The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 205. Anthony Scaramucci: Why America Keeps Making the Same Mistakes

Episode Date: September 6, 2026

Why does Anthony Scaramucci think Osama bin Laden is “winning”, and what has the War on Terror really cost America? From letting China into the WTO to bailing out the banks in 2008, how did America's own leaders pave the way for Donald Trump's electoral victories? As Trump's second term reaches its halfway point, is America about to bankrupt itself? Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart are joined by Anthony Scaramucci, Trump’s former Communications Director and co-host of The Rest is Politics: US, to answer all these questions and more. __________ Search IG.com to find out more and/or Look for IG in your app store. __________ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [e-mail] __________ Social Producer: Celine Charles Head Video Editor: Josh Smith Assistant Producer: Daisy Alston-Horne Senior Producer: Nicole Maslen General Manager: Tom Whiter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks for listening to The Restis Politics. Sign up to the Restis Politics Plus. To enjoy ad-free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to the restispolities.com. That's the rest is the politics.com. This episode is presented by IG. September feels like a reset. Summer's over. Finishing here my five weeks in Kreef, diary filling up again. And suddenly you're looking at the rest of the year thinking, am I saving properly? Am I thinking responsibly about my money? Yeah, and of course we've got the budget coming up, which is going to be one of the most important events in the life of this Parliament. There's always something changing. But with IG, you don't need to wait for Westminster before making your own plans. Therefore, over 50 years, trusted by British investors, been through every budget market the government's experienced, helping make the money work for you. With no annual fees, zero commission on UK stocks, shares and ETFs. It's a platform that empowers your financial progress, helps you stay ahead of the curve no matter what's next. I particularly like the no annual fees and zero commission. So while we speculate about what's happening next in politics,

you can get on with planning what happens next for your money. Search IG.com to find out more or look for IG in your app store. IG, trade, invest, progress, capital at risk, other fees may apply. Welcome to the Restless Politics Leading with me, Rory Stewart. And with me, Alastair Campbell, and we have a guest that may be known to some of you because he has a rival. Well, is it a rival or is it a friend? But he has another podcast called The Rest Is Politics, US. His name is Anthony Scaramucci.

And the reason he's on this podcast is because he spent 11 days in the White House, not quite as long as I spent in Camp David, where I've got my mug here. I don't know if our guest ever went to Camp David. But right now, he's on this podcast because he's just a great sear. He's the guy who, when he came on our podcast a few years ago, he said, quote, Biden will beat Trump. I'm confident.

He also said Biden will not step aside unless there's a severe health crisis. And then when Biden did step aside and Kamala Harris became the candidate, he said, don't worry, guys, Trump is not going to win. So who better to talk to than the author of all the wrong moves? Because that's the real reason he's on our podcast. He's got a book out. Much welcome. Oh, there is. I mean, what a welcome, Roy.

It's unbelievable, right? Can I just say, I would like to make the case for you, and indeed for me, because I wanted to make many of the same predictions. There's a lovely moment I like to quote Alistair about how the true prophets are the optimists. We need to be driven by the fact that you need to understand that, Anthony, some of our belief that Trump would be defeated is that we thought he was an awful man and he ought to be defeated. Oh, I meant. I certainly thought that, but I remember that famous night, Rory, where you flew through the night, 14, 15 hours to get to the election day. special in New York. And by the way, Alistair could tease me, but all three of us thought Harris was going to win. No, no, no, no, it was the lone Wolf Dominic Sanbrook, was calling it for Trump.

No, I'm going to rebut. Go back and watch the film. I said nothing. What's your prediction? My prediction is, is, I'm a bit like Marina. It's Harris. I said nothing. I was moderating and I didn't predict. Why? Because I just spoke into one of Harris's pollsters who told me, this is not looking good. And because I do try to stay optimistic, I did not want to say the words Trump. I don't like Alisters, like, facial expressions when he says Harris, Rory. Yeah, yeah. But I'm a professional pessimist. Well, the one thing Alistair and I don't have in common, Rory is height, okay? I'm, I'm too short to see the glass anything other than half full. Okay, I'll just, I'll just leave it to you that. And see, listen, thank you for coming

on the show. Before we get into the many fascinating things about your life and what you're doing at the moment, will you tell us a little bit about this book? First of all, thank you guys for inviting me back on. And I tried to write a book that was a distillation of 38 years of being on Wall Street, 11 failed days as a White House communications person. But I did spend 30 years in Republican Party presidential politics as a donor and a fundraiser. I was one of the finance chairs for Trump, but it was also a finance chair for Mitt Romney. I was on Romney's economic transition team. I was a committee person for Trump's executive transition team helping to build the cabinet. And so I tried to write a book

that explained over the last three and a half decades how we got to Donald Trump. So this is not a polemic about him. It's not even a tribal polemic. And I appreciate Alice to give me a shout out on John Stewart's podcast. Actually, this book is really about mistakes that were made by American leaders, well-intended American leaders, both from the left and right, that led to to the economic divide, which I believe caused the anger-based populism. So I'm submitting to people here that there's a money point of view of history. And in America, guys, you have to follow the money. If you follow the money, you can see where the politics are going to lead. Rory, as you know, I'm always trying to educate you in the art of plugging. But I've just learned

a new one from Mooch. You have to do this all the time. You just have to hold your book, hold your book up and point it at the camera. Are you going to do it at a whole interview? you holding the book? I might do, but I just noticed there's a lot of photoshopping. Okay, he looks 15 years younger on that book cover, Roy. Did you notice that? A lot of photoshopping, a little bit of astroturfing on the forehead. It looks like he had more forehead hair. I'm impressed. I'm impressed. I'm actually in the Kreef Library at the moment, where to my horror, although I'm a local boy, this is my local town, there are no copies of my book and there are two copies of Alice's books. Well, there you, we'll have to change that. So I'm feeling a bit bitter about this. But, Anthony,

we need to get your book in two. Can I just say something about Moochie's book? The reason why I mentioned it on the John Stewart show is because you sent it to me a while back and I read it on a flight. And I do think it's a very good book. And I think it's an important book because essentially it's a sort of, it's a story of the politics of the economy and the economy of politics going back over, you know, quite a long period of time.

