Lemon LIVE at 5: Election Panic Hits Trump World, Scaramucci Breaks Down Fear Inside the White House

My name is Becca Good. I'm Renee Good's partner. She was the love of my life. I'm here today because last January, the whole world had to watch as our entire universe was destroyed, as the sunshine that was my amazing Renee was robbed from us, from her children, and from her community that loved her.

I really just want to tell you about Renee. She was pure love, and she was funny, and she was smart, and she was gorgeous, and she never left anyone without feeling seen and cared for, and without a smile on their face. She read all the time, and she found beauty in every moment. She was the center of my universe, and living without her is like trying to live without the sun. And you don't know how much light something gives you until it's gone.

And then you feel that absence every single second.

And this past August, I got ready to put our son in first grade. I bought him new shoes and a backpack and notebooks, pencil case, the whole nine yards. And I went to back-to-school night on my own. She never missed a single moment. And this Halloween, it's our son's absolute favorite holiday. I'll take him trick-or-treating without her hand in mine. Every single one of these moments for all of her babies and for everyone up here was a monument moment. And she should be here for all of them.

Thank you, Don. I am well. I'm sorry. Pardon me for that. We appreciate the gravity of this gets us all.

Well, when we undertook the representation of the Renee Good family, they asked us for something. They asked us for full justice, and today, Don, was the beginning, was the first day of that accounting for full justice. We filed two lawsuits. One against the United States government for the actions of the shooter killing Renee Good on January 7th. The second is a conspiracy claim, it's a 1983 lawsuit, conspiracy against individually named defendants for conspiring to create the environment causing the death of Renee Good. And Don, it starts from the top. It starts with President Trump's labeling of the Somali and Hispanic communities here in Minneapolis. It's with President Trump labeling Minneapolis a hellhole and calling these fine people names that I will not repeat because I don't ever want to say those words. And then it's those people taking those orders and carrying them out, and they created the condition causing Renee's death.

Well, I'm not surprised at that because I think it's just a continuation of the denial of what the government has been doing to its own people, the invasion of American cities by American masked agents. And it's just the denial of accountability. It's covering up the truth. We don't have transparency when it comes to what this government has been doing when it's been, you know, telling us these cover stories about immigration enforcement. They've really been about terrorizing certain communities, people of color, and it has nothing to do with immigration enforcement. It has to do with suppression.

Well, I think they do. I mean, we've seen the response from them today, and it's really a nothingburger type of response. All they keep talking about are other people being killed, and they did not address the Renee Good case, did not address these lawsuits. So I think they know that they are in the wrong here. We felt very calm about what we were doing today because we believe that we are in the right. The allegations that are in those two lawsuits are factually based. There is nothing in there that cannot be backed up with extrinsic evidence, and we feel very strongly that we will survive any motions that come our way to seek dismissal or denial of any of the claims that we have filed.

Well, you are not wrong. I mean, it's actually something that we should all be concerned about because justice goes hand in hand with the rule of law. And I think you heard me quote, you know, a federal district court judge today that said that without the rule of law, democracy will die. And without any separation between the executive branch and the Department of Justice, if the DOJ is taking orders from the White House, then we do not have regularity. We are running into, it could be an anarchist type of situation, and we can see democracy, you know, just dwindle away. So, it's a very concerning issue. It's very serious. It's one that actually endangers us all when we see that.

Well, look, it's very simple. What happens is if you don't have due process, let's say people get taken off the street without due process, and let's say that they are convicted or they are held without charges for an extraordinary period of time, that is a demoralization of constitutional rights. You are correct. Our Pledge of Allegiance talks about liberty and justice for all. That goes hand in hand with our Constitution and its Bill of Rights. And it applies to all people, not just some. It doesn't apply just to rich people or white people or people in power especially. We are all equal when it comes to the Constitution. And when there's inequality when it comes to application of the Constitution, it makes us all unsafe because then we all become vulnerable. So, in order to prove any lawsuit, to win any lawsuit, there must be evidence. Unlike the government, I believe they commit a crime, excuse me, they charge someone for a crime and then they go looking for the evidence to fit it. But you must have evidence here. We've seen the evidence in the videotape and the audiotape that she was not turning her wheel in the direction of the officer. So, we've seen that evidence, but they are telling us to not believe what we've seen with our own eyes and heard with our own ears.

