Is Stephen Miller Running the White House? | Pivot

Kara, you know, you grew up like I did. You know, you're Italian. You don't give a [ __ ]. Okay. You know, I don't give a [ __ ]. I'm ready to fight. Yeah. You know, because I grew up here on Long Island. We were doing push-ups in the parking lot outside of discos getting ready to fight people. Okay. I don't give a [ __ ]. I will fight Trump every step of the way.

Kara, it's good to be here. Thanks for having me. And I saw Scott last week in Davos. I enjoyed his commentary and, well, I enjoy your commentary.

I'm sitting up straight. You yelled at me before we started to sit up straight.

Well, I think it's important to understand what they were trying to do and how it backfired and we'll talk about the business people. So what they were trying to do, because I know these sons of [ __ ], is they were trying to set up a great media exposition for themselves in the culture war. And so here the narrative: Minnesota, blue state, blue state is bad, corruption in the blue state is conjoined. This is that conspiracy nonsense.

it is the greatest issue our nation faces. The group of people who committed fraud. You should just look at the White House on any given day. But go ahead. I understand the pushback and we can talk about the Democrats, how they should be responding better to it, but I want you to understand what they're doing. So, they're sitting there saying, 'Okay, this is great. We're going to send the ICE people up there. They're going to rough these people up, and this is going to be great for our culture war. We're going to send a signal to our red-meat-eating, law-abiding people that we're getting tough on people, particularly in the blue states where they're doing quote-unquote all the fraud.' Now they send inexperienced ICE agents up there and we saw the videos and Trump saw the videos, which is why he's panicked, and they murdered the guy. I mean, that's basically what happened and now the whole thing has blown back on them and so this media imagery that they were looking for has been a negative media imagery. The problem

Yeah. They wanted a Fox News day of programming where the day set from the A block for 12 hours. Look at the Trump administration, how tough-ass they are in action and we're defending the Republic against fraud and we're mean and we're tough and we're taking 5-year-olds because that's what we're supposed to be doing. And they're tone-deaf to the overall optics. And then they created a Kent State-like moment. For the older listeners, the younger listeners, National Guardsmen shot a student at Kent State and it flipped the entire political landscape at that time. And so what's happening here is the landscape is starting to flip. But concomitant to this is the chilling effect that Donald Trump and his Department of Justice and his jackbooted people have on business leaders. So, hear me out for a second. If you're on a corporate board and you have a public CEO, you're telling the guy or the woman, 'Chill out, take a back seat. There's 1,000 days left for Trump.' If you're the managing partner of a law firm, negotiate with him. If you're a president of a university, negotiate with him. He's not quote-unquote Adolf Hitler. He's a lame-duck president. And while he's flexing on you, take it. Don't overly criticize him because he could do damage to our long-term brand and damage to our long-term stock market performance. Okay? And that's short-term. But that's up against the stuff that you just said about your brand is fascism. Okay. So, the mistake that they're all making is you have to reject Donald Trump. If you don't flex on Donald Trump and reject Donald Trump, you'll be at a disadvantage. He'll continue to roll you. European leaders, wake up. Business leaders, wake up. Somebody pick up the phone and call Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, and get some executive coaching, some leadership coaching from him because he gets it. Okay? You know, Newsom is close, by the way. Newsom would be number two in terms of getting it. You have to shove and push Trump back if you're going to get any respect from Donald Trump.

Let me just say, I talked to them behind the scenes, including people that are close to Trump. Let me just say, like, couldn't... so close they wouldn't... they could be on the other side of him. They abhor him. It really at one point was with two people I ran into on a plane and they spent 20 minutes trying to tell me, you know, 'We really can't stand him.' And I go, 'You need to shut the [ __ ] up if you're not going to say it publicly because I don't... you're not going to win my love because what you're doing is so complicit.' And so talk a little bit about that because you're at Davos. They obviously... do they still shrug and say... because initially it was sort of the shruggies with business, 'We'll have to deal with it and then he'll be gone, like this will... this too will pass.' Has that... did that change at all? Because the Europeans got no... Scott, tell me why.