But the thing that I quoted on that, which I was really struck with me, is that the Mooch basically traces all the stuff that's followed. Populism, Brexit, Trump 1 and Trump 2, you trace it back to the WTO talks in Seattle and letting China in. I find that the most interesting part of the book. So just if you could just tell us a little bit about why you think that. Well, I mean, I start out the book by explaining everybody how wrong I was. I was 35 years old. This is November of 1999.

I'm this smug, self-absorbed Wall Street capital allocator. and I'm looking derisively at Ralph Nader and the union bosses descending on Seattle, Washington, to protest China's entrance into the WTO. And remember, the establishment guys was for it. The Wall Streeters like Bob Rubin that were part of the Clinton administration were for it. And as I point out, we were very smug at that time. We had ended history, guys. The Berlin Wall had fallen.

It was the end of history. the Democratic West, the Western-style free market capitalism, has won the world. And China, if we let them into the World Trade Organization, we can help them urbanize, we can help them go from poverty to middle-class ranking, and they'll eventually be part of our system. And we bought into all of that. And those protesters, guys, were talking about lower wages, decimating situation for our small towns and factories. and as a Wall Street person, I ignored it to my own peril. And I didn't really get to see the wreckage of that until, frankly, I was on the Trump campaign.

I did 71 campaign stops with President Trump or then candidate Trump. And I was like, oh, my God, we took aspirational working class Americans like my dad, and we turned them into economically desperation ones. And again, we didn't do it on purpose, guys, but we made mistake. We should have let China in, but check them more. emerging market status for two decades in the WTO. This first big China shock, and maybe we can get on to the second China shock, is so central to the way that the United States thinks about inequality and deindustrialization.

And I wonder whether it isn't convenient for you guys to put the blame on China when a lot of it is to do with your own tax policies, your own welfare states, your own industrial strategies. Germany also went through China joining the WTO and went through 15, 20, years of industrial growth, added hundreds of thousands of jobs to its factories while trading with China. And for many of us, we actually believe deindustrialization was largely driven by technology, by the fact that you can now make a motor car in the United Kingdom. Four years ago, we were making as many motor cars as we were making in the 1970s with about 9% of the workers. So we went through deindustrialization, but we went through deindustrialization, partly under

Margaret Thatcher, through technology change. So I wonder whether it isn't a convenient American thing to forget about technology, forget about tax, and say there's a bad person called China out there that's responsible for everything that happened. Well, this wasn't a polemic to blame China. This was actually a polemic to blame policy leadership in the United States in terms of not understanding what we were doing. And just to add to your point, Rory, I would say the educational aspect of this thing was

something that the Americans miss. If you go back in the research for the book, I looked at President Clinton's speeches leading up to this decision to let China into the WTO. He was talking about retraining our workers. He was talking about higher quality jobs and blue-collar people going into the white-collar economic zone, none of which happened. So, no, this isn't about me turning China into a boogeyman. I think they acted in their self-interest and I think they acted, frankly, prudently. You're mentioning Germany. is a very important thing to understand about Germany versus China in the U.S. So a lot of this is

currency related guys. So I'm going to take you back to 1972. Richard Nixon allows Mao at that time, February of 72, to link the renn-mb or the yuan to the U.S. dollar. This is very, very important for China because as they start to industrialize, once Mao dies and Deng Xiaoping takes over and puts in some capitalist reforms, they are industrialized. and they're growing their industrial base, their currency should have gone up in value. But their currency actually goes down in value because they're linked to this deficit spending country known as the United States, which is devaluing its currency, unclipping itself from the gold standard, etc.

So this caused massive acceleration of growth in China. Again, this would be a policy mistake by the Americans. It just said you brought up Germany, I just want to remind people when the euro was created in 1992, Germany was able to launch. linkets currency to Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain. Some people call that acronym Pigs. But I just want you to think about what happened to Germany. The Deutsche mark, if it was trading at fair market value, would always be trading at a premium to the euro. So Germany also picked up some benefit from being part of the euro. And to their credit, their politicians, Gerhard Schroeder,

you guys will remember this. I'm sure Alice will remember this. He pushed three. union reforms. There was a great line, Trichet said it to me once at one of our conferences. He said that the country that can fire the most people will hire the most people. And he said this was a problem with France because it was very hard to fire people. But Schroeder, in addition to good industrial policy, getting the benefit from the euro, devaluing the Deutsche Mark, he put in those union reforms, which caused a lot of industrial growth in Germany. The U.S. to ask, Rory, we did none of those things. We did none of those things. We were arrogant about those things and we took it for granted as opposed to creating a good strategic plan.

Given we've gone straight into the whole issue of economics and the relationship with politics, can we just come to the present day? I want to come back to your book. But I want your assessment and also I've been interested in Rory's take on this as well, the extent to which the damage being done to America, certainly to its standing in the world, but also possibly long term to its economy as well, by this extraordinary use of tariffs, which has led us now to a trade war with your geographically and economically and politically most of the time, one of your closest neighbors, namely Canada. Is this another wrong move? And is this the one that somebody writing the mooch book in 10 years' time is going to

maybe put ahead of all the wrong moves you've got in the book? I think the election of Donald Trump, the first term, you could say, was an aberration. and you could say America was trying to fix the problems that we saw. I mean, if you actually looked at some of the bills that got passed under the Biden administration, the Chips Act, and others, he was trying to fix some of those things. But ultimately, the Biden administration failed. And I say, why did they fail? Because Donald Trump returned to power. And so definitionally, he was supposed to close that gate and prevent that from happening. So his return to power, I think, is the catastrophic decision. That is an American population decision. That's also a failure of

leadership of the Democratic Party. Of course, it's a failure of the former establishmentarians of the Republican Party. But just remember something about Trump, he is a destructive force. And so the notion that he wants to ruin the best alliance that we've had and the most peaceful border over several hundred years, the U.S.-Canadian border, the fact that he wants to ruin that, He wants to create this bellicasse of rhetoric towards our Western allies. He's flying his CIA chief into Moscow. I think it's about, hey, give us a little bit of a break in Iran. And we're going to, you know, before Trump leaves office, we're going to relieve you of all these economic sanctions.

