Why Trump Keeps Winning The Anger Vote | Anthony Scaramucci

Trump is a Shakespearean figure and he eats his young, and so I think it'll be very hard. I don't think Trump wants either Vance or Rubio to replace him. I have said on the rest of politics US with Katty Kay that he doesn't want a successor from his party. He's such a narcissist that he would like to say, 'Hey, you Republicans were nothing before I got here.'

Well, I mean, the country is doing okay. We've got a little bit of a K-shaped economy going on right now, which I am worried about. There's a large group of people in the country that feel the economic struggle of the affordability crisis, etc. But generally the country is doing okay and the economic innovation is there to create the wealth necessary. I guess we just have to figure out the right policies to spread the wealth down into the system. The political leadership is not doing okay. I think the political leadership is actually failing the country. But the good news about America, because we've got a lot of entrepreneurs and we have a culture that's more or less a risk-taking culture, will pull through this. But we've created a cartel now in the country. It's sort of a uni party. It's like the Demop Republicans or the Republics. And they've got a very tight stronghold on Washington. They're spending way too much money and wasting it, by the way. And it's very hard for new leadership to break in. We've got octogenarians running the country. So that part of it is not great. But generally the United States has usually been a place over the last 250 years despite different types of downturns and cyclicality has pulled through and I predict it will do that again this time.

Well, you know, the interesting part about the book, it's not an indictment of Donald Trump because all of this stuff happened prior to his arrival in the political stage. This is really a statement of bipartisan arrogance after the fall of the Berlin Wall. We got very overconfident. I got overconfident in terms of what we thought was going to happen with Russia. For some reason the American thought leaders thought that the Chinese were going to move towards a democratic style form of capitalism as opposed to the communist party having that stronghold on the country. And so I just point out that we made several big catastrophic decisions. One, letting China into the World Trade Organization unchecked. It really did hollow out our manufacturing centers. We went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan. First time in our history with a tax cut. Every other time in history when we had a major war starting, we raised taxes. We actually cut taxes. That put us on a very bad deficit trajectory. And then the third thing, and I think perhaps this is the most damning of all of them, is when we went to bail out the banks in the global financial crisis, we didn't give any money to the middle class or the working class people here in this country. And they developed movements like the Tea Party movement. They developed Occupy Wall Street. It looks like those two got together, had a baby and created MAGA. And now we have this anger-based populism and I think you understand this because pockets of this are happening in the UK. You have this sort of horseshoe. So left-leaning populism and right-leaning populism have a lot of the same ideas, but they're both based on economic desperation and the anger associated with it. And I just talk about how this happened and how we can pull ourselves out of it if we want. If we want to, we can pull ourselves out of it. But the current political leadership is not going to be the leadership that pulls us out of this. Unfortunately, they just don't have the will for it.

Well, listen, it's anger-based. And I think you have to look at it from the emotional nature that it actually is. And so the narrative sort of goes like this: your current establishment is not helping me. I'm not saying that this rich person is going to help me, but you know what they're going to do? They're going to stick a finger in your eye. And so people like Farage or Trump are shaking the establishment. And if you're not part of that club, if you're in a lower middle income area of the UK or the United States, you're like, 'Okay, I can't get into the club, but at least these people are avatars of my anger, and they're going to smash into the people I think that have hurt me.' And it's a terrible thing, but these guys are preying on that anger. They're preying on those economic disparities. And what we found, I can't really speak for Nigel Farage, but I can definitely speak for Trump over the last two terms, the six or so years that he's been president, he has done nothing for those people. If you look at the big beautiful spending bill, as an example, passed last year, it provides corporate welfare. It provides tax cuts for the wealthy, but it actually takes people off the SNAP benefit programs. Those are our food programs. And it removes about 17 million people from our health care, our health insurance, the Obamacare. And so it's sort of ridiculous. They voted Trump in and he is now doing things that are against their economic interest. But they stay with him because he represents their anger. And I think they cling to that unfortunately.

