Is This The End Of MAGA? — ft. Anthony Scaramucci

This is an amazing question because he is what H.R. McMaster called him — he's a reflexive contrarian. He got his full ass kicked. So to me, people said, "Oh, he's going to go crazy and get super aggressive." And you and I saw last night that he didn't do that. We also saw today that he didn't do that. But that is such an interesting strategy. If he pulls the plug on those things, their popularity will equalize. A couple of things like that would be absolutely political genius on his part. And the thing I know about him better than anything, he's a transactionalist.

Well, first of all, you were terrific this morning, and I appreciate you being with me. I'm going to say something meta and then say something micro. I think the meta thing is total repudiation of Donald Trump. That word's been overused today, but I would say the micro thing is if you go candidate by candidate, particularly the senatorial candidates for the Democrats, they were decent, they were reasonable, they were in the consensus. Didn't see a lot of Democratic socialists in that mix, and that's why they were able to break some norms. Terrible, the win in Kansas — I mean, it came close there in Mississippi. You and I were laughing about it this morning, you know. I mean, so I just want you to think of the magnitude of this. And guys, just for one second, you've got 55 Senate seats and you've got 250 House of Representatives seats for the Democrats. I mean, that is staggering in what has typically been a 50/50 country since the year 2000. And Ron DeSantis said it better than me, so I'm going to say it to you. Take a look at the calendar. Take a look at the states that are up in 2028, 2030, and 2032, and look at the magnitude of that victory, and it seems impossible over the next six years that the Democrats will lose the House and the Senate. Now, listen, crazy things happen. If they get a Trump-like figure in the Democratic Party, there'll be a resounding trouncing, of course. But they really did seismic, meteoric damage to the Republican Party. We can talk about the aftermath of it, but it was a combination of the electorate said enough of Trump, and then the other piece of this thing, which I think you know, Ed, is that if you bring the moderates to the game, or as your colleague Scott Galloway says, raging moderates, they're going to win elections in the United States right now.

I agree. But then I want you to point to me to a leader that wasn't MAGA. Tell me one leader that you and I could point to, household name, somebody that people could recognize, national figure or a local figure, who wasn't MAGA. They all went into the bucket for MAGA. Now, if you want to bring Chris Christie back, you want to bring Liz Cheney back, you want to bring Paul Ryan back, okay, that's differentiating, but who are you going to bring? They're all MAGA, MAGA-adjacent, MAGA-light. Now, they'll distance themselves. They'll burn their red hats and they'll try to get themselves photoshopped out of the thumbs-up picture with Donald Trump. But to point to the person that you could go to and say, "Okay, MAGA is done, Trump blew it, but you're now the person, he or she, representing the non-MAGA side of the party."

Well, listen, I think it's going to be very hard for guys like Rubio and JD Vance. They are dipped in ruby-red Donald Trump. I don't know how they get out of it. David McCormick, I think he's adjacent. He'll try to say that he isn't. He'll try to use his veteran status. I think he's somebody that could run for president. He's a good guy. I like David McCormick. But I'm just saying he is MAGA. He can't pretend otherwise. He curried favor to Donald Trump to win the election in 2024, and some of Trump's coattails in Pennsylvania helped him. Glenn Youngkin, I would say he's probably the least MAGA of the MAGAs, but he was still pretty MAGA when he was governor of Virginia. He's a talented guy. But then again, you know this and I know this — you need the rizz, Edson. You need a little bit of the rizz. Any of those guys have the rizz? You know, Chris Christie's got the rizz.

You know, I would like, if you don't mind, it's a mini soliloquy, but I want to do this for your viewers because it's gotten traction, and I want people to think about it. Okay? Why did Trump and the Republicans get trounced? Okay, you ready? And I did this this morning. You heard me do it. It's the gas prices. It's the war that wasn't authorized. It's the corruption — the full-on billions of dollars stolen by Trump and his cronies. It's the incompetence. What about the tariffs? Of course, they were illegal. Even the ones he's put on right now are likely illegal. Playing nice with Putin and Russia. The impression of cruelty. You're an American citizen. We don't like the cruelty. No, Americans see themselves as decent people, even if other people around the world don't see us that way. We don't like the cruelty. We think it makes us look bad in its bad form. Overly aggressive deportations, the accidental arrests of American citizens who were Hispanic, the arrogance. How about Pistol Pete Hegseth and his level of arrogance? The ballroom, the reflecting pool that doesn't reflect, the golf courses where he's cutting down trees where the judges tell him don't cut the trees down, the Qatari 747, the aggressive redistricting push, and what about the threats against our allies, treating them like they're adversaries? I mean, come on. You know, it's an overwhelming list, and each person had a different reason, and maybe some of the people had all of those reasons to vote these guys out of office. But you're taking the state of Texas back to 1988. You're taking the state of Kansas back to 1932. I pointed out to people the last senator from the state of Kansas was born in 1879, Edson. So, I mean, this is a full-on blowout. This is a full-on steamrolling. And, you know, obviously I couldn't be happier about it. I mean, I know you're an objective guy and you got a great British accent, but I'm not an objective guy. I want these people smoked out of their houses, and I want them fleeing the village.