I mean, the fact that he's putting up pictures on its truth social of him and Kim Jong-un, and he's telling the Americans that we should be at a trade war with Canada is some of the most repulsive things that I've seen. So yes, if we're going to write another all the wrong moves, we'll say, well, there's now four catastrophic decisions. Trump is doing existential damage to the United States. He is amexiting the United States. You guys had a Brexit 10 years ago. We could argue about the economics of that.

And I'll tell a story about Trump and I write about it in the book about the Brexit. But he's amexiting the United States. He wants the United States to exit the world's global trading. system, the Western-based alliances as it relates to our defense, which is arguably one of the best defense treaties that was ever created in the history of the world. He's been an existential force for damage. And by the way, guys, what's surprising to me is not his disapproval rating. It's surprising to me his approval rating. He's still at 32 percent, one-third of the electric still likes this guy and is buying into the...

this nonsense. So yeah, no, that's a very big problem for us. And by the way, some of my Republican friends say, no problem, we'll get to the next election, we'll be gone with Trump, we're just going to wait him out. He's done institutional damage to the brand, and he's done institutional damage to our alliances around the world, both economic and from a defense of security perspective. One of the things that makes you unique, and quite unlike Alistair and me, is that you know this man quite well. I mean, we can all sit around and pundit about him and populism, but you sat on Air Force One with him. Much more than just a few days you spent on the White House, you traveled on campaign trails with him, you got to know him, you watched him, sort out his hair in the bathroom, read the

newspaper, etc. What do you think people miss about him who don't know him? What's the thing that when you see descriptions of him on podcasts or in the media, you think, whoa, that's not quite catching the man that I know. He would charm the daylights out of the two of you. No, I wouldn't. In fact, the more nasty things that you would have said about him, he would try to go into the overdrive of charm. When he's in a small room, okay, people find him charming. Okay, you would say to me, that's ridiculous, blah, blah, but I'm telling you that it isn't. And I talk about him landing the Trump name-in-blazoned helicopter at the Iowa State Fair in the summer of 2015. He's announced his candidacy for the presidency, and he lands the helicopter, and Rory, he gets out of the helicopter, and he's asking the young children, do they want to fly in the helicopter with him?

And, of course, the mothers would like, yeah, you know, go fly in the helicopter. And then Trump is saying, hey, get me some fried Oreos and fried butter sticks, okay? And he's in the helicopter now with these blue-collar kids or these farmer children from Iowa. And that's something that people don't understand about him. He is a very talented retail politician. But he's a destructive human being. Just to develop the charm a little bit. I mean, obviously this is uncomfortable territory for us because I think the three of us are united

in our absolute rage and contempt of Trump. But I think this is important to understand what people find attractive. What is the side of the charm? Is it that he listens? Is he capable of being witty and funny? Does he flatter people? I mean, what sort of charm is it? He flatters people.

He is witty and dry and funny. You know, he's got a little bit of a stand-up routine. Okay. He's self-absorbed. He doesn't like other people talking in the room. Okay? So he wants to be the person talking. He wants to be the show.

But one thing he does is if he thinks you're smart, he'll never admit to you that he thinks, he thinks you're smart, but he'll call you, okay? And if you get on his 11 p.m. call circuit, which I was on for about four months, ring, ring, yes, Mr. Trump, or then Mr. President, he'll call you, he'll start asking you questions, and he'll say, well, who should do this, or who should be the vice president? You know, he was talking to Chris Christie about being vice president. He made a decision that Chris Christie was too much like him. He was going to get too much of the spotlight. And so he went with the more muted Mike Pence. But you do mention,

listen, I traveled with him. And I want to tell you guys this story because it's in the book. I am reading a research brief. We're coming back from California. I've got a research brief in front of me from Skybridge's economic team. I'm reading it. And Trump looks over at me. What are you reading? Well, I'm reading about the economic consequences for the United Kingdom should they Brexit, May 2016. Trump looks at me and says, you're an idiot. And I look at him and I said, well, okay, I know I'm an idiot, but why am I an idiot? He says, because I can tell you what's in that briefing book that they're not going to

Brexit. And that briefing book is telling you that the economic consequences are dire. He didn't use that word, but I'm paraphrasing. And so therefore, they're not going to Brexit, but you're an idiot because they are going to Brexit, because politics and voting is about a much. motion. And you see all these people that were traveling this country right now, all these decimated towns, all these absent factories. That's going on in the Midlands. That's going on in the north. And they're going to descend on the voting booths and they're going to Brexit.

And I looked at them like he had three heads. And I said that might be, but I doubt it because it will be very damaging to the economy. They're going to have lower per capita growth. They're going have lower wages. There's no way they're going to act in their economic self-interest. Once again, he was right, Rory, and Alistair, I was wrong. One month later, you guys decided to Brexit. And then I said, okay, holy shit, this guy's going to, this guy could win. This guy can win. Because, you know, our two countries, whether we like it or not, or like a match sailing race, your sale was a little bit ahead of ours in 2016. And you were the precursor predicting what was going to happen in America in November of that year. I honestly don't think he could charm me because I think

I've seen too much of him. But anyway, you know, it's unlikely as it happened. Although if you do put a word in, we'd love to have him on the rest of his politics. But Al, not to interrupt you, but you met with Newsom. You met with Newsom. Didn't Newsom tell you that Trump tries to charm the pants off of him? He calls him new scum. And then when he sees him, ho hokey ha, ha, I was just kidding about the new scum. Yeah, that's not a charm. That's a cute. That's two-faced hypocrisy. You see, I just think His values are so repellent. And so... You've been in politics a long time.

