Hi there, everyone. We have something very special for you this week. I recently sat down with Renaissance Man, podcaster, financier, former Trump White House communications director, and former Trump advisor turned critic, Anthony Scaramucci. Like the rest of us, he's obsessed with the big questions surrounding the future of our democracy. Things like, how the heck did we get here? And how do we get out of this crisis? To help answer those questions, he wrote a book. Its title is "All the Wrong Moves: How Three Catastrophic Decisions and Years of Shitshow Politics Led to Trump and How We Find a Way Out." We spoke in front of a live audience at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. It's part of a new series called 9 to NY on MS Now, where we join forces with one of our country's greatest cultural institutions to bring you conversations with some of the country's leading thinkers. So this is the best people, and this is Anthony Scaramucci.
Let me ask you about corruption, and then we'll turn to the book. It seems to be that there are folks like myself who've been skeptical of Trump from go. But there were a lot of people that wanted what he was selling: radical change and economic revival. He's the swampiest, most corrupt politician this country's ever seen, and the economy for the vast majority of Americans is a daily struggle between the price of gas, the price of groceries, cost of housing, access to healthcare, on and on and on. What is the limit in terms of what he will steal, what he will grift, what he will profit from, and what he will sell, in our name as Americans, to adversaries?
I don't necessarily think there's a limit. I think there is a melting ice cube of support, though. If you look at the numbers, I was watching your show yesterday that you were reporting a 27% approval rating on the economy, overall approval rating of 32%. And so the ice cube is melting. If you look at his podcast posse, they have broken from him, whether it's Tucker Carlson — you named the podcaster — Joe Rogan, they're talking about pyramids now. Joe Rogan, Theo Vaughn, they're all running for the woods because they can't believe everything that he's done. The banner for the Democrats should be, and I'm surprised they're not consolidating on this, is promises made, promises unkept. And you can go through a whole list of things that he's done in the second term, which is the exact opposite of what he was campaigning on.
But I think there's a bigger issue, and it's something I tried to address in the book, Nicole, because when I travel and speak or do podcasting, people invariably come up to me and say, "What happened? How did we get so tribal? How do we get so partisan?" And it took me a while. I did a year's worth of research on the book, analytical data, historical analysis of other times in American history, a political analysis. And I tried to write a book that is actually nonpartisan. It's addressing three big catastrophic decisions that were made by Republican administrations, Democratic administrations. I'm not really taking a stab at anybody. If you actually read the book, it is just an overview of what happened. So somebody could say, we're in 2026. Things were going reasonably well at the end of the '90s. We were printing a $240 billion budget surplus. We were talking about a peace dividend. This was pre-9/11. How do we go from that spirit of optimism in the United States to where we are today? And I think you can trace it through these decisions that were made.
And again, guys, I'm submitting to everybody in this room. These are well-intended people, very, very smart people, and they're predicting outcomes and they're making decisions based on expected and predicted outcomes. And guess what happens? It goes completely against them. You know, President Clinton, I write about him in the book. He's trying to integrate China into the global economy. He's going to make them a permanent member of the WTO, and I write about how I got that wrong. There I was as a 35-year-old smug Wall Streeter, thinking that the protests that were led by Ralph Nader and the union leaders up in Seattle in November of 1999 were misguided. Here we are, we're going to open up this market, 1.3 billion consumers, any manufacturing or labor will shift into the service economy, and these people will get sort of white-collarish pay. This is going to be a halcyon era for the global society. And of course I was fueled by what we were doing. The deficit was ending. Francis Fukuyama had said 10 years prior was the end of history. We think about things a certain way and they go against us.
