This is the Reason interview with Nick Gillespie. Today my guest is somebody who I follow voraciously, particularly on the Rest Is Politics US podcast, but everywhere he appears, it's Anthony Scaramucci, whose new book is called All the Wrong Moves: How Three Catastrophic Decisions Led to the Rise of Trump. Anthony Scaramucci, thanks for talking to Reason.
Oh, listen, it's a big honor to be on. I was very grateful to get invited. And I have a Nick. I have a Nick Scaramucci. You know, I love the name Nick because Nick, if like you're going to get punched in the face, you know, if you have a Nick Gillespie, Nick Scaramucci, it's like a tough name. You know, you didn't have a problem in middle school because...
Oh, no. Actually, I did because Nick rhymes with virtually every epithet for the male organ.
Male sexual organ. So, it was a tough thing growing up, and it came from the Italian side, my mother's side of the family. And I didn't meet a non-related Nick until, I don't know, I think I was in college or later. It's a popular name now.
It's a big Italian name. So, we have a Nick in our family.
Anthony. Anthony and Tony as well. And you are, I guess, you're named after the patron saint of lost things, right?
I'm named after the patron saint of lost things, and I'm actually named after my uncle Anthony, who fought on Normandy Beach.
And so that's my mother's oldest brother.
I just want to ask real clear, he was fighting for the Allies, right?
He was, yes, he was fighting for the Allies. This is the Italian immigrant story from the 1920s. He was born in '24. They moved his high school graduation from June to March of '43 so that he could participate in the Normandy invasion, which he survived, thank God.
Yeah, I'm glad to hear that. My father, who was the son of Irish immigrants, was also in, not in the Normandy landing per se, but in the Normandy campaign. And my mother, Teresa Guida was her maiden name, had a brother who invaded Italy, the same country her father had left only about 20 years before. And her yearbook, just to start on a kind of somber note, she graduated from a high school in Waterbury, Connecticut in 1945, and it's almost all women because all of the men were already serving, and there was a page of people who had died. An amazing kind of contribution that really helped white ethnics in America, not so much blacks unfortunately, but get full citizenship rights really in America, like cultural citizenship rights.
Yeah, it's an amazing story. I mean, listen, it's a different generation, Nick. You know, you and I are in that bridge, right? Because we're the tail end of the baby boom. So, we remember all of those people, and now we're experiencing this new world where World War II and Pearl Harbor, things like that, are distant memories, but it's something you and I grew up with, all those stories.
Absolutely. And let me, before we go into the book proper, which is not only important but incredibly readable and open in the way you discuss events in your life and particularly with the Trump administration and larger policy questions, but I just want to focus on this for a second. In one moment, I think it was in 1972, you're a young kid and you said you came home and your grandmother and mother were beside themselves with glee because they had just gotten a washer and dryer installed in the cinder block basement of the house you grew up in, and that meant your grandmother never had to go to the laundromat again. Can you just talk a little bit about that America? I mean, it's not even that old.
It's a core, core memory for me, you know, and I'm coming out of the second grade. If I took you to my hometown or took you to the house I grew up in, I was very lucky that we had our school, which was called the Main Street School in Port Washington, was walking distance from my house. And this predates helicopter parenting. And so my parents, my mother would hand me a lunch bag and you go walk to the school. There was no driving or anything like that. We went right to the school. And I just remember coming home one afternoon and my mom and my mother were hugely excited. It's a core memory for me because I used to remember my grandmother and my mother. They had those bags where they had, you know, those rope handles. I could still see the red indentation marks on my grandmother's hands. She would take our laundry up to the laundromat. And what's interesting, the laundromat was a few blocks away. There's a Chase Bank now where that laundromat was, but you know, this is middle class America. Lots of Italian-Americans. Many people don't have washers and dryers in their house. So, this laundromat was gigantic. Of course, as we start to have rising living standards and everyone's starting to get their washers and dryers, that laundromat goes out of business. And today, because I still live in the town I grew up in, it's a Chase Bank. But you get the story of that progression. And I think I told that... so you've done obviously great research for this podcast.
I read your book, among other things, but...
Well, I appreciate you reading it, but I told that story because that's the family I grew up in. And by the way, like you, Nick, I'm a grateful person. I would never tell anybody I grew up poor. I would never dishonor the work ethic of my grandmother, my dad, my mother. I did not grow up poor. We had everything that we needed. And on Sundays at 1:00, we ate to the point of explosion. Okay. I guess the only thing I could be mad at my father and my older brother for is they made me a Mets fan. Other than that, I really have nothing to be upset with them for. I mean, we could have been a Yankee fan, but now I have to suffer for the remaining years of my life, and I have suffered for the last 50 years as a Mets fan, but you know, that would probably be the only thing I would say.