That's... That is to face hypocrisy to the man on the street. So I'd call it out to his face. That is horrific, greasy charm. Yeah, well, it's not a sharp. And that was the point that Gavin would make. I'm just telling you that it worked. I'm telling...

By the way, he lost Iowa to Ted Cruz, but it was very close. And you remember, he stepped out of the Iowa debate. You remember that whole nonsense? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the reason he lost Iowa. Yeah. Okay, if he hadn't stepped out of the Iowa debate to pull all that theatrical nonsense,

he would have won in Iowa. He won in New Hampshire. A week later, he won in South Carolina. He marched into Super Tuesday. And of course, that's when Jeff Bush dropped out after Trump slayed him in South Carolina. But listen, he's a politician, guys. He's a formidable politician. Oh, yeah, listen.

I get that. He's a formidable politician. And he has done egg. He is a virus. He has done, he got into the system and then he started exploding inside the system to hurt the system. Yeah. And, you know, weirdly my 11-day ill-fated career, like at least I now had standing to intellectually articulate what he is doing, okay, to force the conversation. Okay, Now, he rarely comes after me now because it explodes my Twitter feed. It explodes my Instagram feed.

And his attitude is I'm just going to ignore the son of a bitch because he's a New Yorker like me. He's going to punch back. You know, I'm not Ted Cruz where I'm going to sit there and take it, you know. Our newsletter, the week that Carney pulled the plug on these talks, we had a couple of interviews with some Canadian economists and professors. and one of them said that he made this really interesting comparison, said that Mark Carney was like Mohammed Ali, float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. And I just wonder, you see, I think the reason,

I heard you last week, I heard you on a recent episode, the rest is the politics of the US saying that Kani's now like the leader of the free world. Now, he's certainly become one of the most impressive political leaders in the world right now. But in part, I think that's because he is in so many ways an antidote to Trump. Carney's charming. Carney's genuinely charming. Carney's clever in a way that Trump's not. Carnie understands the world economy in a way that Trump doesn't.

And Carney also has really deep-rooted values. And I think it's the lack of values in your president that I think people find so utterly repellent. I'll say something to you, Alistair, you and I interviewed, I think was unavailable at that time. So you and I stepped in for Rory, and we interviewed Mark Carney prior to the primary race with Christian Feeland.

And I think you guys also offered her a spot as well. I know if you remember that interview, but he said something in that interview, and I called you after, I said he is very tough, this guy, because he had preached in the interview about core principles, and he preached in the interview about not budging from those core principles. And that's what real leadership is, right? We both know politicians that are thermostats. That's Carney. He sets the coordinates.

He tries to bring you there. And then we know politicians like Trump, who are thermometers, they feel the heat in the room, and then they express the heat back to the public. Carney's the guy that will try to cool the thing off and bring it directionally in a different direction. But the thing that's so impressive about Carney to me, and I've said this repeatedly, when you fight Trump, he doesn't know what to do. He doesn't know what to do.

He flubbed this week. His team said, oh, no, we didn't bait and so. which Carney at the end, that's a bunch of lies. And then Trump's in the Oval Office saying, yeah, that's me. Of course, I added more things and baited and switched them at the end. Okay. So to me, what I love about Carney is that you can predict what Carney is going to do because because of those core principles that you're describing. You're quite interesting because, obviously, unlike Alistrami, you very much come from New York. You come from the finance industry. You know Trump well. And one of the things I've picked up talking to you is that you've also had deep

connections into the United Arab Emirates, into Israel, both of which have become increasingly close to Trump. I mean, something quite interesting seems to be happening in the Gulf at the moment where Saudi and Qatar are increasingly at loggerheads with the UAE. What do you think is going on there? What's the shift there that you're sensing? And what is Trump sensing there? And how does Israel and the UAE play into this whole game in Iran? I think that those areas is going to make a very broad statement because I talk to a lot of people. in those areas and I'm friends with a lot of people and some of the families are actually clients of mine. But I think those areas welcome the return of Donald Trump. And I think if they

would say to you, oh, he runs his country the way we run our countries. It's a family-centered governmental country. You know, I say about the UAE, I don't know if they like me saying this or not, but I feel like that that's MBZ's home. I don't see it as a country as much as I see it as his home. You go to his home, you say nice things, you're polite to him, he'll treat you with unbelievable generosity and respect. If you're going to do things in his home like soil as carpet or throw China into the patio, he's going to be upset. And so it's not a country like the UK where you have civil rights, civil liberties and freedoms or in the United States. It's somebody's house. And so these guys looked at Trump's return and they said, okay, this is good for us because we know how to deal with him.

He'll want a plane. He'll want us to make an investment in world liberty financial. He'll want us to do things to lucre up his family and therefore we'll have influence with him. But they learned the nasty thing about Trump that the loyalty is asymmetrical and it's asypical behavior. You don't get any reciprocity from Trump. He's the man that you take care of and that he does absolutely nothing for you. So those governments right now are sitting there flummoxed and they're frustrated.

And if they were going to be honest, which of course they can't be, but if they were going to be honest, they'd say, well, if I prefer a Joe Biden, a Bill Clinton, or somebody that's more of a traditional politician than Donald Trump. But I don't think they're as close as you may think from the surface. I think there's a lot of anxiety about dealing with Trump. And I think in the Israeli perspective, there's also a lot of anxiety guys. Maybe Netanyahu doesn't have the anxiety because he wants to stay out of jail. But I think the general population in Israel doesn't like the direction that Israel's brand has taken over the last three years.

Rory mentioned Iran there. We get the feeling, and I think this is probably your view as well, that whatever the objectives and the reasons for him taking this action, that the Iranians are sitting there thinking, okay, we've taken quite a big hit, but we're winning this. Your second big catastrophe in the book relates to the US and war, and particularly what you call the mistake of war without taxes. And this is the post-9-11, the Bush administration, first Afghanistan, then Iraq, triple trillion dollar wars, where basically they were saying to the American people, don't worry, this isn't going to cost you too much. So just talk us through that. And also whether you think that Trump's Iran mistake is on a par with those. Yeah.