Because he's willing to do things that other politicians were not willing to do. He's willing to fudge the Constitution. He's willing to overstep. He's willing to detain you at the airport. He's willing to put a sanction against your business. He's willing to do things that are outside of the realm of due process. Right? So, you have to remember, to be in a safe and free society, you have to be subordinate to a set of laws and you have to have due process. Did the young man that was murdered this past weekend have due process? No, he did not. They made a decision to murder him indiscriminately. Okay, that's authoritarianism. When leaders are turning guns on their citizens, they care more about power than they do their citizens, right? And so these corporate leaders are making a very big mistake. They're kowtowing to Trump because they feel he's got all the power and he's going to use the power in an unpredictable, indiscriminate way to hurt them. But if they were smarter, they would all team up. The Fortune 50 would team up like the 60 CEOs in Minnesota and say, 'Hey, listen. I'm sorry, guy. We're not going to take this anymore. We're going to flood the zone for Democratic donations. We're going to try to get rid of your regime.' And he's one man standing. You see, this is the problem.

They don't do that because they're operating in their own silos. Okay? And so when you operate in your own silo, Kara, you go to your board and say, 'What should I do?' And they say, 'Get out of the way.' Okay? But if you were operating...

duck. If the law firm Paul, Weiss called 50 other law firms and said, 'They're coming for me. They're eventually going to come for you. What do we do?' and they all teamed up. Now they've got a voice, then they can push back, right? If the Fortune 100 got together like the Minnesota CEOs, you see, he got frightened. I know this son of a [ __ ]. He's a baby. You know, most bullies are, okay? He looked at the video. He said, 'Holy [ __ ], we murdered the guy.' Which is why he told the Wall Street Journal last night he's reviewing everything. He called Governor Walz this morning and he put out a friendly Truth Social about Governor Walz because he knows he's in trouble. Okay, now he's got these CEOs. He's looking at that saying, 'Whoa, that's 3M. That's Target. These are big companies. If they're coming for me and I get wiped out in the midterms, okay, or they start to reject Republicanism, I just took a couple billion dollars for myself. I'm going to end up and my family's going to end up in wild investigations.' So, you see what he's doing? He's pulling back. That's Trump's nature. Okay.

The Melania, it's not on my list actually, but if you see it, you can report back to me.

It was like one old lady with Alzheimer's who wandered in like by accident is the group of people watching.

I want to tell you something from history that your viewers and listeners should think about. When Chamberlain headed for Munich to discuss with Adolf Hitler his annexation and what was going on there, the German bureaucrats, okay, we've discovered this in their diaries 50, 60, 80 years later. The German bureaucrats were with great relief. They were writing to each other and in their diaries, 'Oh, this is great. The British Empire is coming to Munich, represented by Neville Chamberlain, and they're going to flex on Adolf Hitler. It's going to scare the daylights out of him, and it's going to knock him out of power. Thank God, this last five years have been a disaster for Germany and he's going to get tough and knock Adolf Hitler on his ass.' Did that happen, Kara? No, it did not happen. He went there and he totally capitulated and he came back with a sheet of paper said 'peace in our time' and Churchill said this is ridiculous. You're allowing him this birth of authoritarianism. And five, six, seven, you know, three years later, two years later, you're at war. Five, six, seven years later, 60 million people are killed. I'm not comparing Trump to Hitler. I'm just talking about behavior, okay? If these CEOs and these business leaders and political leaders got together and said, 'F you, we're not going to take this anymore,' they'll scare Mike Johnson, they'll scare the Republicans in the Senate, they'll push back and they'll flip it, but they won't do it. As long as Trump is intimidating you one-on-one, Kara, he's going to beat you because he's got the force of the presidency and the federal government.

Who's he suing? Whom's he suing?

Well, let's just talk about this for a second. He said three or four things that Trump did not like. Okay. Number one, he wants the Fed to be independent. He doesn't like the lawsuit and the criminal investigation against Jerome Powell. Number two, he said, 'I'm not giving money to the ballroom because if I give money to the ballroom, the next administration is going to say, hey, jackass, you were trying to blackmail... you were getting blackmailed and you were paying bribe money to the president.' So he's a pretty open, pretty honest guy. Full disclosure, I know Jamie personally. I love Jamie. I think he's one of the more brilliant financial services executives in our history. So, pretty honest. And then what does Trump do? You can't bring the hammer down on him. He's going to bring a $5 million lawsuit, which of course he'll lose. And he's bringing a lawsuit against Jamie personally and the bank. He'll lose the lawsuit. But this is a massive chilling effect.

Massive chilling effect. Did you see what he just did to Jamie Dimon? Listen to me.