And then we get to the Bush years, that's the second big one. People may or may not remember Lawrence Wright's book, The Looming Tower, but if you wanna go back and read it, what Lawrence Wright said in The Looming Tower is that Osama bin Laden frankly understood us way more than we understood him. Same thing's going on with the Iranians right now. They study us. We don't study them. We lack curiosity about their 5,000-year empire. But they study us. And bin Laden said, guys, get your air bases out of the Saudi sacred land near Mecca and Medina. And Cheney told them to scram. And so on February 26, 1993, we hit the World Trade Center. Everybody remember that? People died in that tragedy. It just wasn't the big one. In 1998, he hit the two embassies in Africa. Nicole will remember that. Okay, people died in that. In the year 2000, they attacked the USS Cole. Do people remember that? We killed our Navy servicemen in the USS Cole. And bin Laden said, "I'm coming for their homeland. I'm going to hit them super hard, and they're going to wildly overreact. They're going to come into my neighborhood. They're going to spill their blood. They're going to spend their treasure. They're going to take away their own prized civil liberties." The Patriot Act was passed six weeks after 9/11, everybody remember? And so what did we do? We played right into bin Laden's hands. Two wars. I love President Bush. He knows I love him, and she worked for him, and I know she loves him. You can be a good person and a well-intended person and an American patriot and make mistakes. Two wars, two tax cuts, $8 trillion of deficit spending. And that's not me. That's the Brown University cost of war study. And we blow a hole in our ability to sustain ourselves. We end pay-as-you-go. Bush and Cheney say — people say, should the American people sacrifice? We're going to war. They say, go to the shopping mall. You remember this. But remember, this is all about expectation of outcome. Everybody thought this was a couple of weeks, perhaps a few months. Nobody thought it was going to go two decades. Two decades, two wars, $8 trillion.
And now let me tie those two catastrophic decisions together. You're killing the middle and lower middle income people by having China take over our manufacturing and outshoring everything. Now you're going to kill them with inflation. Because our government, our public servants, they want to provide you the services, but they don't want you to pay for it. But you know you're paying for it, right? Because you know this is unfunded deficit. Deficit spending is unfunded tax liability. And so you're gonna pay it. And so we end up paying it with the most pernicious and the most regressive form of taxation. And what is that? That is inflation. And who does inflation kill the most? It'd be the family that I grew up in, because my dad was a wage earner, didn't have a lot of assets, and now you're eating his ability to spend. And we're killing these people, and then we finish them off with the third catastrophic mistake.
The third one is we have good intentions, ladies and gentlemen. The Clinton administration is trying to expand the American dream, and they want more home ownership in the country. And so they're telling the banks, it's OK, let's expand the American dream, and we're going to do subprime mortgages alongside of prime mortgages. And Bush loves this idea, so he takes it with him into his administration. And the home ownership percentage in the country is creeping up, but unfortunately, these people are very sensitive to the economy. And so when there's an economic shock, they can't pay their home mortgages, and they start defaulting on their mortgages, and the earthquake is happening in '07, and then the big kahuna hits in 2008, and now we gotta bail out the banks. And by the way, I write about this in the book, you have to bail out the banks. Okay, we had a panic in 1873, we had a panic in 1907, we improperly bail out the banks in 1929, we have to wait for FDR to bail them out in 1933 and create the FDIC, so you have to bail out the banks. I understand that, but the trillion dollars that was given to the banks went only to the banks. Had they had set this up where maybe $250 billion went to underclass people, middle class people, the distribution of the bailout would have been fairer. But it went to the banks, and banks do what banks do. They paid 5,000 people that year $1 million or more per person in bonuses. And, Nicole, that got people angry. And so you had the Occupy Wall Street movement. You had the Tea Party movement. And those two movements got together, had a baby. They named the baby MAGA. And then came Donald Trump as the godfather of MAGA. And that's my story. And I'm sticking to it. But go ahead, Nicole.
I mean, what all three crises do is they put so much distance between the politicians who enact the policies, the leaders, and their base, right? It alienates them. And I remember when I went, my first assignment after Trump wins in 2016 is to go out and interview Clinton, Clinton, Obama, Obama, Trump voters, if they're that age, or Clinton, Obama, Obama, Trump voters, or just Obama, Obama, Trump, or just Obama, Trump. So they were from young to old, and they were people that had voted for Democrats and then found themselves voting for Trump. So they were the people impacted, or their parents were impacted by these policies. And you look at what's happening in our politics right now, Trump seems to be trying to put distance between himself of the things he's doing and his base. Do you see, you know, the fourth crisis happening right now?