Well, it's heading that way, but I think it's important because on the dark web, bin Laden, let's just go back to bin Laden. It's very important, okay? We start a defensive response to Iraq invading Kuwait. And what do we do? We put two air strips in Saudi Arabia near Mecca and Medina. Bin Laden says, I don't like that. That's crusading.

that's sacrilegious, get those air strips out of there. And Dick Cheney gives him the bird. Now, let's remind everybody that bin Laden, Osama bin Laden, was one of our allies. We were sending surface-to-air missiles to take out Soviet helicopters in Afghanistan to beat the Russians out of Afghanistan or the USSR. So bin Laden then goes to the Americans and says, you gave me all the military stuff. That's great. I want money for schools here in Afghanistan. The Americans say no because they're madrises and they'll be fomenting radicalism. So bin Laden is actually mad about that, but he's okay with it. He gets super mad when they put the air bases in Saudi Arabia.

And so the terrorism starts, right? You bomb the World Trade Center, February 1993. You take out the embassies in Africa, 1998, right? Remember, Clinton is shooting missiles into bin Laden's tents in 1998 in August of 1998. And then, of course, you have the USS coal in Yemen explodes. Okay, and so we have this. Bin Laden is writing on the dark web. I took out the Russians.

I'm now going to destroy the American Empire. Well, how are you going to do that? I'm going to hit them on their soil. They're going to wildly overreact and come here and bomb my mud huts. And, of course, this life is temporary for us, and we believe in a post-life, and we don't care. Bomb our mud huts. You're going to bleed out your treasury. You're going to spill your blood and guts in our homeland trying to beat us.

Oh, and the other thing is you're going to take away your own civil liberties. Look at the Patriot Act and look what that was in the early 2000s in the aftermath of 9-11. So what I write in the book is that it was catastrophic to go to war and overreact like that. Now, George Soros is a pariah to the conservatives, but he wrote an op-ed in late 2001, and he begged the United States not to overreact in the Middle East. He said, please, I know 3,000 people died, unspeakable tragedy. Do not overreact in the Middle East because you're going to get into a quagmire like the Soviets did in Afghanistan. Nobody listened to them, guys.

And then, remember, the Bush versus Gord debate in 2000 was about our surplus. We had printed a governmental surplus in $2,240 billion. I write about how we were able to do that, right, with all those pay-as-you-go laws. Bush eliminates those. He cuts the taxes in March of 2001, and then he goes to war in Afghanistan, October 2001. He goes to war in Iraq, March of 2003. He cuts taxes twice going into those wars. We could have had a million-era patriotic tax and restored the Clinton tax code for people making over a half million dollars a year to close the deficit gap. He doesn't do that, guys. And so he ends his term.

I want you guys to think about this. We go from George Washington to George W. Bush, $7 trillion of deficit spending. The ensuing presidents, $33 trillion of deficit spending, and you can trace it back. So my American friends are not going to like me saying this. Bin Laden is winning. Okay. And you guys are Brits, you probably want to understand this baseball expression. But it's the bottom of the ninth.

It's the bottom of the sixth inning. bin Laden is up 6-1. He's dead, but what he said we would do is actually happen to America. He's crippled us because we didn't take a beat and look at what he was doing. So this second catastrophic decision, I think, has been a disaster for us. And I think it's also, you know, even the way we handle our lobbying circuit with the military, and we got ourselves down. Guys, we got ourselves down to five defense contractors.

Remember, we're going to have a peace dividend. We have 51 defense contractors. We allowed them to consolidate. And now we've crippled the way we procure equipment. Guys, we're spending a trillion dollars. So about Iran? We're spending a trillion dollars on the military. We got five months worth of munitions.

What are you guys doing with the money? What are you guys doing with the money? So, yes, this is all tied in. And you're saying, is this a disaster in Iran? It's an unmitigated disaster. And they were planning, they were planning for this for 20 years. That's why they had the Mosaic Defense Doctrine. That's why when they got decapitated, all those leaders jumped up, why they have semi-autonomous units, why they closed the Strait of Ramos.

Anthony, let's- It's all there. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm ventilating like that, but I'm just trying to explain to you what I saw, you know? Well, so one of the interesting things, I guess, is that in some ways, if you're in Europe, the narrative is not the United States is a disaster. The narrative in Europe is often, and you'll find this with the kind of fancy conferences you go to, that the U.S. is doing very well. I mean, the European economies were the same size as the U.S. economy in 2008. The U.S. economy is now 50% larger. Famously, the GDP per capita in Mississippi is now greater than that in the United Kingdom.

The U.S. stock market is now 70% of global stock markets. We feel that we're being completely left behind in defense, security, cloud computing, AI. So there's a very interesting thing that maybe you need to explain to a European audience, which is how does your kind of gloomer narrative sit with the fact that many other people, particularly in your industry, looking at the United States, says, wow, this is really impressive. And in fact, the U.S.'s relative position against China has significantly improved over the last few years. So, Rory, everything you're saying is true, but this could have been handled so much better. We could have had a rainy day fund in the United States. We didn't need to have $40 trillion of debt. We could have had better strategic planning.

The United States is benefiting from a culture of risk-taking and a culture of innovation. And what you're saying may bail us out. I am an optimist like you. Tom Malthus said we were going to starve. We out-innovated the way we delivered food. We had more people dying from obesity than we did starvation. Okay, we were told that we were going to run out of oil. We figured out fracking and better offshore drilling and better energy efficiency for our air conditioning. So I'm a believer that we're going to fix all of this. But no, this is a disaster for the United States. And Europe is a different problem. Okay, too much bureaucracy, not enough culturalization for risk taking. You've got a lot of stratification in Europe and people are afraid to lose their standing if they fail at something. That's a totally different problem. Okay, but this is about how do you make the United States better and what did we do wrong?