Well, one of the things I write about in the book is unfortunately for all of us, it's part of our human nature. Some arrogance creeps in. And I think the president's arrogance is on full display now. He just listed a 927-page financial disclosure document. It turns out that he was buying Apple computer, then waiting a day and then tweeting to other people to buy it which pushed the stock up. He was selling short the markets before his announcement of the tariffs and then he was getting long the markets or buying the markets when he was putting a reprieve on the tariffs. And I think this type of reprehensible behavior is going to really hurt him. And I think it's going to hurt the Republicans in the midterm elections and likely in the 2028 elections. I guess what's at issue though is that the Democrats are still fighting our culture here. Trump understands the culture better than them. So we'll have to see how this thing unfolds. But for me, it's the current political class. And somebody like Tucker Carlson, who I know you guys know, is saying something I think quite interesting. It won't work. But he's saying, 'Well, we have to have a third party. These two parties don't represent the interests of the Americans anymore.' As evidenced by the voter registrations, just for your viewers and listeners, 43% of the Americans now have left the two parties and have registered as independents. And so when you think about that, these parties really don't represent us anymore. But because of gerrymandering and because of the things they've done operationally to tighten their hold on the system, they've become this cartel-like duopoly. And I think if we can get some political leaders in there to speak to the American people directly about what they're doing, whether it's Trump or frankly some of the Democratic socialists that are also populists, I think we can make some headway. The country is starving for straight talking political leadership at this point.

So such a great question, but I think the answer to the question is no. I think somebody's going to have to do what Trump did. And so Trump created a third party. Let's call that third party MAGA and he effectively merged it with the old Republican party, decapitated the old Republican party and installed MAGA in that party. And so that's what would have to happen again. We'd have to have a reform-based group of people that attach themselves to one of the two parties. And remember, this is something Elon Musk looked at. I'll just point this out to your viewers and listeners. There's 105 million people in the United States. It's the most powerful voting block that we have. And they vote the exact same way in every single election. And that's the non-voter. And so, as surprising as this sounds, we're in a democracy, but literally 51% of the eligible people above the age of 18 do not vote. And so, think of that entrepreneurial opportunity for a political leader to reach into that market, try to grow the market of people that could vote, bring them into the registration pool. This is something Musk looked at. Ultimately he was talked out of doing it by JD Vance, but I think that's where the potential opportunity is for reform in the United States to wake up the apathetic people who are not part of the system in terms of voting and see if we can get them back into the swimming pool.

Well, you know, here's what I would say. There's a lot of young people that are less ideological than the Mandanis or the JD Vances or the AOCs or the Marco Rubios. And it may not be in this next election cycle frankly, but I do think over the next 5 to 10 years we'll see those types of people emerge. But you know, we've got a very old and this is not an agist statement. This is just an objective statement. We have a very elderly electoral class here. If you look at whether it's Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, Chuck Grassley, Donald J. Trump, these are all 80 plus year old people that are in senior leadership positions inside the country. And I think it's time for new blood. And for me, when I'm thinking new blood, I'm not thinking me in my 60s. I'm thinking about people that are in their 40s. I certainly want to be helpful to those people, that's for sure.

I think it'll be very hard for Vance. I think Trump is a Shakespearean figure and he eats his young, and so I think it'll be very hard. I don't think Trump wants either Vance or Rubio to replace him. I have said on the rest of politics US with Katty Kay that he doesn't want a successor from his party. He's such a narcissist that he would like to say, 'Hey, you Republicans were nothing before I got here. You'll be nothing after I leave.' And just think about what he does to the Republican party in terms of going after existing established Republicans by having them primary. So I think it'll be very hard for those two. Having said that, what the Republicans have going for them are the Democrats. They're very desperate. They're fighting with each other and people are not going to like me saying this, but the Democrats are off the mark on the American culture. The culture of wokeism is not where the Americans live. And I just want to point out that AOC herself, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, after election day in 2024, she took her pronoun designation off her X or Twitter feed. And when she was asked why, she said, 'Well, a lot of my constituents voted for Donald Trump. They also voted for me.' I said, 'Well, why did you split your vote like that?' And they said, 'Well, we don't like the culture. We don't like the direction you guys are taking the culture.' So I would just implore my Democratic friends to be careful here. A lot of people dislike President Trump, but they don't like that aspect of the culture where the Democrats are trying to drive things. And so it's going to be a lot closer than people think as a result of those issues.

Well listen, I've said repeatedly he only respects strength. He doesn't respect weakness. He doesn't like the people that are overly obsequious with him. People think, 'Oh, he likes that.' He really doesn't like it. He laughs at it. He thinks those people are kowtowing to him and he snickers about it. And even in the book Regime Change, he was showing text messages from Jeff Bezos fawning over him or from Mark Zuckerberg. And he was doing that with a high level of derision. So I would say to your future prime minister, pick up the phone and call Mark Carney. Have him be your life coach for a few weeks. Nobody understands Trump better in Western leadership than Mark Carney and be tough when you need to be tough. President Trump, that's really the only thing that he respects. If you fawn over him, you'll do that and it'll cost you.

Thank you guys. Thank you for having me and happy 4th of July. I'm sorry that we're such traitors, but we are a rebellious group of people over here on this side of the pond.