So I mean, this is an amazing question because he is what H.R. McMaster called him — he's a reflexive contrarian. Everybody thought he was going to go crazy and bombastic and reject the election. Well, it turns out he's not Vladimir Putin. He's more like Viktor Orbán. You know, the election was overwhelming. He can't pick up the phone anywhere and say, "Hey, we're short 2,000 votes." He's got to pick up the phone and say, "Hey, help me find 20 million votes." I mean, he got his full ass kicked. So to me, people said, "Oh, he's going to go crazy and get super aggressive." And you and I saw last night that he didn't do that. We also saw today that he didn't do that. But that is such an interesting strategy. If he pulls the plug on those things, their popularity will equalize. Okay, just remember before the election, the Democrats are polling in the 20s, 25%, 30%. The Democrats are polling like the IRS polls, or like the cable company that won't answer your phone call when you're trying to get your cable service back up. And so to me, a couple of things like that would be absolutely political genius on his part. And the thing I know about him better than anything, he's a transactionalist. You know, "I hate Jeff Bezos. I'm going to break up his company." Okay, sir, you just won the election. Jeff Bezos is coming in with a million dollars for the inaugural and $40 million for Melania. "Okay, I love Jeff Bezos. Sit him behind my family at the inauguration." "I hate Mark Zuckerberg. He banned me from Facebook and Instagram, and he gave me a huge hassle and he censored me." Okay, well, here he comes with the money. Let's change. So it is very plausible that he could do that. You know, Brian Lanza, you and I interviewed him this morning. He said, "Well, what if Trump just goes in the other direction on tariffs?" You know, and I know because you're a great reporter that the Republicans are pushing him every which way on the tariffs. You know that Susan Collins, one of the big reasons she lost up in Maine, were the tariffs, because she's in a border state and she's been woefully economically impacted by it. Mike Rogers knows that a big part of that loss in Michigan is related to the tariffs. So just imagine if he goes in a reverse course, and there's no way we could look around and say, "No, Trump is not capable of that." Everybody. He was blasting Mamdani, communist, socialist, this, that, and the other thing. He'd lovey-dovey with Mamdani at City Hall, at Gracie Mansion, and in the Oval Office. So that's part of the calculus. You got to definitely look at that, Ed. Could it happen ASAP? I doubt it. A broad rollback of the tariffs would likely be unlikely. He's also still pressing them. You know, Carney said two days ago there has been some progress after the US has dropped some of their demands. Okay. And so you could see a deal now with Canada. But let me tell you something about Mark Carney. He's also got to be very careful. He is so popular, Ed, for sticking to his guns in Canada. If he cuts that deal, there better never be any perception in that deal that he made major concessions to Donald Trump. It'll hurt his political standing. The best thing that's happened to Mark Carney's political career is Donald Trump. You know, the conservatives were about to win in Canada. Trump comes along acting like a jackass. Carney wins the election handily, and Carney knows how to play this guy, and he's got a 70-plus percent approval rating in Canada. So to me, Trump could make those moves. It wouldn't surprise me. The flip side is, I said this this morning, I'll say it on your show: he had $800 million in his war chest. He spent 10 million of it. What is he waiting for? Maybe the setup is in 2028 by Vance, by Rubio, and here's $300 million on one of my adult children.