Well, we have several pieces of very compelling evidence. Obviously, we have the video. And not only do we have one video, we have several videos. Because we have several videos, Don, we are able to triangulate those videos and really place everybody within a pinpoint location of where they're at. So, we are able to know within millimeters where Jonathan Ross was standing, where the car was sitting, where the wheels were pointed, where the gun was pointed. So when you have that along with other witness statements and the policies of the Department of Homeland Security when it comes to the use of deadly force, you put those in combination with each other, and we have a case that we will be able to very hopefully withstand any motions of dismissal.

Well, I mean, that's something that I wouldn't even say today. I think you and I can have that discussion. But after she was shot in the head and the car was rolling, not under Renee's control, the officer called her an expletive starting with an F. That shows the animus that these agents are working with. And please contrast that with Renee's state of mind, saying that she wasn't mad at anyone and waving people past her while she was sitting in the car. People have to compare that state of mind between the officer and between Renee to understand what happened, that these agents went in there with a violence mentality, an escalated mentality to use force and in any instance use deadly force.

Well, Don, I've had many, many conversations and sit-downs with Becca about her love, Renee. But I got to tell you, I think everybody felt the power of Becca's statements today when she was talking about Renee. We all were extremely moved by her because that was just straight from the heart. That is somebody who is going to miss the love of her life forever. And we cannot forget the children. I mean, they were raising a child. They had dropped off their child at school and were going home. Their dog was in the back seat. They were a family. They were a unit. And now it's destroyed and gone. And I think it got us all today to an extent that none of us expected.

Well, we're going to wait for the government's response. You know, the Department of Justice will have to respond to the lawsuit, and you know, we will move through whatever channels the courts tell us that we have to. But as we promised in January and as we promised today, we will seek every avenue of recovery for this family, but especially the avenue of accountability. And we must have the truth. Ultimately, we must discover what happened, what led to this horrible, deadly encounter.

Thank you, Don. Stay well.

That absolutely is what happened. Those officers had been out on enforcement action. A vehicle had been stuck. They had come to help get that vehicle out. That's when this individual started blocking traffic for minutes and minutes.

You said that the woman attacked them and surrounded them and attempted to run them over and ram them with her vehicle. She blocked the road for a long time and was yelling at them and impeded a federal law enforcement investigation. And that's what you need to focus on, Jake, is they were breaking the law by impeding and obstructing a law enforcement operation. They were breaking the law already, and these officers were doing their due diligence, what their training had prepared them to do to make sure they were handling it appropriately.

Well, I haven't seen the vice president's statement, but he's generally very accurate. I hate to say it. Look, I watched that yesterday, and there were a lot of different forms to it, but there was a woman screaming, 'Shame, shame, shame, shame.' She was an agitator, probably a paid agitator, but in my opinion, she was an agitator, a very high-level agitator, so professional. She wouldn't stop screaming. I said, 'This isn't a normal situation. This is a professional troublemaker.' Because you heard it and I had it. Now, I will say this, the news sort of turned her down, turned her off because you're trying to watch. She was so loud and so crazy and just not normal. When somebody sees something like that, they don't go screaming and screaming the same words. So, I guess you could say professional, but I didn't think she did a very good job. You have agitators, and we will always be protecting ICE, and we're always going to be protecting our border patrol and our law enforcement.

It's good to be back, you know, but it's sad to be back on that sort of an occasion, but it's always great to be with you. I guess my reaction to the whole thing is that's Donald Trump, Don, and that's exactly who he is and that's always who he will be. But what is something I would recommend to Democrats, this is a contrarian thing, so just hear me out for a second. The Democrats, I feel, have made a decision that Biden let the border be too porous. They think that caused them election harm in 2024. But I don't want the Democrats to shut down on the idea of legal immigration and the need for the United States to be flourishing by having one and a half to two million legal immigrants in the country. And so what I don't want to have happen is Trump's rhetoric, as damaging as it is, I want them to respond. Again, I'm not a Democratic strategist, but if I was, I would implore them to respond in an American way of thinking. The nativism, the nativism is in my mind, Don, anti-American, and I would want the Democratic candidates' message to be pro-our families, the stories of how all our families got into the country, etc.

