Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - CNN's Dana Bash Reveals Why Trump Is Unlike ANY President in History

Episode Date: October 27, 2026

What can Julius Caesar, Abraham Lincoln, and Nelson Mandela teach us about today's political chaos? This week on Open Book, I'm joined by CNN's Dana Bash to explore the elections that changed history, the dangers of unchecked power, and why Donald Trump may be unlike any political figure we've ever seen. Dana Bash is CNN’s Chief Political Correspondent and the anchor and co-host of Sunday morning’s State of the Union. She regularly serves as a moderator for CNN''s political town hall specials and debates, including the 2024 presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. She has conducted sit-down interviews with major political figures, including Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Bernie Sanders, and more. Get a copy of her wonderful new book with David Fisher, The Elections That Changed the World: Fifteen Pivotal Moments That Shaped How We Live Anthony Scaramucci is the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge, a global alternative investment firm, and founder and chairman of SALT, a global thought leadership forum and venture studio. Order my next book, All the Wrong Moves: How Three Catastrophic Decisions Led to the Rise of Trump Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hit pause on whatever you're listening to and hit play on your next adventure. Get double points on every qualified stay. Life's a trip. Make the most of it at Best Western. Visit bestwestern.com for complete terms and conditions. I can't think of anybody in history who acts like him, who approaches things like him, who challenges all of the things that we've talked about the way he does and can get away with as much as he does.

He gets push back a little bit, but not as much as anything. any other living human being would. And I think we're gonna see that test when J.D. Vance tries to take the mantle of MAGA. When I hear the word Trump, I think people are gonna be mad of me, but it's Lenin, Trotsky, Hitler. I see Trump in that vein.

I'm not comparing him to Hitler, as much as I'm comparing him to somebody that wants to wreck the status quo of a society and somebody that doesn't respect the society that he's living in. And so there's many people in history that have done that, and some of them have been very successful,

at wrecking their societies, and he's putting this society under a tremendous amount of stress. Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Joining me is Dana Bass. She is the CNN chief political correspondent, and she's a New York Times best-selling author, The New Book, The Elections That Changed the World, Fifteen Pivotal Moments That Shaped How We Live. Wow, what a... I learned a lot in this book, by the way, and I consider myself a little bit of a history buff. There's a lot going on in this book that I did not know. But let's start with congratulations on the book. And I just want you to talk a little bit if you don't mind about your career because a lot of these, at least the later elections, you covered. And so tell us a little about your career. Why you got into this?

Where did the passion come from? Hi. Hi, Anthony. Thanks for having me. Yeah, kidding me? No, I couldn't wait to have you. I feel the same. I feel the same. and congrats on your book. So the answer is, it was a late in life passion. I didn't give a shit about any of this, my whole life, to be totally honest with you. As you know, this is my podcast. You're allowed to curse away on this podcast. I know.

That's why I said it. I'm very excited. I like that. Okay. I, the real me is going to come out, as you know. Good. My dad likes to joke that I graduated high school without really knowing there were three branches of government.

And I don't know that he's. entirely wrong. Probably would be the same thing I could say about myself. Really? Yeah, I think so. And then I went to the George Washington University in D.C. We lived in the D.C. area when I was little moved back to New Jersey and that I went back to D.C. for college, not because of politics, just because I remember D.C. being

like a fun place. And then I got the bug. And I actually did internships in politics thinking, well, I don't know. like, do I want to work in politics or not? And then I did an internship at CBS News in Washington, and I was like, oh, this, this is what I'm supposed to be doing. And so, yeah, the rest is history. And speaking of, we end the book.

So this is 15 elections that shape the world. Start with Julius Caesar. I am not old enough to have covered that race. And then we go to Nelson Mandela. I was like aware and working at CNN for a year. And so, yes, that was sort of the first, one of the first major world events that I remember being at CNN for. But sadly, I didn't get to cover it. We decided to end in 94 because so many of the more recent races, I feel David Fisher, my co-author and I both felt like they were too recent to talk about through a historical lens.