Can we reflect on what we did wrong so that we can stop repeating the mistakes and create what I think will be a fairer, more economically aspirational society. So I'm not trying to compare it to Europe. I get, you know, people came here. Gary and I toured Little Illy together, Gary Lineker. And he said to me, man, all these Europeans can't believe how wealthy the U.S. is comparatively. And I get all of that. But let me tell you something, we are staring at a $40 trillion potential debt crisis.

It's gotten so bad that one of the guys that broke the Bank of England in 1992, the Secretary of Treasury, is trying to manipulate the treasury markets in the United States by bringing down the long end of the curve. Okay. And I'm telling you, that usually ends in tears, worry. So I hear you. I mean, I love this country. I wrote, this is a love note to the country, by the way.

This is not a, I hate that. This is, hey, this is some mistakes we made. We got a great group of people here. Can we dial down the rancor and the partisan rhetoric? And can we work on things that could fix the country? Anthony, Alistair, quick break, and then back for more. Your third big catastrophic betrayal mistake, call it what you want, relates to the post-crash decisions that were taken.

And there, I think we are, you know, that you can see directly the kind of thread to, populism and Trump and all that's gone with it. And, you know, what I guess the problem there, tell me if I've read your book right on this, is that essentially what you had was socialism, which I know is a dirty word in the United States for most Americans, if you had socialism for the bankers who basically had screwed the whole world and you had austerity for the poor. Yep. Right. And we had a version of that here as well. So, but what I can't go my head around is how did the people who were the victims of that see,

Donald Trump, who is as a sort of predator, inherited wealth, billionaire, corrupt, crooked, all the stuff that people have known about. He's been one of the most famous people in America for years. How did they see him as the guy to get them out of this? All right. So that third decision was I basically say we gave a trillion to the banks. We gave no money for middle income or lower income relief. Got everybody angry.

And said differently, 5,000 people on Wall Street made $1 million. more in a bonus in 2008 as a result of that bank bailout. And that really upset a lot of people. But Trump, and I saw it, guys, again, 71 campaign stops. Trump was an avatar for their anger. You know, Trump always felt left out. Trump always had a grievance. So maybe he was just channeling that. But those people galvanized around him. Okay. And I think I told you guys this story once. And I'll repeat it. I'm in New Mexico asking people why they are at the Trump rally. And they're saying, oh, well, the factory closed here. You think you're in New Mexico, new New Mexico. That would be Mexico. That's where the factory went. Mr. Trump is going to bring the

jobs back. He's a multi-billionaire. He's a business leader. This was this imaging that the apprentice gave him. You see, and, you know, Mark Burnett sort of crafted that image for him, okay? And so people believed it. And when he showed up with his hat on and he said some derisive things or derogatory things about the establishment, people are like, yeah, burn it down. Guys, you know how this works, right? Bono had one of the best lines about Ireland, right? He said, you know, when I drive around and I see the house in America, I say, oh, I can probably live in that house someday if I work hard enough. When I see that same house in Ireland, burn it down, I'm never going to get there. Bono has got there, by the way. He's, he's, made it. Don't worry.

Okay, but he tells a great story about culture. When you feel left out and you feel there's a ceiling over your head you can't bust through, burn it down. And so those people looked at Trump and said he's going to burn it down. I want him to burn it down. He'll have Alistair and Rory talking shit about him. He's going to have Anthony Scaramucci talking shit about him. Good. They're part of the media. They're part of the elite. Burn it down. And that's something that he understood better than anybody else. And then he flipped it on him. He said, oh, you know, no more forever wars. Now we got a forever war. Oh, you're going to get the Epstein files. Poor Pam Bondi, very naive. She thought he meant that. He's calling her, say, hey, idiot, I'm actually in the

Epstein files. You know, we're not letting the Epstein files out. Okay, let's get Todd in the position, right? And then he said, oh, affordability? No, no, I don't care about affordability. I'm going to dope you guys on meme coins. I'm going to grift the plane from the Middle East. I'm going to make hundreds of millions of dollars insider trading because I'm technically allowed to do it. Oh, and by the way, your gas prices are going to $5. So what? And by the way, you saw him in the Oval Office last week, said, oh, gas prices are lower. The journalist said, no, they're not, sir. They're up 37%.

Fake news, he said. It was fake news. So, Anthony, one of the things that was surprising in the first Trump victory, but even more surprising the second Trump victory, because it became clearer there, is that you can't explain the majority of his vote just by post-industrial areas that were wiped out by Chinese competition. He's getting a huge number of votes from rural service areas that were less affected by China. It's getting a huge amount of vote, frankly, just from white men, like the majority of white men in the United States vote for Trump. 54% of the white women. A lot of traditional Republicans. So, I mean, I sometimes wonder whether we don't put too much emphasis on the kind of J.D. Vance vision of these kind of terrible stories around factories that were wiped out and China and industrial.

policy, but if you look at the map of Trump's election, there are many, many areas which are not like that that voted for Trump. Many people who are not like that who voted for Trump. So I appreciate that analysis, but I'm going to simplify it for you, okay? We have a crazy uncle. He's spewing nonsense from the White House, and we're in the middle of COVID. Okay, you know what? Let's get rid of the crazy uncle and we'll bring in the benevolent but very benign, inert grandfather. So knock out the crazy uncle. Okay, it turns out that the benevolent grandfather is sun setting on us. Okay, so it looks like he's heading into the house of dementia.

So let's bring in the younger sister. Oh, wait a minute. We don't even know who the younger sister is. And you guys know this the day prior to the election. People were Googling in the United States. Did Joe Biden drop out? That was the most searchable term on Google. So now I've got the unknown, untested sister versus the crazy uncle.

Oh, wait a minute. You know, it wasn't so bad with the crazy uncle. You know what? Let's bring back the crazy uncle and forget about the unknown sister. So I appreciate the analysis that you're talking about, but this was a lesser of evil to evil's decisions by the Americans. That's why he got the popular vote. That's why he won the seven swing states.

One small thing. And then back to while, I'm talking too much. But the other thing that I pick up from Trump supporters in the states is, how many people continue to be very, very angry with what they call woke culture. You know, I just got an email from a guy that I used to teach with who I very much thought was from the left saying that he hated Trump, but he was going to vote from anyway because he was so angry. And then he lists off a whole series of complaints, which are basically culture war complaints.