Yeah, this is a big one. I mean, this would be, you know, if the book sells and I'm writing another book about catastrophic decisions. This is a very big one. The return of Donald Trump is a little shocking to me because he gave you a 925-page document called Project 2025, and he said, "This is what I'm going to do. I am gonna gut your Constitution. I am gonna flex on the judiciary, flex on the legislative branch. I'm gonna try to silence the press." And he gave you the document. And then in July of 2024, when people were looking at the document, Trump said what Trump says, he lied. "I don't know anybody in this document." Excuse me, J.D. Vance wrote the foreword of the document. "I don't know who, I barely met these people." You remember that?
But he then got the job, and he went one executive order, you could follow the document, just turn the pages. He was going right down the document, and he was trying to do what Steve Bannon once said, which is shock and awe the people.
People used to ask me, people don't ask me this anymore, but when they used to ask me what happened to the Republican Party, I had a sort of a version of your theory of the case here, which was the base of the Republican Party saw Republican politicians like Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney talking up trade policies that did not benefit them or their families or their dads or their opportunities or their towns. They saw Republican politicians talking about wars going on and on that cost them the lives of their friends or their people they grew up with. And there didn't seem to be a plan to either win or end those wars. And Donald Trump comes along and says, "No more wars ever. I'm gonna fix your economy." Not sure that he told them exactly how.
Balanced the budget in four years.
And left the — 'cause people would say, "How did Trump hijack the Republican Party?" He didn't hijack the Republican Party. The leaders were so detached from the lives of the base of the Republican Party that Trump went right in and they chose him instead. How do you make sure that our politics doesn't leave so many Americans sort of out in the cold so that someone like Trump can't come in again and do so much harm to the things you're talking about, the Constitution, the democracy, the free press?
Okay, so it's a great question, and I just wanna put it back to you for a second. Is there a Democrat that you think is running for president that could take that mantle of leadership? And just to remind people, we did have an America First movement in the 1930s. It was led by Charles Lindbergh and Father Coughlin and Huey Long, and we actually had a Nazi party rally, so hard to believe, but we had one in Madison Square Garden. But Franklin Roosevelt was a very adept politician and he put down that movement, okay, and thank God Roosevelt was a very talented, charismatic guy, but he was on the side of the angels, he was on the side of us. And so I guess what I'm asking you, is there a Democratic prospect out there? Because we know one person can do existential damage to the society. We have this evidence. But we also know that a really good person could do positive things for the society. Is there one of them, two of them, three of them that you look at? You say if they got the position, they could really handle it?
I mean, if Alyssa Slotkin or Jon Ossoff became president, I would vote for them to have him for 20 years to fix it. I mean, yeah, or Raphael Warnock. I mean, there are a lot — What about Josh Shapiro? I feel the same way about him. Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of Democrats that I feel like are deeply in touch with what's happening in the actual lived lives of their constituents. Josh Shapiro right now is trying to protect the Commonwealth from measles. There are more people dying of measles in Pennsylvania than the government. I mean, all of them are on the front lines of these fights. And my theory of politics is that you are always one leader away from something totally different, either catastrophic in the case of Trump twice, or transformative in the case of, I think President Obama came and turned a lot of things around for a lot of people, and I think President Biden tried to as well. But I, I mean, the dynamic that you describe is about leadership that leaves behind large chunks of the country. And I wonder, having written a whole book about the crises, what your warnings are moving forward for leaders to not do that again.
