Look at me, too. I'm a normal guy. I can't believe I thought I was a loony tune. I'm in the bell curve of normal male nuttiness.
Hi everyone, this is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher. Scott is off today and I'm joined by the man who may or may not be running for president. It's Anthony Scaramucci, the Mooch, lawyer, podcaster, and founder of SkyBridge Capital. Hello, Anthony. How are you doing?
All right, I'll stipulate right here on this show. You're my running mate. We're going to go for it, Kara. You and me the day after April Fools.
I'm your running mate. Let's flip that. Strike that. Flip it.
Okay. You want to be the president? Okay, great. I'll be your running mate. Okay. I'll grow a beard like JD Vance. Okay.
Emphasis on the word beard. Okay. What are we talking about today?
All right, we're talking about Anthony. There is so much going on. I just don't even know. Explain to people. You put up a fake April Fool's thing about running for president. Correct. And what was
I thought it was fun. I mean, the reaction was sort of crazy actually, but I thought
I know. I thought it was real for a second. Like why not given the craziness of this world?
Well, I mean the truth of the matter is we could be doing better than we are doing right now. That's my honest opinion. But I've never felt that political calling. But my staff made up that Mooch 2028 hat.
And they said, "Let's put this out for April Fools." I said, "Okay." You know, I'm not going to play the jokes, you know.
Last year, I wrote that Elon Musk had given me a job at DOGE. A lot of people thought that was true, you know. I don't know. People, I mean,
I don't engage in April Fools. It's odd. I get tricked by them a lot. But I like it. I appreciated it. I believed it for a second, honestly. I was like, "What?" And I sent it to the staff. I was like, "Is he running?" I mean, again, you never know.
Let me stipulate. I'm not running. I'm running for reelection in my marriage and my wife knows.
The polling is going... I could be term-limited. That's the one problem with my marriage. I'm worried about that.
That's true. Your wife is
running for reelection in my marriage. My wife has a political platform of castration. So, I will not be running for president. But anyway, it was a good April Fool's joke.
Okay, Anthony, let's get to the news. Donald Trump says the war in Iran is nearing completion, but the US will hit Iran extremely hard over the next two to three weeks, bombing the country back to the stone ages, which is just a lovely term. A 19-minute address to the nation on Wednesday night, Trump tried to justify the war, but didn't offer anything new. It was rambling. It was problematic. I think he lied a lot. He also downplayed concerns about economic fallout, calling the spike in the gas price a short-term increase and saying the Strait of Hormuz would open up naturally after the war. He said the same thing about COVID, it would end naturally, which it really didn't. He didn't say anything about putting troops there or following through on threats to leave NATO. He talks about it but then doesn't do it. Talk about the speech because I thought it really was a big flat zero. It really was flat and nobody was paying attention to it in a weird way. Although the markets certainly were.
Yeah. Well, I mean, the speech is about power. Okay. So, CBS News, still in Trump's mind, the Tiffany Network, said, "Hey, no problem. Our reality show that's been on the air for 25 years, Survivor, we're going to interrupt the programming to bring you this speech." So, it's not just going to be a cable news speech. It'll be a network speech. Trump's like, "Hey, definitely doing that." And so, that shows you a little bit of the corruption of the media. I think he has decapitated... The reason why your show is doing so well is that he's decapitated corporate media. He's got them chilled. He's got their lawyers triple-checking everything they say. And so Trump's looking at saying, "Hey, I'm going to get attention and people on me. I'm going with the speech, even if it's a speech about nothing." But to your point, the market said, "Oh, whoa. We're likely going to have ground troops in there. We're likely going to have a really tough time," and as a result of which it was full risk-off after the speech. So, and you know, and people are saying to me, they always say, "Oh, Trump cares about the market. Trump cares about the market." Trump doesn't care about the market. Trump cares about manipulating the market. Trump cares about making money from the market for himself and the people around him. He doesn't care about your portfolio or your market. He doesn't even care about the polls anymore because he's not running for reelection. And so guys, get off of those notions of first-term Trump caring about the market and the poll numbers. He has worse poll numbers than Jimmy Carter did at the peak of the oil crisis in 1978, 1979. Those poll numbers are terrible. He doesn't care.
Doesn't care. So what was the reason for the speech? What is he doing? Why is he making such efforts if he doesn't care?
The reason for the speech and as an American
A weak speech. I think we'd agree.