You know, you grew up like I did. You know, you're Italian. You don't give a [ __ ]. Okay. You know, I don't give a [ __ ]. I'm ready to fight. You know, because I grew up here on Long Island. We were doing push-ups in the parking lot outside of discos getting ready to fight people. Okay. I don't give a [ __ ]. I will fight Trump every step of the way. Okay. Which is probably why he hasn't come after me because he knows, okay, if he sues me, we're going to have a great time. I'm going to pick up a million Twitter followers and let's go. These guys are afraid of him because they see themselves as having too much to lose. But what they're missing is society has too much to lose if they don't get together and they don't coalesce with each other.

He's not... but Kara, you understand human nature. I've read your books, Burn Book, blah blah. You understand human nature better than you're letting on. There's an impulsive weakness up against authoritarianism. There is people...

Oh, no, no, no. I think he is. I...

No, he's looking at the situation snickering and he's like, 'I'm going to wait this guy out,' which he's going to do, and he'll win the case, which he will, but it's a message. It's a message to others. You don't want to get in my crosshairs. Okay? When a cabinet member from Trump One comes to my office, sits on the sofa and says, 'Listen, most cabinet members are trying to avoid a Trump tweet and some level of humiliation.' Why is that, sir? Well, it could be career-ruining for us if we do that. No, that's okay. But Kara, that's how they think. Kara, I just know how they think. Poker. I want to play poker with these people.

Why be present is what I want to understand.

Well, okay. So, in Patrick McGee's book, Apple and China, we learn, okay, it's a phenomenal book. I thought it was the business book of the year. And he talks about how entrenched Apple is in China. And so Tim is saying to himself, 'I got to get Trump off my back and Apple's back because I'm minting money with this iPhone 17. I've got new products coming out. Whether people like it or not, most of the manufacturing is in China. I can virtue-signal that it's moving to India or other places, but that's where it is. And if Trump is off my back, that's really good for my shareholders.' Okay. But where is the line? And you're better at drawing the line than he is obviously because he's looking around and saying, 'No problem. I'll show up at the screening.' Okay. But he happens to be showing up at the screening where there's a murder taking place. He happens to show up at a screening where Trump is telling our NATO allies that he's going to invade Greenland. And he's sending out maps on social media where he's got the provinces of Canada flagged alongside of Venezuela, Cuba, and Greenland, right? And also Iceland. I don't know if you noticed that Iceland was in there as well. And so again, that's the trolling of Donald Trump. I get it. He's a culture warrior. He wants to troll everybody. He wants to set all the liberals' hair on fire. I get all of that. But where Tim is sitting there, he's saying to himself, 'I'm going to give this guy a gold amulet like I did a couple of months ago. I'm going to shove my whole head up his ass because of the situation.' That's...

That's the new... That's the next season of Heated Rivalry. Go ahead.

You know, he looked at the letter coming in from Minnesota. He looked at the video. He said, 'I got to... I got to move out Jailhouse Barbie Kristi Noem. I got to get Jailhouse Barbie off the playing field. We're going to put, you know, take the bribe Hoene back on the playing field, the 50 grand in cash.'

All right. We're going to put him back in.

And I'm going to acquiesce and I'm going to find a way to exit this disastrous situation. But you see, the real question though for me is how are we letting Stephen Miller, who couldn't get confirmed as a dog catcher, forget about anything else...

This evil... Well, I'm going to tell you how. Because Stephen Miller bought call options on the worst day of Trump's political life, which was January 6, 2021, where Kevin McCarthy said he's finished. McConnell said he's finished. They told Pelosi, 'We don't need to impeach and remove him from office because he's politically finished after what he did.' Mr. Miller bought call options on Trump's electoral success in 2024. Nobody else bought those call options. And then Miller said, 'This is fantastic. I'm an evil guy. I hate people and I want to inflict pain on people. And Trump is my empty vessel to get back into the White House. And oh, by the way, we're going to have four years to prepare ourselves to be even more dastardly and more evil and to remove more normal people out of the checks and balances of Trump One. We're going to have lapdogs in Trump Two like Bessent and Buttlick or Nutlick, whatever the... I mean, the biggest [ __ ] on earth. We're going to have these people in position, okay? And then I'm going to rule the roost. I'm writing all the speeches. You know, you can throw this [ __ ] through ChatGPT. You say, 'Who does this sound like?' It's the writings of Stephen Miller.' And so he's writing the speeches. He's promulgating the policy. How is he...