Well, I mean, he did that last night. We both saw that, and we were both laughing about it, and he was getting schooled by Bret Baier about the polls. But Trump did say something that the results would have been different if his name was on the ballot. And I actually do agree with him. The margin of the losses would have been way bigger. And that's the irony of the whole thing. Okay. And he sort of knows that. Okay. He's also got a vice president that's trying to reposition himself now. And Vance is saying, "Well, this happened because of the war." And Vance did something very clever. He got Don Jr. to say the same thing, right? They both came out today and said it was the war that turned people off and dissuaded people from MAGA. And I want to go to DeSantis for a second, because he did say that we have close to an extinction-level event. You know, again, six years, very unlikely to lose power. But you know, listen, to me it's what do the Democrats do with this victory? What do they do with it? Because if they run it up the middle and they put more moderates in place and they try to build a coalition with some level of compromise to common-sense pragmatists in the Republican Party, look out, they could really control the card table. If they decide that no, no, no — there was one conservative pundit that kept playing the replay on a liberal cable news channel of a woman saying, "Hey everybody, woke is back. Woke is back." I don't know. You think woke is back? I mean, you know, Fox News is going to play that tune all day tonight and tomorrow, but the truth of the matter is, if woke is back, that's going to be very bad for the Democrats. And this is going to be a very short-lived victory. And I would suggest to my Democratic friends, even if you like woke, go see your sister AOC and ask AOC what she thinks about the culture war right now. Because she took her pronoun usage and her designation off her Twitter feed. She's telling people that woke one was crazy. And she's trying to indicate to you guys, hey, ma'am, I don't want to fight that. I want to deliver on affordability. I want to deliver on getting us out of this war. And Ed, you're a markets guy, so I just want to say this to people. The war is a half-a-trillion-dollar venture because it's $50 billion in climbing to leave the Navy where it is, the Marine Expeditionary Forces, all of that stuff. It is 150, possibly 200. It's $2,400 a family in the increase in energy costs in the country, which isn't just gasoline and diesel. It's also fuel and jet fuel. Okay. You saw the prices coming over the pond, how expensive it's become. The other thing that's happened is we raised interest rates. You know, on your show, because I listened to your show, we were talking, or you were talking with your guests, about lowering interest rates in calendar year 2026. So last November, you, me, others were saying, "Okay, the consensus is two, possibly three rate cuts this coming year." He declares war. The ten-year is at 3.96 going into the war. It's over 4.90 now. It peaked in the 5.30s. So I mean, look at what he did, and those costs. So it's not just the 50 bill here, the 200 bill for the energy, but now you have increased borrowing costs all over the society. And as a result of interest rate rises, you have certain stocks that are down. So, you've killed people in their 401k and in their savings. And you didn't get the outcome. There's no outcome here other than this will probably go on forever.

Oh, I mean, listen, for 30 years, Yale Hirsch and now his son Jay Hirsch are the authors of the Stock Trader's Almanac. Have you ever seen it?

Okay. I'm going to send you a copy for Christmas because I get them delivered to me, and I like giving them out to my friends. And in the Almanac, it talks about the seasonality, like the Farmer's Almanac. It talks about the seasonality of stocks, and it talks about different issues that happen in stocks, but it also talks about four-year presidential election cycles that go all the way back to 1896. And it turns out that when you have a mixed cycle, when you have the Congress turn to the Democrats and the Republicans still keep the presidency, people actually get bullish. And the main reason they get bullish is there's almost complete gridlock in Washington, and nothing gets done. You know, and this happened during the Clinton era. You know, they eventually shut down the government, but then they reached a compromise, and some of that compromise was reform-based, that led to some budgetary surplus in the year 2000, as I write about in the book All the Wrong Moves. And let me tell you something, Ed, that mixed government helped the country. So if you go back to 1896, anytime you get in a situation like this, it's been better for the stock and bond market.

I think there's one missing piece to this, because again, this is a markets commentary show in addition to politics, but I think the missing piece is the data center piece. And so the data centers are very unpopular. Sherrod Brown went after Huston on the data center issue, as did others. And I think the AI boom was supposed to be the GOP's economic story, but it ended up on the ballot as somebody's utility bill. I think it's important for people to understand that they felt, holy, the data center is here in my neighborhood. It's not environmental. It's drawing too much power, and because of the demand-supply mix for power, my prices are going way up, and people weren't happy about that.

I think so. You know, and I think so. And let me tell you, the exit polling, it was high enough on the list, and it's fairly universal. Younger people don't like it. You know, I think it got beaten almost everywhere. You know, anywhere where there was a regulating message and a "we got to figure this out" message, that candidate generally did well. You know, go to Ohio for a second. Okay. The voters rejected the AI buildout almost everywhere it was on the ballot. There were 14 municipalities that passed bans and/or restrictions on data centers in the state of Ohio. You know, now I could argue, man, that could be economically stupid, but this reminds me of the WTO issue. You know, you and I talked about this. You know, we let China into the World Trade Organization, and the working-class family says, "Don't do that. It's going to really hurt us." And Wall Street's poo-pooing them. There's symmetry here. You know, the working-class family is saying, "Don't do this. It's going to kill our jobs. Whoever's our white-collar family member that's administrative or in an early-stage consultancy is going to get knocked out of the job. Don't do this." That's the message in the polling.