So it's such a great question, but remember, why did they leave the people behind? They had confidence that we had won. They had confidence that that decision on WTO was gonna raise wages, not lower them. They had confidence that that war was gonna go by quickly and we were gonna democratize parts of the Middle East. Remember, freedom reigns. Remember when they had the election in Iraq? They had confidence. They had confidence that the bank bailout was gonna heal the country, not create the anger. And so the first thing I would say, we have to be cautious and be humble about our decision making. I've certainly, by the way, if this was a book about my own mistakes, it'd be a phone book, okay? I didn't want to write about that. I've made my own mistakes and I've got a lot of things wrong in my life, and so I would say that would be the first thing, is that we have to be cautious on our decision making. I think the second thing is learn from what we did. We detached ourselves to your point, and so you gotta get in the field and you've got to bring those people back. One of the things that Democrats do, which I would suggest that they don't do, is write off 80 million people that voted for Donald Trump. Because when I talk to certain Democrats that are pretty far to the left, they're like, well, those are racist. Those are undesirables. Somebody once called them deplorables. Guys, don't do that. You've got to get those people back into the social contract. Go talk to those people. Senator Ossoff understands that, by the way. So does Governor Shapiro. You know, I was fortunate enough to do the Bill Maher show with Josh and my old boss Lloyd Blankfein last March, and we had a chance to hang out in the green room together, and he gave one hell of an interview with Bill Maher on that show. And Josh is a can-do person. He reminds me a lot of Mayor Bloomberg. He has the same skill set. And you can feel, ladies and gentlemen, you know this. You can feel when somebody loves people and when somebody's self-dealing. You can feel when somebody wants to serve the public and make the quality of life of the people around them better, and who wants to serve themselves, and who wants to take care of themselves.
This gets to the asymmetry, though, that I think is a decade-long source of despair for the pro-democracy side. That yes, on the Democratic side, you have to be all those things and be able to stand on one foot and speak in 47 languages and stay up all night and be a policy wonk and never have a catastrophic crisis. On the Republican side, you can be a felon.
Well, you know — What do you do about the asymmetry? What did he do?
It's probably a cliché, but what Katy Tur, my podcast host, says is that the Democrats fall in love and the Republicans fall in line. So if they're going to support a felon, they'll all lock up and support a felon. I mean, I mean, there are some big weasels in the Republican Party, but my number one weasel is Ted Cruz. Let me just give the reason this guy. I mean, this guy — this guy, we do a top three because I think J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio want him to like hold their beer. Okay. Okay, but but you know, I see Marco more as a weathervane. I see I see — Oh, but this is my favorite. What is more dangerous, like a shapeshifter? You gotta be very careful.
But what's more dangerous, the people that know better or the people that are actual weasels?
These guys are all nuts. They all want power more than they wanna serve the people, but in Cruz's case, he's calling Trump a sniveling coward. And they're in a fight and then he consolidates and he kowtows to Donald Trump in a way that has disgraced him for many generations of Cruz's.
I agree with you. J.D. Vance, I mean, he's gonna change his name four more times before he ascends to the presidency. So, I don't know what he's gonna be.
Trump was Hitler, now he's Jesus with the flowing robes. I mean, guys, you gotta understand Trump because people don't understand this. He does think about this stuff. He's lighting up the Pope on Orthodox Easter, and then he's sending out AI images of himself as Jesus. And you're saying, "What the hell is he doing?" That was to take out Vance. You got to understand what Trump is doing. Vance has converted to Catholicism, and he's writing a book that's coming out in June called Communion, about his retracement intellectually into Catholicism. And Trump wants him to kowtow to him. And he's literally messaging to Vance, hey, bitch, I'm your pope. That's the message. And Vance plays to it. And what does Vance say? You know, the Pope, Pope Leo should really, when he's talking about Catholic theology, he should really be careful. Everybody hear that? But that's what Vance did. And he played right into Trump. The best part of that story, because she's a comms director. I only played one for 11 days, but she's really a comms director. And so they went to Trump after the Jesus thing with the flowing robes. And they said, Mr. President, just say that the picture was doctored. And so Trump, his brain's addled. He says, "I was a doctor in the picture." They were trying to tell him that the picture was doctored.
It's my favorite part of the story. I heard you say that on "Nove."
No, but I know that. I know that from one of the comms people.
I love it.
This is a really smart book about our history and about our future. And every Democrat I know has read it or will read it. No Republicans will. And I wonder how you solve for in the electorate and in what we do in our communities and in our communications, I won't call it a double standard 'cause the standard is a standard, but you can only avoid crises and catastrophes if you elect leaders who care and who learn from their history and who read the books about what's gone wrong in the past. How do you fix our politics so that both sides hunger for something more sensible?
