sir. But why not figure out a way to keep him in your party? You didn't have to make him the HSS cabinet secretary. He was getting a lot of pressure from his family to stay in the party. He had reached out several times to the Harris campaign looking for some type of, they didn't have to promise him anything because we both know that's illegal, but they could have washed his back a little bit.

My point is don't underestimate, you may, you may dislike him and I accept he's incompetent on the vaccines and so on and so forth. But he did have, and again, forgive me, you know, he did have bro power with a lot of voters. And, and, and he took voters from the Democrats that didn't need to be taken from. Yeah, I don't want to be misunderstood. This is not personal. I'm not commenting about him personally. I'm commenting about whether or not he should be in the job he's in.

But I want to move on to a couple of substantive issues before asking you my bonus question. Talk about Trump's tariff policy and its likely impact. Is it just a negotiating ploy or is he actually gonna do this? And then talk about his immigration policy, mass deportation, and the potential impact of that on the economy.

So let's talk about the tariffs first, and then we'll talk about the deportation, but the tariffs are the great irony of Donald Trump. So there's semblance, there's notional things that he's saying that have semblance of truth and veracity. So if you're saying that you're worried that the waterways in the Arctic Ocean are warming and there are naval vessels from Russia, naval vessels from China up in those waterways,

and you want to protect North America, Canada and the United States, and you want to protect the mining output potentially of Greenland, there are things that he's saying that you could get it done diplomatically and you could get it done through our alliances. You don't have to take Greenland. That's where he takes a bridge too far. There are things that he's saying about Panama that are true. You don't want the Hong Kong port authority to take over the ports in Panama. It's a potential national security risk for the United States. But you don't have to take the Panama Canal. And so with the tariffs, some of

the things he's saying are true. And I don't want to bore people with a 65-year or 80-year rendition of our trade policy. But Robert Lighthizer wrote a great book called No Trade is Free, and basically just explained when we started GATT, the US had 2% of the world's population, 65% of the world's output. And so we accepted untethered goods and services flowing into the country in the post-World War. We didn't allow for tariffs. We let all these countries send their stuff in. We didn't tariff anybody.

We then accepted on their side tariffs because we were trying to protect their markets and we were trying to raise living standards in those countries. The wisdom of these neo-Victorians that ran the post-World War II government, Republicans and Democrats, recognized that we had to do that. That was sort of the anti-Versailles Treaty approach to the end of the Second World War. Then we followed it up with the Marshall Plan and other things. We built the architecture of peace with the different acronyms of the post-World War II organizations.

But we left certain things unchecked. One of them was when we turned GATT into the World Trade Organization, we allowed the Chinese in, which I agreed with, but we never checked the Chinese at the door. We allowed them in as an emerging market. When they became a competitive market to the United States, we never adjusted their profile in the WTO. So Trump is right about that. You have to accept that.

And even the Democrats now have agreed to that. There is a bipartisan commitment to checking the Chinese. But here's the problem with what Trump is saying today. Trump wants reciprocal tariffs around the world. So Trump is saying that the way we did things 80 years ago, we can't do now. If you've got tariffs up against us, we're going to put the same tariffs up against your goods and services. There are too many fragile, free countries.

Economics drives freedom, Bob. You know this and I know this. If you have a robust economy, you can set up the platform of decentralized freedom. If you have people starving, they have a tendency to go towards strong people. We were just lucky that we had Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s and not Benito Mussolini or Adolf Hitler. And so you have to protect these fragile economies that are democratic and free by allowing them to have an asymmetrical relationship with the United States. The MAGA people will argue that I'm wrong about that, but I'm telling you, as I use

that example about families, I am right about that holistically if you want to project freedom and you want to push back totalitarianism in the world. He's right about certain things, and I'll tell you where I think he's right, and he's wrong specifically about that. But if the Chinese are teaming up, the government is teaming up with their companies and they're creating predatory pricing and they're dropping prices way low and our non-subsidized private companies can't compete with that pricing, then the Trump administration, the Biden administration,

you pick the administration, they have to put tariffs on those goods to equalize it and make it fair for the American company. So surgical tariffs is something that we should be deploying, and surgical tariffs are successful. But this hammer approach, 25% tariffs indiscriminately, reciprocal tariffs around the world, very, very dangerous. It will put the United States in a position 10 or so years from now that we don't want to be in. Some of these economies will fall. They'll fall into totalitarian regimes.

Other economies will realign. I know Trump wants Europe to, I guess, realign or seek its own independence. I don't want that. You don't want that. I'm telling you, this is a billion person combined market. We don't want that. No one's giving the counter narrative and explaining to the American people why they don't want that, that the America first situation, which means Europe last, may exacerbate America's

decline. Let me just say this one last thing about this, then we can go to deportation. Ronald Reagan, 1982, 4% of the world's population, 26% of the world's output. 43 years later, Bob, 4% of the world's population, 26% of the world's output, 43 years later. So that's providing you evidence that these policies, 26% of the world's output, 43 years later.