Well, okay. So we're preaching to the choir again. Look at our labor and look at our intellectual capital. American innovation, American growth, American economic development for the entire country is benefited by an inflow of immigration. And so, yes, you and I are in agreement. We don't want an unnecessarily porous border, but what we do want is we want to allow for legal immigration. By the way, I'm having difficulty, as I would imagine other companies are, he's put it on lockdown right now, visas from here until... If you talk to an immigration lawyer here in New York City, you say, 'Okay, I'm trying to get a super talented person in on a knowledge and intellectual capital visa.' They've got it on lockdown between now and the election. And I think it's a mistake, and I think it's something that the Democrats should press harder.

Well, he's got a lot of corruption going on. He's got insider trading. He's even trading on SI. Right. So, those guys went out and bought on the brokerage sites the internet domains because he's changing the name of artificial intelligence to super intelligence. The SI domain names were purchased before he did that press conference. And so you have premeditation for the last two years, Don. I'm going to say that the Gulf War is ending, oil prices are going to drop. I'm going to say that the Gulf War is not ending, oil prices are going to go up. And you can follow his minions coming in and out of those trades. And so if the Democrats were to get a hold of things and if the Democrats controlled the presidency and were able to put appropriate SEC enforcement mechanisms in place, they would go after all of those people, right? And so, you know, that's why he's saying, and I said on my show, if the Democrats win the House and the Senate, he will pardon everybody, and he may even pardon himself, but he will certainly pardon his children the day after the election before that Congress is sworn in in January. Those kids will be pardoned, and he's more or less indicated that. And he'll do the whataboutism, and he'll say, well, I have standing, he'll say everything related to my kids is specious, it's illusory, it's just me doing it the same way Joe Biden did it.

And that's going to be his messaging. And so to me, I think it's disgusting, but he has wrecked the system that we admired. And this is the weird thing about it. We didn't know because Barack Obama handled himself right. You may not have liked George Bush, but he handled himself inside of the norms and standards of what the American presidency is. You know, you're old enough to remember the controversy when Bill Clinton pardoned his brother and Marc Rich in the last few days of his administration. You know, this is now fast forward into something that is wildly outside the norms and standards. So, yeah, you know, he, and by the way, here's the other thing about Trump. He doesn't care anymore. You know, if he cared, he would never have admitted to Time magazine the willingness to do that closely tied to an election.

That's my point, is his attitude now is he's in the full-on nihilism mode. I believe Tucker Carlson in the following respect. Okay. Tucker Carlson said that he went to Trump about the situation related to the war, and Trump said, you know, I don't care. We're all going to die. Okay. And I absolutely, you know, I don't like Tucker Carlson, and Tucker Carlson's not a friend of mine, and I don't have a lot of respect for him, but I do believe that Trump said that because that is the nature of Trump's personality. So, we're in the full-on nihilism mode of Donald Trump, where it's going to be very destructive. And trust me, Democrats would be wise to take advantage of that. And Republicans are now trying to figure out how to deal with that because he's wrecking them. You know, he doesn't care about those northern states. He would have cut the deal, Don, would have cut the deal with Canada. There was a deal in place six weeks ago, so much so that he tweeted out about the deal. Okay. And then they tried to switch up the deal last minute. Carney pulled out. They could have gone back to the deal that they had very easily, which would have helped all of those border elections, those senatorial and congressional seats in places like Maine or Ohio and Michigan, but he doesn't care. You know, Paxton basically on an open mic said he's down here glorifying himself at this midterm convention, and all it did was hurt my poll numbers because he's got such a low political standing right now. Him grandstanding in Texas actually brought the Republican candidates down, not up. Okay? So he doesn't care, and they now have to figure out a way to deal with him. And I guarantee he doesn't, you know, he's such a nihilist. He won't, if JD Vance is their heir apparent, he will not help JD Vance because his attitude will be like JD Vance could possibly get some credit for my greatness. I mean, you may think he sucks and your listeners may think he sucks, but trust me, he thinks he's greater than George Washington, and he's saying to himself, I'm just telling you what he's like. Okay. And he's thinking JD Vance could get some credit for all of these great achievements. You heard him this morning where he said, 'I haven't done a good job of explaining how great the country is doing.'

Yeah. Explaining. No, he's, yeah.