Yeah. But there was something he said in the speech that people should be listening to. And as an American citizen that's still exercising my First Amendment right, I denounce it as an American citizen. He said he's going to bomb Iran into the stone age.
Okay. That was the reason for the speech. And let me explain why that was important. That was important because I'm putting the ground troops in. I have a 12-year-old's mentality. And when I'm moving stuff into the region, guess what, guys? I'm not using that as a leverage point. I'm using the stuff. So, the 82nd Airborne is going in there. So are the Marines.
And but by the way, you know, General Kaine told me that that booby trap... Qeshm Island, and they've got all these little Vietnam-like guerrilla things they're going to do to our troops, and our troops are really set up for Cold War army-to-army battle. So, I've got to spend the next three weeks blasting the living daylights out of Iran before I can get the troops in position. So, I'm going to give you the speech and it's going to be, I'm going to bomb them back to the stone age speech. So, this is going to be the speech when historians look at the wreckage of Donald Trump. They're going to say, "What were you guys doing when you let somebody that inhumane into the White House?" And so, in preparation for this, I prepared something for you. Can I just go over this very quickly?
So, it is not enough for MAGA the following. We're going to release the Epstein files. Oh, wait a minute. Trump's in the Epstein files. We're not going to release the Epstein files. We're going to bomb people to distract from them. We're going to bomb a school in Iran with young kids in it, mostly women. We're going to create Alligator Alcatraz, which is this disgusting penitentiary for immigrants in Florida that has sewage backup. And we're going to laugh about it while we're down there. We're going to murder people in Minneapolis. We're going to kidnap children and not even know where we're sending them. We're going to manipulate the markets. Kara, we're going to take bribes, particularly a big $400 million jet. And I'm going to keep the jet after I leave. I'm going to excoriate our allies that have been our friends for over a century. And I'm going to threaten to attack a NATO country, Greenland. I'm going to shit all over Canada. And then I'm going to come after your First, Fourth, Fifth, and 14th Amendment rights in the Constitution. And oh, by the way, every price in America is going to go up as a result of my tariffs. And I'm going to lower corporate taxes, big beautiful spending bill. And so if you're making a million dollars or more, you're going to get a $7,000 benefit. And if you're making $50,000 or less, I'm taking $500 of benefits away from you, and this is what I'm going to do, and you're going to shut up and you're going to like it. MAGA, you're still going to support me, 34%. But let me tell you what's going to kill them. It's the gas prices. So, it turns out that the red line for MAGA, Kara Swisher, are the gas prices because they don't want to go into the 250th birthday of America grilling hot dogs at $8 a gallon in gas. And so, his approval ratings are going into the gutter. But everything I just read, including the gutting of the Department of Justice, and we could name 50 other things, hollowing out USAID, was acceptable to these
scientists, attacking lawyers, attacking media.
No, no NIH grants anymore. We're not going to do any cancer research in the country.
But you said he doesn't care. Like you just said, like doesn't care.
So why do it besides self-promotion, self-aggrandizement, self-interest?
He's doing it because he likes putting people in pain. He's doing it because he's a miserable SOB and he's doing it because anybody in his path gets destroyed. You know, some people say nihilist, other people say nihilist, but that is him. He's attacking Macron this morning.
Macron is in his field of vision today. Then he'll attack another person. Yesterday afternoon, he said, you know, JD Vance is out there negotiating this thing. If it works, I'll take all the credit. If it doesn't, I'll give him all the blame. That is Donald Trump. I have
So, can I ask you, is it cognitive issues? I mean, you spent... it seems like that speech last night looked, I hate to say it, looked like my mom on a bad day at the nursing home.
Oh, okay. So, I'm the contrarian on this because I've known the son of a bitch for 20 years. It's slight cognitive issues, but he's not in full-on dementia. He's an 80-year-old guy that's a little bit forgetful. He's stooping a little bit. He's lost some posture. Maybe his spine is a little bit weakened through old age. A whole bunch of inflammation. Speaking of inflammation.