So that's providing you evidence that these policies, these very well thought out, grounded and bipartisan committed policies have worked for the United States. Now we have a deficit problem that we have to resolve and it is resolvable. We have issues that we have to resolve. But the way we're doing this right now is going to damage our relationships around the world. The deportation, if you want, I can spend some time on that as well, because I think that that is another classic mistake that we're making. We're not xenophobic by nature, and yet we have now somebody running the country that's a nationalist. He's a xenophobe, and he's an isolationist, and he wants to wall off the

country from the rest of the world, literally and physically. And I can just tell you that that doesn't work. Now could we have more controls at the border? Certainly. You need controls at the border because we have a welfare state. But one of the things that you could do is you could create more economic development in Central America and in the Yucatan Peninsula. You know this, we had a good neighbor policy under Franklin Roosevelt.

He called it good neighbor policy. He created space for economic development in that region. When that aid got cut, it started the flood of immigrants to the border and people seeking asylum. But I would tell you it's a pound of prevention by pushing out that economic development versus 20 pounds of cure trying to deal with these people at the border. So that's number one. And then number two, you know this in California,

I know this in New York, these people are doing jobs in the country that nobody else wants to do. And they've added to our GDP, they've added to our tax base, they've added to our Social Security Trust. And it's a total lie that they vote Democrat. Total lie. A lot of them are in conservative Roman Catholic families and go take a look at what happens when they assimilate, they look like every other American. Some of them are right leaning and some of them are left leaning. They're not all blue. This rhetoric, oh, they're flooding the border to create a blue-ified America is a bunch

of nonsense. It doesn't work like that. So Rubio knows this. He was part of the group of seven or the group of eight that tried to come up with an immigration solution. Right? He knows this, but now they're sitting there with Donald Trump. And by the way, by the way, and I think you know this, we lost in 2012, the Republicans did. The Republican National Committee put out a white paper and said that we needed to come up with a more pro immigration strategy and that we needed to find healing in America. And we went from that sentiment

to Donald J. Trump, who's way over here. And I'm telling you, it sounds good on paper. A lot of Americans want deportation. A lot of Americans want this sort of stuff. But I'm telling you, they actually really don't want it. Because when they come into their neighborhood and ICE has shown up in their neighborhood, people are unnerved by it. We hear about violence all the time in the news, yet we rarely hear stories about peace.

There are so many people who are working hard to promote solutions to violence, toxic polarization, and authoritarianism, often at great personal risk. We never hear about these stories, but at what cost? On Making Peace Visible, we speak with journalists, storytellers, and peace builders who are on the front lines of both peace and conflict. You can find Making Peace Visible wherever you listen to podcasts. You know, there are a couple of things I'm going to get to that I think students care about and they're asking about. But first, I want to do our bonus question.

You are and have been anyone who follows you knows this. A staunch advocate of cryptocurrency. A lot of folks don't understand how cryptocurrencies work. And a lot of critics contend there are perilous investment ultimately likely to collapse. From your perspective, can you educate us on this? I know it's not politics, but I thought it would be an interesting question. Yeah, say the question again,

so I wanna think of it, give me a little bit more time to think about it. Say it one more time. Talk about cryptocurrencies, explain to people what they are, and are they in fact a perilous, dangerous investment? Okay, well, for your demography and for my demography, they're in perilous, dangerous, and desperate.

None of our people in our world really understand it. But for my children and for their generation, I think they've got their arms around understanding what a digital asset could be and that there would be value in a digital asset. And so I had my awakening to Bitcoin. And again, I am more Bitcoin specific. I do own some other coins, but I'm not in, you know, there's 20,000 coins. Many of these coins, Bob, are worthless. And I think what ends up happening is when Trump puts out a meme coin, which is a disaster and so many different ways and unethical,

and he takes $500 million out of it and then he ruggles everybody that bought it, and now they're all sinking in that coin, which is absolutely worthless, it hurts the entire industry. But if you really sat down and read the Bitcoin white paper, and you understand that what Bitcoin is, is a decentralized ledger. It is effectively a spreadsheet that's hardened and it's immutable. It's not hackable. It has value to it because if you read Neil Ferguson's book, The Ascent of Money, Bitcoin

ticks off all the boxes of what the world has thought of in terms of money. It's scarce. It's easy to trace, it's transferable, it's low cost transferable, it's permissionless. And so for those reasons, I am a believer in Bitcoin long term. I think Bitcoin will scale and it will be adopted. And if you really understand what the blockchain is, the blockchain is basically hundreds of thousands of nodes that will help verify transactions. So right now, we'll use the banking system for that. We'll use JP Morgan, and we'll use Bank of America, or you pick the system. But all that is also a spreadsheet, right? Your bank is a spreadsheet. If you're a car dealer

and I want to buy a car from you, the digits in my account go down. I wire those digits to your account, they go up, you send me a car. And so Bitcoin has been able to create a network where you don't have to use a third party to create that value transfer. And so let me give you just two examples of how that could work. I could be in a restaurant with you instead of taking out my credit card and paying a three and a half percent fee to the credit card company that's going to verify that transaction and prove that I have the money to pay the restaurateur. I could take out my wallet on my phone and I could move either a stable coin, which is a digital dollar, or I could move Bitcoin to the restaurateur over the blockchain and save him and me the three