Yeah. Well, you could have been a Dodgers or a Giants fan and have to give up on baseball altogether. Right. So...
Right. That was a big heartbreak for that generation.
I want to come back to this after we talk a little bit about the three big catastrophic decisions that you talk about. How much of what we're going through right now, you know, there is a palpable sense of disunity, of stagnation, of negativity, particularly among younger generations, millennials and Gen Z, who, you know, there are no questions that they are facing certain types of difficulties and the economy is in a radical transformation. The culture is in a radical transformation, but materially they are better off than ever. And one of the things that I guess, you know, what's interesting to me and that is implicit in everything that you write in the book is that our parents and grandparents and I think most people in the baby boom generation inherited this, but it kind of ends with us in a way. You were grateful for what you had because you knew it was better than what you had had 50 years ago or your ancestors, you know, either in the old country or here. And how much of the problems in America are not about things that are really happening and it's more we don't have a narrative. We grew up with that idea that well America is a land of immigrants and it was better here than it was in Italy or Ireland or, you know, Poland or anything and we don't think that way anymore because we've incorporated the idea that everything should be getting better lightning fast and if I don't have what I'm going to have at age 50 at age 25, screw the whole system.
Yeah. So listen, it's a great point. Living standards have gone up for everyone. I do think unfortunately we're relative social organisms and so we always have this relative benchmarking. I do think in the age of social media, the glorification of wealth has made people feel FOMO or feel left out. But I'm going to frame it to you this way and I'd love to get your answer on this. If I said to you, Nick, you could live in 1926 and I'm going to give you $125,000 of 1926 money a year. It's going to make you a very, very rich person for 1926, or I'm going to give you that same amount of money, $125,000, but it is 2026, a hundred years later. Which society would you like to live in? Now remember this is pre-penicillin, before modern advancement of medicine, lots of things that we didn't know about the world that we do today, before computerization, air travel, jet travel. And so what's the answer to that, Nick? Would you rather be super rich in that era or medium getting by in this era?
Yeah. I mean, and just to dial down on that a little bit more, $125,000 today is still about 50% more than the median household income in America. So, it's not just getting by. It's actually doing pretty well. Now, you would be not quite rich as a Rockefeller 100 years ago, but you'd be doing very well. I wouldn't hesitate to pick today, or I would even say give me that amount of nominal dollars 20 years from now and I'll take that because the world is going to be a better place.
Yeah. So I think that's the issue. So you and I are in intellectual, philosophical agreement. We're in a better place. That's the issue. I often tell younger people to think like that. The society is advancing. Peter Diamandis is a good friend of mine. He just wrote this book, We Are Gods, which is about the technological abundance that we're about to embark upon. My mother is about to turn 90. God bless her. I hope she gets there. It'll be in January of 2027. God willing that she'll get there. But if she was born earlier, she would not have made 90 because she was diagnosed with leukemia. She has a disease called CML, chronic myeloid leukemia. And that diagnosis happened at age 78. And the drug that she's using is something called Gleevec, which was discovered at the University of Pennsylvania, that she's lived a relatively normal life on Gleevec. And we've gotten 12 additional years of having her with us. And so again, 20 years from now, to Nick's point, it's going to be way better 20 years from now than it is today. I think the big thing for us is how do we make things better for the most amount of us? How do we go from people feeling economically desperate to economically aspirational? Because...
Abundant, right? To use a Diamandis type term, you know.
I want my kids to do better than me. Maybe they won't, but I want them to at least have my living standards. Well, can I ask, I mean, because, and I'm sorry I'm kind of frontloading the conversation here, but you know your kids are not going to do better than you because you are, you know, you're a centimillionaire. Are you a billionaire or, you know, where do you land in these kinds of conversations?
So I'm not a billionaire. I mean, if you looked at my SF-86 from 2017, you know, which was publicly disclosed because I had to do that to go work in the White House, I had about $85 million of net worth. So, obviously, I'm a decent investor. It's probably more than that today, but I'm not here to brag about that or even pat myself on the back.
But what I'm getting at is the idea, and I'm not saying this, you know, in a nasty way, but it's like your kids are not going to do better than you because you are squeezed in at the top of the pyramid and there's no place else to go. I'm not doing nearly as well as you, but I am doing so much better. I mean, by the time my father hadn't graduated high school, by the time I got my first full-time job out of college, I was making more money than he had ever made.
My kids are probably not going to do better than me because I'm doing very well, but they will do as well as I did.
Yeah. Well, listen. I mean, listen, I...