His ankles are swollen, but he has not lost it. And whether people like it or not, he has a lot of energy for an 80-year-old. He's moving himself around. Okay? And so, but what it is, what it is, is hatred of self and projection of that hatred onto others. And you got to see it for what it actually is. Okay. The other thing is, let's say that I'm not saying anybody's an agent of Putin, but let's say I was an agent of Putin. Okay, let's just say hypothetically I happen to be an agent of Putin and I happen to... oh, I happen to be the president of the United States. So, let me do the following. Let me go after the NATO allies. Let me threaten to pull out of NATO. Let me pull aid and material from Ukraine, excoriate the Ukrainian president. Let me... oh, here's a good idea. Let me attack Iran and then as a result of attacking Iran, I'm going to lift the sanctions on Russian oil and I'm going to lift the sanctions on their ally Iran's oil. So now the Russians are going to make billions and billions of dollars off of this which will help my buddy Vlad. And I don't know, you tell me.
I don't know what he's doing. I felt like he was slightly cognizant, but you know, he is having a rough week in courts because courts are pushing back on him everywhere you look. It was like 10 of them yesterday. Let's go through some of his losses. A federal judge temporarily halted construction on his beloved White House ballroom, saying it needs Congress's authorization, and Congress doesn't seem to be moving on it. Trump's executive order cutting funding to NPR and PBS was struck down, a judge ruling it violated the First Amendment. Another judge ruled that a civil suit against Trump for his actions on January 6 can go forward and that presidential immunity does not apply to his speech that day, talking to supporters before they marched the Capitol. And one more, a judge in Texas blocked a Trump-backed deal allowing churches to endorse political candidates. Trump also was at the Supreme Court on Wednesday very briefly listening to arguments on whether his executive order to limit birthright citizenship is constitutional. The justices seemed skeptical, and that's being kind. His latest order restricting mail-in voting ahead of the 2026 election is already facing legal challenges and he's going to lose. He's going to lose badly on that one. So, pick a case, any case. I mean, this is what he does. He transgresses with illegal actions and then everyone's picking up the pieces and pushing back legally and he does damage in the wake. What is he going to lose on every one of these things? It seems like any... does it matter or what?
The only one he cares about is the ballroom from what I can tell.
Well, see, I actually think there's a bigger thing going on here because remember Trump to a group of right-wing intellectuals is an empty vessel. Okay, so they bought call options on him on January 7, 2021. Low point for Trump right after the insurrection. Everyone said he was politically dead. And so these right-wing lunatics that couldn't get the time of day of a Mitt Romney or a George W. Bush, they said, "Let's team up with Donald Trump. He's probably going to come back. He still has lots of MAGA popularity. And if he comes back, we can take all of this intellectual nonsense that we believe and we can run the card table with Trump." So let's talk about one of the cases, which is the argument against birthright citizenship. So remember, everybody's looking at the case like, "Oh, he's trying to repeal the 14th Amendment. Blah blah blah. He's going to lose the case. Ho haha." I don't see it that way. This is a maximalist position. Okay? This is a group of people to Trump's right, these intellectual imbeciles that want to expand Article 2 executive power and they are pushing for a maximalist position. Okay? So every fight whether it's win or lose expands the boundaries of what future presidents will try. Kara, and I think this is the point that people need to
even if he loses, like even if he loses, you just put on the table that everything in this Constitution is negotiable. You see what I just did? I went to the court to intimidate them for my base. Didn't work. My base hates black and brown people and they hate anchor babies and I'm sending my base a message that I'm fighting for them. Okay, but imbecile, let me just point out something. If you... let's say they ruled with you, you would create a situation that is ridiculous. Okay. And what is that situation? You would have children born in the country that actually have no citizen rights anywhere because a lot of the parents... the justices pointed that out. Okay, so that you would have... they wouldn't be able to work legally in the country, they wouldn't be entitled to schooling. This is a constitutional...
Why do the maximalist thing when the minimalist thing is how they get things? That's how they got to abortion. They slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly ate at it. This is going to never be brought up again for 20 years, 50 years.
Kara, I got three years to push and shove you guys. Okay. Now, if I can only get control of the elections, what I can then do is install another right-winger to further weaken everything in the Constitution. You know, Peter Thiel, he says, "I don't like the Constitution. The Constitution's very, very messy. I don't like these people that I don't agree with. I want the things to go my way or the highway. And so I need the orange wrecking ball. I've got three years left. I got to smash into that Constitution as hard as possible." And by the way, good news for me. I've already weakened the Constitution in the eyes of 30, 40, 50% of the people. So I got to keep going on this and see this.
I see. So, they're going to just keep trying to smash until they can't.
Until they can't, even if they don't win.