and a half percent. And so there's a wave of financial technology that's upon us that will make things cheaper for us, make it more seamless, make it less hackable. And so a result of which I think this stuff has value, but older people, they think it's financial blather. They don't really understand it. And so a result of which I think this stuff has value, but older people, they think it's financial blather. They don't really understand it. But I've spent two years of my life, before I made my first Bitcoin investment, I spent

two years of my life working on it. I will send you a book, a copy of my new book, the little book of Bitcoin, which is a stories about people that didn't understand Bitcoin and came to Bitcoin, did the homework on Bitcoin, and they move towards it. That could be Stan Druckenmiller, a name you may know, or Ray Dalio, or Paul Tudor Jones, or Michael Novogratz. These are people that are way smarter than me in financial services, and they've drawn the conclusion that I have that Bitcoin represents value.

Now it's volatile. It's definitely not a perfect instrument today. But as it gets adopted, I think it's going to be very successful. So students ask me all the time, and I think a lot of people watching this actually have this question too. You kind of touched on it. Why don't Democrats seem to be an effective opposition? Do you think James Carville is right that they should just sit back and wait for Trump to destroy himself?

James says over the next 30 or 60 days. I think he's right because they don't have an organized narrative of dissent. You know, I don't know who said it. You know who said it. It could have been Will Rogers. Somebody once said, and I'm paraphrasing, you know, I don't know who said it. You know, it could have been Will Rogers. Somebody once said, and I'm paraphrasing, you know, I'm a member of six disorganized parties. I'm a Democrat. I don't know who said it. Yeah, it's Will Rogers. I'm not a member of any organized party. I'm a Democrat. Okay, that's what he said. So I'm paraphrasing. But my point is, the Democrats are very dissembled. They're very disorganized, and they don't have a galvanizing leader.

Now, Jack Kennedy perhaps represented that. Bill Clinton for a time represented that. Barack Obama certainly built a very broad coalition and represented that. But for whatever reason, the older people in the party have stuffed down the younger people. And so there hasn't been a lot of product development, if you will, candidate development of younger people. But so Carvel's probably right, because you don't have anybody, you know, please forgive me, 80 something year old Bernie Sanders, not the right answer for the character narrative.

Chuck Schumer, a lovely guy, but he's in the twilight of his career. Nancy Pelosi in her mid-80s. These are not people that are really representative of where the party needs to go. I will point this out to you, and you know this. Your party, the Democrats, do better when they have people below the age of 50. Jack Kennedy, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama. Republicans have typically done better when they've had people over the age of 50, Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump. And so you have to find younger leaders, cultivate

younger leaders, but I think Carvel's right until you have a narrative. Now, what I would propose they would never accept. And that tells you about their ideological anchoring and their egos. I would say, Hey, you're in trouble. Team up with the dissident Republicans, form a new coalition, get as many people under the tent as possible and destroy, destroy and put to sleep the Republican party. The Republican party in its current iteration is very dangerous for the world, is very dangerous for this country.

It is the Whig party of the 1850s, and it needs to be upsized by a coalition, a new coalition of people that should be willing to work. If the people really understood the danger, and I really still, I do see systemic danger, Bob, if they really understood the danger, they would do what Attlee did and what Churchill did was team up, team up to defeat the existential danger of something that's right here, right upon us. Well, look, this has been a terrific discussion and your insights are often original and

sometimes provocative. And the discussion is as entertaining as is enlightening. If I could say this, Anthony, you're irrepressible. Well, listen, I'm I was a bit it's a big honor for me to be with you. You know, you're one of the real geniuses in politics. You know, I followed your career when I was a student and been very proud to be affiliated with you and have a personal relationship. So I'm grateful to be invited into your classroom over zoom. I hope I can get out there and do it in person again soon. But listen, and I hope we don't feel like I'm exaggerating. I'm not saying it's 50% or anything like that, but I do see a possibility or a lane that he may take, which could be very disruptive to our society. I think we need an American renewal of our democracy, and perhaps we need some protective amendments to the Constitution. Remember, this Constitution's got 27 amendments. If you divide that by 210, it's roughly eight amendments a year, yet we haven't had a new amendment of any real consequence since the 65 Voters Act.

The 93 amendment was a procedural one. So for me, we need to get back into the room and put some new planks in that constitution that perhaps end Citizens United or create AI-generated congressional districts that are not based upon gerrymandering, but are based upon demography and trying to balance these districts. You know, again, something has to change to make this thing less tribal. Yeah. At any time you're invited back to the Center for the Political Future. So thank you again. I appreciate it, sir. Thank you. Let me thank everyone who's joined us on Zoom or Facebook Live, or all those who will hear

this section on our podcast, Let's Find Common Ground. Thank you, Anthony Scaramucci. Good to be on with you, sir. Thank you again. Thank you for having me. Thank you for joining us on Let's Find Common Ground. If you enjoyed what you heard, subscribe and rate the show five stars on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on social media at USCPOLFuture.

And if you'd like to support the work of the center, please make a tax deductible contribution so that we can keep bringing important voices together across differences in respectful conversations that seek common ground. This podcast is part of the Democracy Group.