And that's pretty uncomfortable for Alistair and I, because I guess we're pretty woke. But talk us through that and try to, you know, help your. European American British listeners understand why a kind of moderate American might be angry with the Democratic Party and be tempted to vote for Trump. So, okay, raise your hand on this podcast if you're an atheist. Okay, raise your hand. Oh, there's two people that are not raising their hand, but there are two people on the podcast. They're athlete atheists, and we have one practicing Catholic.

Okay, so you've got to understand the country. This is a religious country. You got to understand the country. There's a Bible belt. There's even a buckle on the Bible belt where there's extreme religious. orthodoxy. So when the woe culture steps in with all this identity politics in the United States, the country doesn't like it. 15% of the people like the wall culture, 85% of the people really don't like the wall culture. And in comes the general, the general Napoleon of the culture war.

That would be Donald Trump. Nobody understands the culture war in this country better than Donald Trump. And what did they write about Napoleon? He could see the battle. battlefield. You could anticipate where the generals were moving, the opposing generals, even before they made the decisions. Napoleon said, okay, he's going in that direction. I got to do this to beat him. And Trump does that every single time. Example, we had 10 transgender kids transition and play women's athletics in high schools. Ten, population, 340 million people. Trump spent hundreds of millions of dollars on that issue and flooded the zone in those states. He definitely is a malicious dude. He's a horrific dude. You know who runs the Democratic Party in the United States?

Nobody. Okay, that would be Donald J. Trump. He's the leader. He's the leader of the Democratic Party because he's the white cue ball on the billiard table. He smashes into them and they go in 15 different directions on the billiard table rather than consolidating and saying, hey, we're going with Newsom. I hate his non-woke policies, but he's a big, tall white guy, and in this culture right now, he'll probably win. We're going to do that. We've got to go with the alt-left or the lunatic. And by the way, AOC is a good general in the culture world. Not as smart as Trump, but AOC did two things after the November 2024 election. She dropped her pronoun usage on her Twitter feed. She said, well, a lot of people in my district split the vote. They voted for me

and voted for Trump. I asked them why they hate the woke culture. And then she said two weeks ago, woke one was crazy. What did she mean by that? She meant that all the stuff that the Democrats had got hung up on was damage the Democrats. Hey, said this is a religious country

and these people don't like the woke shit and we better knock it off if we want to win. That's what she said. Mood, you keep telling me it's a religious country, right? This feels like the least Christian government. I am an atheist. This feels like the least Christian government pretty much anywhere on the planet right now. Oh, that's true.

Okay. So, and the other thing, going back to Europe, I've just spent two and a half weeks going around Europe into nine European countries. You know one of the nicest things about the whole trip was constantly running into Americans telling me how much nicer it was here? The Trump, Vance, Musk, MAGA crowd are deliberately trying to destroy the reputation of the UK and of Europe. Why are they doing that? And what's your advice to us about how we fight back against that? Well, they're doing that

because they're threatened by. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so the number one threat for conservatives for 30 years was a woman named Hillary Rodham Clinton. So they spent multiple billions of dollars to destroy her. Okay?

The number one threat right now is Gavin Newsom. And they are spending, and Fox News spends an hour a night trying to take out Gavin Newsom. And I don't get texts from Corny, but I do get texts from Gavin because he watches the show and he texts me. And I said, Gavin, you know what? You have the hottest economy right now.

There are more startups in California, which is, quote, unquote, a liberal state than any other state in the nation. You can combine Florida and Texas. He's got way more startups. Okay. And he would be the fourth largest economy if you took him out of the state. United States, and when he got the job, it was the fifth largest economy. So Gavin, you better shut down this narrative because the conservatives are very smart. British culture and your

freedoms there and the freedom of press. Let me shit on those. Let me take your strength. You know what good politicians do? They find your strength and they start dumping on it, right? Remember what Obama did to Romney. He said, you're losing jobs and your health care with Romney. And Romney was a job creator. What did Bush do to Kerry? He was on an air strip in Texas drinking beer. Carrie was fighting and got the Purple Heart in Vietnam. He got Swiftboat guys together, and he said,

Carrie was a coward in Vietnam. Okay, so he took Carrie's strength, and he went right after it. And so what the conservatives are doing to the UK and Europe, they're looking at the strength of your culture, and they're attacking it to create an us versus them. And there's only one way to stop that, and that is to rebut it. Grow some Carney, Keonis, and have your politicians push back on it and invite people to the country. Final one from me, Anthony, and strong recommendation on people to look at your book.

But one of the terrifying things is we're not even half the way through Trump. Yeah, 29 months ago. It's unbelievable what he's managed to pull off in the last. than half his presidency. I mean, it feels completely different to the 2016 presidency. And when we think about Greenland, when we think about Canada, when we think about Iran, when we think about the far-right populists in Europe, when we think about tariff wars, when we think about immigration, when we think about ICE, what's your fear of what this guy can do in the next two and a half years? What is the world looking at? What could he do

do to the world in the next two and a half years? I think it's very sad for me. And again, I'm not trying to be doom and gloom because I do believe we can fix this stuff. Unless the can check him. If you're telling me that Democrats win the House seems likely and he doesn't have any election interference and that happens, they'll probably be able to slow him down a little bit, Rory. If he loses in Texas and Tala Rico wins, they're going to slow him down a little. But if they don't slow him down, I think he goes exponential after the midterms because he's 80 years old on his way to 81. He's going to want to make 20 to 40 more billion dollars for himself. and he doesn't care.

He's a neeless. He'll want to rampage. And I also think he's a cipher for Vladimir Putin. And I think he's got a checklist from Vladimir Putin. I think he's afraid of Putin. And he lets Putin know at every opportunity that he can, that he's there for him. He's going to help him to stand he can in Ukraine. He's going to do all the different things that Vlad wants them to do.