The only way Trump will see it is if you start saying Trump is the lapdog of Stephen Miller. The administration's being run by Stephen Miller. Trump will absolutely hate that. Okay? And it's like when they were saying President Bannon, when the President Bannon Time magazine cover came out, he got hit with a ray gun, knocked out of the administration. And so, but Miller is running the administration. He's running domestic policy. He's running international policy. He's writing the speeches about Venezuela and Greenland. And he is sitting...

Look, I used to fight with...

Let me tell you, him and I were not friends. I used to fight with him left and right. There was one situation in the 2016 campaign where I called him up and read him the riot act because he was treating donors with this, like, you know, lack of emotional attention and this sort of caustic, you know, arrogant, supercilious way. So look, he's a terrible person. I think we can stipulate that just by his behavior and his actions, but it fits Trump's narrative. Okay. Because Trump likes hurting people. Trump likes humiliating people. He likes hurting people. He wants to denigrate people and make them feel bad, you know. And then when he gets himself in trouble, he will walk it back like he did with the UK war veterans. He had to send out a missive to Starmer because it was ridiculous the heat that he was getting. But this is what these people are like. And the problem is the waiting-it-out strategy. If you're a corporate board official and you are on one of these corporate boards, Fortune 500, and you listen to Kara and Scott, let me... here. Are you listening? Let me tell you what you got to do. You got to get your CEO in position to join forces and create alliances with his other CEOs, he or she, and push back on Trump. You cannot wait 1,000 days, Kara.

You got to get your [ __ ] together. You got to get your [ __ ] together right now and on behalf of the American people and channel what those German bureaucrats wanted from Neville Chamberlain. Don't be a Neville Chamberlain and wait the 10,000 days. Too late. It's going to be too much existential damage done to your company, by the way, and the United States.

The Democrats suck, though. Let me just... hear me out for a second.

We all agree. You know, the Republicans are evil, okay? So, they suck more. But the Democrats suck because they can't get their [ __ ] together. If they could get their [ __ ] together, they would channel Newt Gingrich. Okay, and hear me out for a second because you're old enough to remember this. In 1994, Newt Gingrich said, 'Hey, we're going to combat Clinton. We're going to all unify and we're going to get our ducks in a row. Here's our 10-point Contract with America. Everybody's signing on to this and then when we get power, we're going to flex.' The Democrats have to have the doppelganger of the 1994 Contract with America. And even though they don't like each other and AOC doesn't see eye to eye with Gavin Newsom, get it together, fellas. Get in a room.

But not only is that small ball, that's a disaster. You're a capital markets person. Look at where the US dollar is trading, the Japanese yen is trading. Look at where gold and silver is trading. We're in full-on currency debasement. You know, Trump thinks he can get out there and do his reality TV nonsense without consequence. But people are pulling away from the dollar. They're forming unnatural alliances. Carney is going to China. The dollar is weakening. Gold is going up. People are finding ways to barter with each other outside of the petrodollar system. And Ray Dalio is going to be right, guys. You want to shut the government down. You're going to further weaken the US dollar. Don't do it. That is...

DHS. Correct. They also can't politically fund them.

Correct, Kara. There's no choice because we're in accord and not with each other. But if they shut the government down, I would rather have them fund DHS and have the help of corporate CEOs and law enforcement. You know that local law enforcement is against ICE. Get together, people, okay? Develop a communication strategy. Fund it, but have an overwhelming group of people push back on it. You don't want to shut the government down when we are facing our own economic peril. We're sitting on a debt time bomb that's running towards $40 trillion.

I don't... it's not going to hurt Trump himself more. It's going to hurt the man on the street more.

Our dollar has lost 28% of its value since January of 2020. Okay. If you own assets, Kara, you're fine. But if you're like my dad, my deceased father, who worked an hour and got an hourly wage and had no assets, you took 30% of it. You took 30% of his life away from him. We've got three or four things happening in parallel tracks that, you know, we can control the card table and we can maintain our mantle of financial services leadership and our mantle of global leadership, but we've got to change the narrative. And the way you change the narrative is through coordinated opposition. Trump is banking on the fact that the liberals are so self-righteous and so picky with each other that they'll have internecine fights with each other as opposed to coordinate and go after him. But they could do that. They could go to the Cooks. They could go to the CEO of 3M and they can say, 'Okay, listen. This is not good for America. We don't want our people murdered in the street. It's bad for economic innovation. It's bad for capital flows into America. We have to fight back. There are two people, Stephen Miller and Donald Trump, and there's us. And there's a force majeure of us that can overwhelm them if we coordinate with each other.' And Trump is banking on the fact that they won't do that.