You see, it's so funny because even though we don't know each other, I feel like I do know you because we probably grew up very similarly. So, I would say this to you. I've taken a different approach with my adult children. I have five children, three from my first marriage, two from my second marriage. But my adult children, ages 34, 30, and 27, I have said to them something that my parents could not say to me. Okay? And that was, I want you to pick something you really love. I don't care what it is. I want you to go at that with a vengeance and just do that. Right? So my older son is a venture capitalist with the Stanford Business School. He may end up doing better than me. Frankly, he may already be better than me because he owns Anthropic, this kid, you know? So, but my daughter's an opera singer and my younger son, my 27-year-old Anthony, is a filmmaker. He's done two very successful small, what they call short films, you know, now, and he's building up his film portfolio. But, you know, I've helped them and I've insulated them from a living standard perspective. So, I think I'm more in the actualization business, Nick. If you had said to me, this is where I'm really going to expose my vanity, Gillespie. Okay. If you said to me, 'What did you really want to do?' I would have gone to Hollywood, tried to become an actor, you know. I didn't have the balls to do it. My parents had no money. I went to Wall Street, Nick. Like, what did Willie Sutton say about the banks? I'm robbing the banks because that's where the money is. Right. So, I went to Wall Street. So, my foray into politics is so accidental. I'm on a Wall Street trading desk. I'm supposed to bring in clients. I don't know anybody. Never been to a country club. Never swung a tennis racket or swung a golf club. What the hell am I going to do? And I said, 'Hey, you know, I'm going to go to political fundraisers. Wealthy people go to political fundraisers.' And I go to work for Rudy Giuliani. This is like pretty crazy Rudy, you know, and I'm working for Rudy. Hey, Nick, the best... when he's squeezing Michael Milken through...
Yeah. After he did the money laundering borderline tactics. Yeah.
Yes. But so you end up doing this stuff.
Well, let you know, this is a good entry into the book because I mean you are an American success story that obviously the numbers are higher than average but it's very typical. You know, you did much better than your parents and you're helping your kids, you know, follow their bliss. This is, you know, this is what your parents would want for you, want for your kids, etc. But now you talk about in All the Wrong Moves, three catastrophic decisions that led to the rise of Trump. And what's great about the book is you actually also talk about how like it's not just the rise of Trump, it's the rise of populism. And when you're talking about the 2016 election, you're pairing Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump because there's a rise of populism, dissatisfaction with the establishment. The first catastrophic decision that you talk about is the Clinton administration's pushing to bring China into the newly created World Trade Organization without any kind of backstops or follow-ups on what China's doing. Explain why this is such a catastrophic decision that it's one of three that you're talking about in the book.
And I want to mention to everybody, I start the book out by saying, man, did I get this wrong. I was a smug 35-year-old Wall Street hotshot, you know, self-assured, self-centered. I was sneering at those protesters thinking, how stupid are they and how smart am I? And they were right, Nick, and I was wrong. And what they were saying was, this is going to lead to a devolution of manufacturing. It's going to hammer us on jobs. It was the Ross Perot narrative that you and I grew up with. The great sucking sound will be the sound of jobs leaving the country because of these deals and we have to protect the American worker. And I bought into the Wall Street idea that the Chinese were going to open their markets. They were going to urbanize. They're going to create affluence in their society. And this would lead to much bigger global trade for American companies, and therefore the American worker would be benefited from the openness. But it didn't happen. You know, the Chinese left their economy closed. They had protection and they had rights in the WTO, as I point out in the book. They came in as an emerging market. They came in with the treatment of an El Salvador or a DR. And that was fine because they were a very small economy at the time. You know, even in 2003, they were still smaller than the GDP of Italy 22 years ago. And so, as they started rising, once they got to the size and scale of Germany, American leaders, Western leaders should have said, 'Okay, you're now the size and scale of Germany. We have to treat you like a Western European mature industrial economy.' And that means you have to lower your tariffs. You have to open your market, your domestic markets in the way that we've opened up to you.
Let me, you know, this is the one case in your book that I take some issue with. Okay. Partly because when you mentioned Ross Perot and he was the giant sucking sound, he was talking about NAFTA. Is that correct? Creating a free trade zone between Mexico and Canada along with China. Those are our top three trading partners. Most economists now say, you know, NAFTA's effect on American employment levels was minimal. And almost overwhelmingly, when you look at the volume of trade, it's been good for the American people. Is China, and you are at pains to say you're not anti-globalization, you're not anti-free trade. It's mostly that because China did not open its borders up, these are a problem. Is it, you know, to focus on the loss of industrial jobs in America in the 21st century, is that kind of missing the forest for the trees? Because industrialization or factory jobs as a percentage of the labor force in America peaked in the late 1940s. I mean, it actually peaked during World War II. And it's been a kind of straight line decline. You and I have probably gone through at least three or four major panics about de-industrialization. And the most recent one, as you know, overall, like before the financial crisis and your stuff on that we'll get to in a minute, you know, the economy was, you know, labor force participation rates were still strong for years after, you know, up through 2006. And, you know, job creation was overall, it just was shifting out of the last few industrial jobs. And is that a problem? I say that as somebody who's worked in factories. I don't want future people to be working in factories. That's something robots can do.