Well, first of all, you're saying something that I just want to emphasize, this is your passion. And what I got from the book is the intrigue. And that what you like about this is that decisions are getting made at a political level that are affecting technology, business, finance, the media. And whether we like it or not, these people are shaping a big part of our lives. said differently, the U.S. budget is roughly 25% of our GDP. And so you have 535 people plus one president that's got command over 25% of our GDP. So this is monumental. That's what I really got from the book. But let's go to Julius Caesar and ancient Rome. And I want to start there. I want to go to the Mayflower Compact, because I did not know. I have to confess this,

even though I think I'm a history buff. I didn't know what the Mayfoward Compact. Act was. But why pick those two and start with Julius Caesar? Okay, so Julius Caesar, because we wanted to start towards the dawn of democracy. The Greeks really started it. And it's hard to talk about Roman democracy without talking about Julius Caesar because he was part of an elite family, but really rose to power because he was a really, really good politician. There was democracy. It was obviously very different. It was just men. It was just wealthy men. It was mostly, he had to vote in Rome, so it was just really men who lived in it around there. But he, he charmed people, and he was able to sort of work his way up,

and you're going to love this. Anybody who listens to your podcast will love this. The main reason why he ran for the highest office in the land is because he was so far in debt from his other political runs, that he was afraid he was either going to be exiled or put in jail. So we thought, I know how to stay out of prison. I'm going to run for office. And it worked. I mean, yeah, I was going to bring that up because, I mean, history does rhyme and repeat itself. All right. And so obviously, they elect him. He's a popular figure, but he ends the republic. And so there's the irony there. There's the cautionary tale. All right, go to the Mayflower Pack. This is a group of seasick people.

They're on the Mayflower. But they're somewhat bipartisan. I get out of there that there's a compromise that happens. So tell us what the Mayflower Compact is of 1620. It could have gone a whole different way. You have these people who are, like you said, seasick and just exhausted and hungry and had just gone in a very, very difficult journey across the Atlantic. They were heading to Virginia.

They thought they would be part of Jamestown. But then the winds blew them north, and they ended up. on Plymouth Rock or in Plymouth. And so they quickly realized that they didn't have any means to govern themselves because they thought they would be governed by really the corporation that was in charge of Jamestown. And so they decided that they needed to come up with their own form of government. They sat on the boat, they hashed it out, and 41 men voted, that these are going to be the parameters by which we will live.

And it was the first time that the white men on North American soil came up with the idea for giving something up that you enjoy, that you like money in exchange for the greater good. I love this because it gives me hope that we can figure this stuff out together, you know, and we can eventually find some levels of compromise. I think the Martin Luther King chapter is also incredibly interesting. He is leading the Montgomery Improvement Association. Tell us what that is. And tell us why, even though this is not a traditional election, it does change the course of the civil rights movement. So give us some color on that. Well, that's exactly right.

We wanted to, in these 15, pick examples not just of elections, as we just discussed with the Mayflower Compact. that's not your typical election, that had different levels of participation. You know, we could have done a school board, but I don't really think that that was going to be enough to rise to the level of this book. But this one came close because it was a group of activists in civil rights activists in Montgomery. They had started the bus boycott. It went so much better than they thought it was going to.

very successful, so much they really felt they needed a leader to specifically focus on that. And one of the leaders in that movement, Joan Davidson, said, you know, there's this guy who is the new pastor of my church down the street, the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. He's really young, he's 25. He can move people with his words. Maybe he would be a good leader. They brought him in, the group of people just raised their hands. It was that simple of an election and said, yeah, we like him. He's going to be the new leader of this new organization that we're forming to lead the bus boycott. And that propelled Martin Luther King, Jr., not just to be a local leader, a statewide leader, a national and international leader, happened pretty quickly because she was right. He could move people with his words. And he went on to change the world, and it was because of that little election with a group of activists raising their hands saying, yeah, we like this guy. I want to transition abruptly to Mandela because there's obviously common ground between these two political leaders. And so he's jailed for 27 years.

Can you imagine? Okay. So that, you know, you and I are contemporary. So that's basically R zero to like 27, right, or to zero to 25. And now he comes out of jail. You and I are young adults at the time. And we don't really know who he is. But he's been in power.

When we put our political leaders in jail, whether it's Adolf Hitler, Donald Trump, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr., we martyr them to an element of their support base. So now tell us about Mandela's rise to the presidency after spending 27 years in a jail cell in the country that he oversees. He goes on to oversee. That's right. I mean, he became so widely worldwide known. And it was because his plight was so really hard to imagine. And then many, many times along the way, he refused offers to get out of jail because they were trying to get him to make deals that did something short of totally change the structure of the government, which was a minority of white people ruling a very big majority of blacks in South Africa. And he became, I mean, one of my earliest memories, I don't know about you, is seeing people march against apartheid and against that government in South Africa and you could see the fervor getting louder and louder.