I'm going to split Canada and America. You want me to do that. I'm going to piss off the UK. You want me to do that. I'm going to break our alliances. I'm going to bring America. down a peg and I'm going to make the world think about America the way they think about Russia and China. Isn't that what you want me to do, Vlad? Yes, that's what I want you to do. Okay, so he's going to

spend two more years trying to do that. And so either the American political leaders are going to say, hey, that's enough now. We're not going to take it anymore or they're going to let him continue to do that. And my biggest upset is with these Republicans in the Senate because they've been told by their political institutions. Look how powerful he is. He just got Darlene Graham to win in South Carolina. Look how powerful he is. Take a back seat. Wait the son of a bitch out. But it's 29 months, guys. That's a car lease. We got a car lease to go with this nut job running the country. And he's going to do heavy damage to the country. And he's going to do heavy damage to the world. And by the way, it's systemic stuff, guys. It's not like, you know, a lot of guys say, oh,

Trump's leaving. And then we're going to go back to one. where we were, that's not going to happen. No, no. What you've just described there is a KGB agent managing a Russian asset. Now, normally when that happens, it's either because the agent, Philby style, has an ideological attachment to the politics and values of the people who are running them,

or the agency has got something on the agent. So what has he got on Trump? Come on, Mooch, you can tell me. Well, I believe. that and I believe that it's hard to prove what he's got. I don't have the smoking gun. Okay. But, you know, if you read the steel dossier and a lot of people have tried to discredit the steel dossier, but just remember one thing about the steel dossier, it was commissioned by the Rubio campaign. And there were billionaires that helped to pay for the thing. And when they read it,

they took some things out of the steel dossier, okay? Because they said, okay, we don't want that out in the public domain. So they took it out of the dossier. And again, conservatives did a good job at discrediting Chris and discrediting the steel dossier. But I think they nailed Trump. Okay. And I don't think it's a peepe tape. Okay. That's always the sideshow guys. You know, we're going to Moscow to tell them not to attack NATO. That's the side show. That's the lie. That's the lie. Yeah, that's a lie. Okay. And so the lie is the peepe tape. I think it's way worse than that. And I think it's something that would really questioned Trump's personal identity and his misrepresentations that he's making about himself to his conservative groups. And I think it's something that paralyzes Trump. And I'll leave it there,

Alistair, because to me, I don't have the smoking gun proof. And this is a British broadcast. And you've got, you know, you guys have to have some qualifiers in there. But I think they got them. And just read Craig Unger's book. You'll see all the different things that they've done to Trump over the years. And by the way, guys, you know, when the window's open and you hear clippity clop, it is a horse, it's not a zebra. Don't overthink the goddamn thing. Everything that he does, he goes right down the Putin checklist to hurt our country. Every single thing he does. He's not the only guy bought by Putin in this country.

There's a lot of other Republicans that are bought by Putin. Well, he's not the only one in this country. We've got one of them went to jail recently. Right, exactly. So these guys do a good job of infiltrating us, you know. Yeah. When the fool story is finally out there, you and I will. know that we've been ahead of the game on this. But as you say, you have to put qualifiers in there

from time to time. Yeah, I brought the qualifiers in there, but they got them. They got the guy. And he acts like a guy that's been got, you know? And listen, let me say something, okay? Because Roy brought it up. Trump won. He was a frady cat going into the presidency. I was there. So he brought in all establishment Republicans. Rory, we would have been better off if he won in 2020. There would have been no insurrection. He would have been in the rearview mirror, and we would have had establishment Republicans working with him in his second term. He would have done bad shit crazy stuff, but we would have correct him. He had four years in the wilderness to say, hey, man, I didn't steal enough money first time. If we get back, we're going to steal a lot more money. Oh, hey,

we had Republicans in here that were holding me back. No, no, we're not going to have any of those guys. We're going to have sycophants in here. They're going to let me do whatever the I want. Oh, and then, because I got Vlad, we got to challenge the electoral integrity of the United States to make people think that our elections are falsified. So all those things happened because of that interregnum period of Joe Biden. So to me, it's been way worse than people thought, way worse than I thought. And unfortunately, unless the Republicans check him, it's going to be worse after the midterms. But if you want to read about how we got to the son of a bitch, I gave a 35-year distillation.

No, we know. I want you to read about it. All right, there you go, okay. I've already read it. I read it before he came out. Can I do a plug, Anthony, on your behalf? I mean, it's unbelievable. The guy read it and praised it.

Now he's shitting on it, the guy. It's called All the Wrong Moves, Anthony Scaramucci. It's an extraordinary account where Anthony attempts to get into very deep questions of American identity. History, economics culture, take us to where he thinks the problems are and where the solutions are. And spoiler alert, you'll find that Anthony in some ways, Wall Street phenomenon though he is, is surprisingly a little bit more left wing than people might expect. But anyway, open the book, and I think you'll find it's something that's interesting to read. I got left wing when I got older because I realized what you guys said, the corporations believe in the welfare, and they believe in socialism for me, not for thee.

See, that's the problem. So you have to even the playing field now. So I got more left-leaning as I got older because we have to recreate that aspirational society that I grew up in. But I am a free market person. I am about unequal outcomes, but we have to create a platform of equal opportunity in this country that is sorely missing right now. And it's something I write about in the book. Well, mooch has ever lovely, lovely to talk to you.

And we'll see you. We'll see you very, very soon. So, guys, just a shout out on the book tour. I'll be in the UK with Intelligence Squared from September 14th to the 18th. And, of course, I'll be in the United States, October 2nd to the 11, touring different cities. Of course, I'll be there to sign books, answer questions. And I appreciate you guys bringing me on. Thank you.

You made me famous. You made my career, Alistair. You're happy. I'm admitting that to all of your loyal power. You made you popular. You're my brand manager, Alistair Campbell. Okay. You made my career, but you did tell me, oh, the podcast will be one hour a week.

It turns out that I'm off one hour a week. That's what it turns out. You didn't mention the one hour a week was the time that I would be able to have to myself. See you, soon.