But I have a question for you if you don't mind. Are we living, you and me? Are we living in a rogue state?
Meaning... Okay. Well, let's go over what a rogue state is. Where...
I know, but who's the rogue? Him or us?
Well, I have to say that our government is the rogue. Yes. You know, our government is the rogue.
Parts of it. Parts of it. Are we living in a rogue state?
We're living in an executive that wants to take more power than ever, which is something that happens in Silicon Valley. It happens in... which you're trying to apply their Silicon Valley... you spoke of Thiel and the others, Silicon Valley management style to the government which has been growing for decades and decades and decades. That's not a new fresh thing. And some used to accuse Franklin Delano Roosevelt of a similar thing if you were... you know, I was not alive then, but if you read history. So I think there's always been this push for unitary executive power, it just tends to get pushed back every single time.
Let me ask a different question then. If a smaller nation was indiscriminately striking another nation in direct violation of law and was applying this type of violent behavior, would the Americans, the old-school American governments be designating that country a rogue state?
Yes. Yes, I would think so. But I think it's a rogue group of people within the state because what I've been struck by is how enduring some of it is, right? You're seeing pushback everywhere. And I know it's... I think one of the things that I think about a lot is it's very easy when you run for office, you can be, and I don't like to use this phrase as much, but a bomb-thrower, right? You can make trouble everywhere. And when you're governing, you change as a governor, right? To govern things. And you aren't a bomb-thrower. So, this is a government that just never governs. It bomb-throws and breaks and doesn't fix. Just like, I mean, the White House ballroom is a perfect... like it's a construction pit. They just destroy. And I don't even know if that ballroom's ever going to get made. It's a kind of a physical manifestation of the mentality of just destroy. And once we've destroyed, we've won the fight already because now the rest of us have to pick it up. But I am struck by the power of the pushback actually at the same time.
Well, there's symbolism in destroying that by the way. You know, I'm here as a wrecker of everything. And this is the thing that the Americans have to answer. The American people have to answer for the following. You got a system that got put in place, tremendous checks and balances, tremendous processes. You had statesmen and women abide to the system, even Richard Nixon. And the system made you the most prosperous country and arguably one of the most, if not the most powerful country in the world and you've now decided that you want to wreck that system. And so, and I understand it because you and I grew up with these people, so I understand it. You want to wreck the system because you think the system is unfair to you. There's a few fat cats getting super rich and you're in a full-on affordability crisis for yourself and you've gone from economically aspirational to desperate. So Trump is your avatar for anger. System's not working for you. Blow up the system.
Okay. So but that's going to be very bad for people. The people that want to blow up the system, it's going to really hurt them.
Yes, it will be. I mean, when I... I know it sounds crazy, but when I was in college, two guys ran for the student body presidency, right? And they had a whole... they basically had a nihilistic thing like we just want to party, we want to spend all the money on ourselves. And they won, right? They won. People were kind of sick of the, you know, the student body president types who wanted to do good government. And there is a moment where I think voters do like chaos, right? But at some point they don't. They absolutely do not. And I think it does... I think we'll be picking up from this guy for decades. And I think it's not a good thing, but it isn't necessarily a bad thing to have to be battered, right, for a second, just to see what holds and what needs to be fixed. And it does allow us to reflect on who we are and what we want to be. I mean, it is... it's kind of interesting that we're in this 250... this quarter, you know, the 250 years and it says, okay, what doesn't work? What does work? What do we need to think about? And it does knock everyone into a sense of what matters to them. And I don't think... I think it's a painful way to learn something, but I think it's a way to learn things. I do.
All right. So, this is a big question. Okay. And I follow you and I love your podcast and I read your writings. So, I'm going to stipulate something. I'm going to ask a very big question. All right. So I believe that this is a very young country and we don't have the cultural mores of Italy, France, Germany, you pick the country. Okay? Not saying it's a bad thing, but I'm just trying to explain to you what happens in our country is we go into the shit every 80 or so years. Yep, we do. Okay. So 1776 into the shit, Civil War. We've lost all the institutional memory because 80 years is enough where the generation dies off. And then we go 80 years out from the Civil War. We're in the Great Depression. We go into the shit again. We have to pull ourselves out of it. And then we build the post-World War II society along with our allies. And we have this moment of great peace, generally great peace and prosperity. But we're 80 years out again, Kara. And so now we're going into the shit again, which...