And Mandela was the symbol of that. And he was a leader from inside jail at Robin Island. And so this is an example of a situation where, By the time they got to the elections, there was no debate whether Mandela was going to win. It was clear he was going to win. But the story of how they got to the election was what was so consequential. And the lesson is it was a white leader, F.W. the clerk, who said, enough. And push back against his community, really pissed them off and said, we've got to change things.

and partnered with Mandela to figure out a way to have free and fair elections. And they did it in a matter of months. And the way that they got the Nobel Peace Prize, the way that they did it together was almost utopian to think about it now. But it happened. And it's another example of how if you have the will and the right people at the right time with the right environment, you can make things happen. Well, listen, to me, it is an incredible,

story of perseverance, but it's also a incredible story of forgiveness. And in a political time where we're heated and on top of each other and we're morally righteous. And, you know, it's like the north going Zaks and the south going Zax from Dr. Seuss. Here is Mandela, who could have sought retribution against these people. And he played different courts as a higher level thinking. And so it's just something that I always think about, you would one and a political leader, which is postpartisanship, ending rancor, and working towards healing. So all this stuff is good. Before I get to the last part of this podcast, I want to talk a little bit about John Adams,

who was called hermaphrodite by Thomas Jefferson. He said that he was a, he was ugly. Yes, he was ugly. He had a man's head on a woman's body. Okay. So we were fighting it out, Dana. We were fighting it out from the beginning here. It's weird, but he didn't talk about his muscular ass, though.

No, he didn't talk about his ass. That's a separate topic, but, you know, none of us are really surprised after seeing the overall office liberaceized. You know, that's not something that surprised me that the president is by curious. But that's fine. Let's go to Tom and John and that fight and how important that was the, frankly, the early peaceful transfer of power of this very young American democracy. It was the first competitive election for president in the very new country. George Washington was a no-brainer. We knew everybody knew he was going to be president because he was George Washington. And then when he decided to exit the stage after two terms, it was time for the real test for this new constitution that they all wrote. 1796, Adams and Jefferson are on the ballot. Adams wins. Adams term was.

was less than spectacular. Let's put it that way. He did a lot of things that really did not make a lot of sense as it compared to what they said they wanted with this Constitution. He put in the sedition laws, which said it's illegal to challenge the government, which is the whole reason that they fought against the king. And so when it came time for the rematch in 1800,

Jefferson won very handily in the popular vote. He got 60% of the popular vote. But these men who wrote the Constitution, they put in the electoral college. And so it wasn't so simple. They had to go through the electoral college. They messed it up a little bit because they didn't realize that the way that the college was set up, it was possible for a presidential candidate and his running mate to tie in the electoral college. And that's what happened.

Jefferson tied with Aaron Burr, his running mate, and it had to go to the House of Representatives. So one of the very first competitive presidential elections, already you had a constitutional crisis. It worked out, thanks to Alexander Hamilton, who we all know because of the musical, sort of put his thumb on the scale and convinced the members of the House to vote for Jefferson and Aaron Burr was pretty pissed about it. But it could have gone another way. There could have been anger in the streets. It could have been something other than a peaceful transition of power. Don Adams didn't go to that inauguration. He went back to Massachusetts.

Yes. But he didn't fight it. And neither did it, neither did Aaron Burr, which is another important part of history. So that not only set up until recent times, the peaceful transfer of power from president to president, it also sent a signal around the world at a really important time when countries globally were sort of toying with the idea of democracy and how democracy was going to work. It became a symbol of an example of it can work. And if it didn't, it probably would have depressed the seeds being planted already around the world.

Guys, thank you so much for listening and subscribing to Open Book. You know we've got 200 authors on this show. and it's been a lot of fun for me, but I'm also an author now too. And I've got all the wrong moves available. Go to scaramucci.net backslash all the wrong moves. You can buy your copy today. It's a lot of fun and lots of commentary about what's gone on in the U.S. over the last three decades.

Well, listen, I mean, I love the story. And it's just a lot of great stuff in the book. My last question, then we're going to go to the five words. I pick five words out of your book. and I need you to respond to them. But which one of these characters would have been best at evading Dana Bash on State of the Union? Which one of these characters? I'm going to say Lincoln.