Yeah. Okay. So, I mean, this is also, Jonah Goldberg actually presented more or less the same argument that you're making. And I'm going to cede aspects of that argument to you and also to Jonah that you're correct. We probably would have had a de-industrialization and we probably would have had a shifting in our labor force whether we let China in or not. However, we would not have if we had just protected the West from Chinese, what I would, I'm not going to say adventurism, that's the wrong word. I would say Chinese economic planning to become the colossus that they are. I don't even have a problem with them being a colossus, but we needed to protect the West by just making the trade fairer. I am for global trade. I do believe in the David Ricardo principle of seeking the lowest cost provider globally, which will create more abundance for the society. But I think if Robert Lighthizer was joining this call, who used to run the US trade, he was the US trade representative for Donald Trump the first time, a good friend of mine, he would say that no trade is free. We have to have fair trade. And the reason I'm saying this is that China has now become sort of interesting. It's the only thing that they all agree on in a bipartisan way, that they have become adversarial to the economic and perhaps political interests of the United States. And so, I point out in the book, yes, minimal changes in manufacturing, yes, American workers feel worse or they feel left out, yes, but it's really to me the geopolitical pressure that China has put on the world. And had we checked them a little more carefully, Nick, I don't think they would have the influence they have now. It would have been a much fairer thing for the world. And so to me, it's malpractice. It's political malpractice by Western leadership to leave the door open like that. But remember, as I point out, and by the way, if this was a book about my mistakes, Nick Gillespie, it would be a phone book. It'd be like a trilogy. It wouldn't be, you know, we'd have to have a 10-hour podcast, right? The point of this book, and I really do appreciate you reading it, is it's not me being partisan or me being tribal. It's me being observant, and I'm saying that Democrats that were well-intentioned, they made some mistakes. Republicans well-intentioned, trying to get good outcomes, also bad outcomes took place. And so, yes, you're right. If you're making the case, hey, we lost our industrialization because we let China into the WTO, you could come with facts and say, Anthony, that's not really true. And I'll cede that. But what we did, though, is we made China unnecessarily more powerful and more competitive with the West than we needed to. And it would have given the West a little bit more flexibility in its economies and a little more flexibility in its geopolitical footprint around the world, which I would argue would have made us more prosperous.
Well, and I mean you hint at this as well that it also might have forced China to not just open up its economy but liberalize its cultural and societal order. I'm not sure of that, but you know, there's no question, and you know, I say this with a lot of huge respect and admiration for Milton Friedman, but when he talked about how, you know, you actually deregulate the economy first and then as people get wealthier, they lobby for more political rights and more social freedom. And that seemed to be going along perfectly until the Tiananmen Square massacre, which you talk about, and then even later when Xi emerges really, you know, over the past 15 years or so, and you see, you know, and this is something I don't think our leaders in America have figured out, that like, okay, China, you talk about it as a post-communist economy. They're not doing a planned economy per se, but it is more and more of an authoritarian state even as it is becoming more and more economically powerful, and we just really haven't seen that before.
No, no question. And so this is a really, I didn't put this in the book, but this is something I'll mention to you. Really studying China, it's actually way more balkanized, Nick, than we would perceive. You know, like when you look at India, to really study India, you know, there's about 70 different countries inside of India with 70 different foods and cultures and dialects, but we treat it as one monolith, like as the way we see the United States. China, same thing. There's seven distinct provinces. It's quite balkanized. It's glued together by the 90 million people that identify as Communist Party members. And so there is a level of repression to keep that thing glued together. And there's a level of authoritarian behavior in China. And look at what they're doing to the Uyghurs or look at the situation. You know, I mean, the Dalai Lama, all the different things that go on with Tibet, you get the point that I'm making. And we thought, you know, what Milton Friedman would say, they're going to get richer. As they get richer, they're going to seek more liberal political ideas and liberal philosophies. And they were not ready for that, nor did they want that. And if you really study their 5,000-year culture, that was another thing that we got wrong. But since you brought up Friedman, if you don't mind, because I know you're a libertarian, and I have a lot of libertarian streaks in my personality. There are two things that he said that haunt us and I live with. Okay? And one Trump got right. Okay? And I'll just, because I want to be as objective as possible. Milton Friedman once said, 'If you have a welfare state, you got to protect your border because if you don't protect your border, the people are going to run across the border, participate in the welfare state.' That's their economic incentive to do so. And you know, Biden didn't get that. Trump got that. You know, he's done a good job on the border. Drug trafficking is down. Narcotic trafficking, child trafficking, God forbid, is also down. And that's generally been good. We need to have legal immigration. Not illegal immigration is where Trump is terrible. I mean, because his aim is not simply illegal immigration, but it is illegal immigration. And we...
