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.'
Anthony, thank you so much for joining us now. It's a big moment for the history of America. 250 years. When you look at modern America right now, how do you think the country is doing? What are your thoughts?
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.
And you have a new book coming out called All the Wrong Moves, which is very much looking at the politics of the country, what went wrong and what could come next. Tell us about some of the big arguments that you make in your book.
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.
I mean, I agree with so much of your analysis there, Anthony, particularly the horseshoe and the real economic endurance test that is life for a lot of people in so many Western economies at the moment. They feel that the system is just against them. It's really hard to just get by. It was always felt that your kids would do better than you. That doesn't feel like that's the case anymore. And yet people seem to be turning to largely in America, Trump, here in the UK, which I know you're very familiar with our politics as well, Nigel Farage. The people who are having a really tough time economically, and yet they're turning to these very rich men who are just getting richer and richer. What do you think is going on with that disconnect with sort of working class people looking to these kind of millionaire men to save them?
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.
So how do things change if he is very good at feasting on the dissatisfaction and the anger that people have? That's not going away. He's very good at controlling the media and the narrative. How are things going to change?
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.