Lincoln. Just because it turns out he was pretty good at debating. Yeah. And he was quick. He was quick on his feet. I add this book on my desk called The Language of Liberty. I recommend it to everybody. It's the original writings of Lincoln.

It's made me a better writer. It's maybe more thoughtful about Politbu. It's just he's so well self-educated. And his thought process is astonishing. And it's 165 years later. But he is the man still in my mind. Okay. So here's how this is going to work.

I have five words I pick from the book. Okay. You have five minutes left. I'm going to say the word. You're going to give me a sentence or two. Okay. You ready? Uh-huh.

So if I say the word democracy, you think what? I think the ability of a group of people in a society to have a representative, to have their best interests at heart in order to make their lives better. Okay. So you're more idealistic than me, right? What do you think it is? Well, I see what it is. It's a dysfunctional, nightmarish mess.

But to quote our good friend Winston Churchill. it is the worst form of government until you compare it to every other form of government. And ultimately we need this cohesion and this mess. This messiness, this is actually what has made America so successful and has created such decentralization and freedom of the press and abilities for entrepreneurs to grow their businesses and all this other stuff. But now the second question is sort of related.

I'm going to say the word power. And you think what? I think that it is a very, power is a very delicate thing. And it is very easy for power to corrupt and power to lead to abuse and is something that needs to be in check. And I do think that there are lots of really good forms of, of the, of the democracy. democracy around the world and parliamentary systems are fine. But I do think that the way that they've figured out this country with the checks and balances of the three branches of government, it is not always perfect. But the way that each has a check on the other to make sure the power

doesn't grow is pretty amazing. Again, it gets stretched, like we are where we are. That's the whole thing. It was the whole beeswax. They read Cicero, you know. He said we're slaves to the law in order to be free. We have to subordinate ourselves because it's like, you know, when I watched that movie over the summer and I was watching Matt Damon tie himself to the mast and I was saying, that wasn't me. I jumped right into that whirlpool with the sailors, okay?

To go work for Donald Trump. You have to have subordination of your ego and your ego. and your quest for power through a system and some level of doctrines of fairness. Okay, last three words, leadership. Rare. Okay, that's really good. We're going to end it right there because that's exactly scarcity, right? Elections.

I say the word elections. Critical, critical, critical, critical, critical. Well, to have them run fairly. Yeah, the integrity of the election. with integrity, and integrity works the top down and the bottom up, to have the integrity of the elections that actually do work and have integrity so that you don't have leaders who claim that they don't work even when they do. Well, that's right out of Putin's playbook to tell people that the election doesn't work.

Okay, last word, you ready? Not going to be surprised with this word. I'm going to say the word Trump, and you think why? One of one. I can't think of anybody in history who acts like him, who approaches things like him, who challenges all of the things that we've talked about the way he does and can get away with as much as he does. He gets pushed back a little bit, but not as much as any other living human being would. And I think we're going to see that test when J.D. Vance tries to take the mantle of MAGA. What do you say when I say Trump?

Well, I mean, it's certainly one of one is a great answer. I don't want to take anything away from the answer. When I hear the word Trump, I actually don't think one of one, actually. I think the, I think, and this is, people are going to be mad at me, but it's Lenin, Trotsky, Hitler. I see Trump in that vein. I'm not comparing him to Hitler as much as I'm comparing him to somebody that wants to wreck the status quo of a society and somebody that doesn't respect the society that he's living in. And so there's many people in history that have done that.

And some of them have been very successful at wrecking their societies. And he's putting this society under a tremendous amount of stress. But your one of one should really stand because he is unique in history in terms of the way he is going about that, by the way. Even these other people went about it very differently than the way he's going about it. So all out in the open. All out in the open. That's correct. All right.

Well, it's an amazing book. It's a great read. Anthony, you're the best. Title of the book is the elections that change the world. 15 pivotal moments that shape how we live. Dana Bash. She's cool. She's got it together.

She's a great writer. And where can we find you before you go? What is your Twitter handle and Instagram handle? They're both at Dana Bash, CNN, Twitter, and. Instagram at Danabash, D-A-N-A-B-A-B-A-S-H-C-N. Okay, great to have you on. Thank you so much. Thank you.

All right.