Okay, so a couple of fixes. Okay, number one, everybody here knows this, but it's worth repeating. We have 40% of the electorate now that is independent. So that means they've left both parties and they're giving a bad Yelp rating to both parties. If you open the primaries and you allow those people to vote in one of the two parties, you'll liquidate the extremes in those parties and you'll get more consensus-oriented people because these campaigns, you know this, I know this, these campaigns are marketing competitions. And so that would be step one. Step two, and this I really believe this, we have to end Citizens United. This amount of money that has flowed into the system. And I can give you all the details on this, but the big headline is, since Scalia rendered that decision, and even if you're a conservative in this room and you think that the decision is appropriate and originalist and pursuant to the First Amendment, it's bad for the democracy. Okay, and so then we would need a constitutional amendment or law to override the Supreme Court decision, but we're 9 to 1, ladies and gentlemen, on donations to policy initiatives, campaigns, candidates, political action committees. 9 to 1 in 16 years. And what happened, and Nicole can tell you this, the legislative agenda is big food, big pharma, tax cuts for the wealthy. We can have our chicken chlorinated because they're paying for that. We can have glyphosate or fertilizer left in our children's cereal. I mean, what the hell are we doing, guys? Come on. That's not serving the interest of the American people, but it is serving a certain moneyed interest. Guys, we spent a trillion dollars on the American military last year. We ran out of munitions in five months. Okay, so I'm telling you, you don't have to be an expert in the military to know that the circuit between the Pentagon into the lobbyist and the senator, back into the defense contractor, that mix, that trapezoid is not working, Nicole. And we have to rebuild it. Eisenhower said in January 1961, beware the military-industrial complex. Guys, the military-industrial complex is dysfunction, and we have to fix it, Nicole. So one of the things I was trying to do by writing the book is saying, okay, here's what happened. Here's how it happened. I tried to write it for my 90-year-old mother who didn't go to college. I mean, she's super smart, but didn't go to college. So it's accessible. And I tried to put some things in there that are nonpartisan, that are not left-leaning or right-leaning, but they're like, hey, what's right or wrong for the country, not left or right? These are things that we need to do as a country. And if we think like entrepreneurs — and there's many entrepreneurs in this room — let's go zero to one on these ideas. There's a hundred million people in this country, they vote the same way in every single election. It's the most powerful voting block in the country. Nicole, it's the non-voter. A hundred million people are eligible to vote. 45% of them are not even registered. Okay, what about a clever entrepreneurial politician that goes after those people?
What about vote by phone?
Well, they'll never allow that.
The great duopoly where Chuck Grassley, who's like, I guess, George Washington's great grandfather. I mean, you better be nice to the world because you're leaving the world to Chuck Grassley. Okay, he's not going anywhere. And he's gonna be in the Senate in 2570, okay? But those are the people. They have created this sclerosis at the top. I write in the book they got scared. They got the life scared out of them in 1992 when Ross Perot got 19 and a half percent of the vote. I said, okay, let's lock this down. Very tight cartel at the top, very tight duopoly. I'll let you gerrymander, you let me gerrymander. Let's put all these procedural guardrails up to prevent a third party. Trump tries to run in 2000 as a Reform Party candidate. He looks at it, he says, no possible way. Bobby, Bobby Kennedy Jr. tries to run in '24 as a third party candidate, says no possible way. They've got the thing on lock now. And steal from Donald Trump. What did Donald Trump do? He couldn't create a third party, so he hijacked one of the traditional parties, decapitated it, created an MNA, and installed MAGA. That's actually a third party sitting on top of the former Republican Party. So we need an entrepreneurial politician to go after those people and bring them into the swimming pool. The vote by phone, they'll never allow that because that knocks them out of power. They don't wanna get out of power, they wanna trade their stock accounts, they wanna go on the junkets, they don't wanna leave.
I mean, I interviewed Pete Buttigieg yesterday and he believes that the reform agenda, I mean, you hear more and more Democrats talking about the need for massive structural political reforms before anyone talks about returning to norms. It's been 10 years of abnormal politics. Are you — So he's one of the brightest guys that they have.
But this is — can I just say, I don't know if anybody read 107 Days, but this is one of the brightest people that they have in the party. He's one of the most articulate. He's a full-on policy wonk. And he goes into enemy territory, guys. He's in Fox News, and he's eviscerating Fox News anchors. I mean, he's moving, right?