Yeah, we're through 7.15 now. So we crossed seven last week. We're at 7.15. There were some prints at seven and a quarter. So, you know, you're back in that high interest rate zone in the early 2000s. But here's the problem. When you have 7% interest rates and you have a $4 trillion budget deficit for the United States, that's the last time we had this type of interest rate activity. It's very manageable. But if you just look at where the 10-year is right now, and let me say something, not apocalyptic, but quite realistic, you could have the 10-year Treasury down at 6%. You have $40 trillion of debt. And I'm not saying it's all priced there because they're trying to price the debt at the front end of the curve to pay the lowest interest rate possible. But if you've got to start lending the money and being willing to pay a 6% interest rate, just do the math. That's $2.4 trillion, Don. That's larger than the Social Security disbursement. Okay? You're not going to be able to sustain that. Do you see what I mean?

And so here's the other irony. I just wrote an essay which I put out on Twitter and LinkedIn, etc., that just going back to the Clinton tax rates and putting in a few things, you could save 10 or 12 trillion dollars of deficit spending over the next 10 years, and you could get this thing back under control. But there's no Republican that's going to do that. Donald Trump's not going to do that. When Donald Trump leaves office, he'll be responsible for 42% of all the national debt.

Yeah. So, yeah, it was 7.15 when I looked at it this morning. Yeah, it got as high as 7.25 at around 11:00. So it's higher than that now. But again, listen, it's priced off of the 10-year. And so the 10-year is on its way to 6%. That means that mortgage rate will be closer to 8%.

But hear me out for a second, okay? And this is the tragedy of what's going on in the country. $83,000 is the median income. Now, that means half the people are making less than that. The median house is 430. Okay? And so if you do the reverse engineering, you can't make it work. You cannot make the math work on $83,000. You're never going to be able to afford the house. So you have half of the country that is missing dental appointments. They have a fender bender, they won't go to the insurance adjuster. They'll leave the car in a mangled position. They're missing prescription drugs. And by the way, everything I'm saying to you is going to get worse after the midterms because the big beautiful spending bill is going to remove SNAP benefits and it's going to take about 17, 18 million people off of the health care rolls. So Don, I just, again, everything that I'm saying is going to get worse after the midterms. So this is the stuff that just drives me wild because this is what engenders the anger-based populism. So the irony is a lot of these people voted for Trump expecting him to help them. He's actually put policies in place going to make their economic situation and their disposable income way worse, which is going to be another setup for more anger-based populism.

All right. Well, thank you for bringing it up.

All right. That'd be great. Yeah. It's called All the Wrong Moves. It's doing well. I appreciate you bringing it up. And that's the reason why I missed your show last week. I was hawking that book, Don Lemon. You know how hard it is to sell books. Okay. I was beating the drum for that book all week last week. We could talk. So, but let's talk, we'll talk about that at...

So he could see the possibilities while other people lost, by the way. So they made that money, and there's an estimate that $3.88 billion was lost by investors in those schemes that they were deploying. But go ahead. I'm sorry.

But that's my point, though. But that's what I'm talking about, the nihilism. He actually isn't that worried. He's telling Time magazine, 'No problem. You know, Hunter got pardoned. I'm going to pardon all of my relatives. I'm going to pardon all my buddies. Anybody that he's getting some vig from.' Do you remember that whole thing that was picked up by the reporters at Mar-a-Lago when he went after Lutnick and said, 'Your kids are making a lot of money. Where's my cut of it?' You know, I mean, you know that that's him. And so anybody that he's getting a cut of their business or a sliver from, he's going to pardon them because they don't have presidential immunity. You know, I could make the case for you, and I'm sure his lawyers will. Good luck going after Mr. Trump. Chief Justice Roberts gave him incredible amounts of presidential latitude, presidential immunity. So much so, just to be dramatic, that what Richard Nixon did in the 1970s would now be covered by the Supreme Court case on presidential immunity. So Trump is looking around saying, 'Hey, this is great. I'm going to pardon every single person around me that will protect me, and I'll maybe pardon myself because you know there's no...' Throw that in ChatGPT, say, 'Okay, I'm the president of the United States and I'm pardoning myself. What is the Supreme Court going to do?' And if you throw that in a Claude or ChatGPT, they say, 'Well, you know, there's no guidelines for it,' and they'll give you the case for it and they'll support it, and they'll give you the case against it. And so he's got a 6-3 Supreme Court where there's no delineation. There's no law whether or not he can pardon himself. And I hope to God that they don't give him that power because then we're done. You know, I mean, because you're now putting every future president in a king-like position.

I don't, you know, I'm going to stay with that position. I think he has neurodegenerative decline. That's consistent with an 80-year-old. I notice he's limping a little bit. That could be knee or hip arthritis. Again, consistent with an 80-year-old. I think he has a tremendous amount of energy. If people don't think he has that, just go look at his schedule. He's at a UFC fight, then he's flying to Europe, then he's flying back from Europe. He's moving himself around. I see you falling asleep. That's related to probably sleep apnea issues related to his weight. You know, he may need one of those sleep apnea retainers or one of those masks. He's probably not sleeping super well at night at his age and his weight. So he is falling asleep during the day.

Yeah, yeah. 180 kilos. Okay. He's not 180 lbs. Okay. He's 180 kg. But I'm just saying to you, I just want you to think about this, and people can dislike me for saying it. He is 80 with a pretty decent amount of energy. Okay. I don't, I mean, if Joe Biden was falling asleep like that, they would be lighting him up like a Christmas tree on Fox News. They're not going to do that to Donald Trump. But he's not unwell in the sense that, oh, you know, he's got prefrontal temporal dementia and all this stuff like these guys say on the internet. He doesn't. I'm sorry to tell you that, he just doesn't. Is he mad? Is he a mad king? Is he twisted? Is he that? Yeah, he's totally that.

Don, think about someday 50 years from now, what is somebody going to say about John Thune, Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio, JD Vance? Okay, think about what these guys did for the power that they have. This short-term power, the busting of all these principles, they could have gone to him. Johnson and Thune could have gone to him and said, 'Hey, man, you got to knock it off. Okay, I'm sorry what you're saying, what you're doing. This whole thing with NATO now in terms of who's he inviting to the NATO meeting versus not inviting. I mean, what is Vladimir Putin picking the invitations now to the NATO meetings?' You know what I mean? I mean, stop it. Stop it. But I'm...

All right. Go ahead. All the Wrong Moves. All the Wrong Moves.

Look, I tell people, you know, I was at Harvard last night. I mean, Harvard is like, you know, it's Taxachusetts. You know, it's the People's Republic of Cambridge. I mean, there's not one person in Cambridge that likes Trump. And...

Yeah, yeah. And people are like mad at me that I once worked for Trump, but I'm going to tell my liberal friends that are listening to your show, you got to knock it off, okay? I got fired. I tried to stay loyal to him out of respect. When it became clear that he was going to wreck the country, I denounced him. That was way back in 2019. I then went to work for Joe Biden and raised him money in 2020. And you know this, I helped Vice President Harris on her debate prep and went with her to Philly and worked as a spin person in the spin room with Governor Newsom. So, you know, I did everything. Once I realized how bad it was, at least I had the guts to admit that I got something wrong. Do you know how many banana heads are in the Republican Party that know how bad this is and they won't admit it? And then one last thing for my liberal friends. Guys, you got 80 million people that voted for him. Don't make the mistake of writing those people off. You got to get those people back in the boat. I said this to your fan base at City Winery. You know that, the night you and I were together. You got to get these people out of that cult and back in the boat. You know, so someone's writing that I'm pro-Trump. They haven't been following me around for the last seven and a half years. But this book isn't really about Trump. This book is about mistakes that we made that were made by very well-intended people that were expecting different outcomes, like letting China into the World Trade Organization. We thought they were opening their market to us. Don Lemon, they did not open their market to us. We went to war.

They never were going to do it. We thought they were. We got it wrong. We went to war. Cheney and Bush told us the wars would last weeks, perhaps months. They lasted two decades, and we went to war with two tax decreases. We cut taxes in '01, and then we went to war again in Afghanistan in October of '01, and then we went to war in Iraq in March of '03, and we cut taxes in June of '03. So two tax cuts, two wars, two decades of war, and that was an $8 trillion deficit that's really set this into catastrophe. You know...

Go ahead.

I mean, I think it's pretty good. I mean, I'm a bougie Long Island Italian. I mean, what's going on there, right? And Vanity Fair did a layout of that. I was like, where's the topless, the shirtless photo of you in the gym? What's...

That is a Huracan. That's a Lamborghini Huracan.

Look, I own a Rivian electric car. Yes.

It's a nice car. It looks like a Batmobile. I will say that.

All right. Great to be on with you always, my man. You know I love you. I love you. I'll see you soon.