Anthony, welcome back into the back room.
Good to see you, Andy. How are you?
Good. Well, we got a bunch of things I want to talk to you about, but I got to ask you the most important question. You were all set for tonight. You got your Melania movie ticket.
Well, if you go on Craigslist, you can get $50. Did you see that? So, they'll pay you $50. You get free admission. You get paid to go. There's an auditor in the theater and you got to stay for the whole thing. At the end of the whole thing, you get a $50 gift card.
Oh, all right. Well, so if you want to go, I mean, they'll pay you to go to the movie. You know, I don't think I would. We're at the Trump Kennedy Center now. So, it used to be called the Kennedy Center, but it's now the Trump Kennedy Center. So, pretty amazing, right?
Yeah. Look, I made a movie and I had HBO fund it. And to me, 40 million bucks for the film and 35 to promote it is insanity. Insanity. I don't know what the ultimate motivation is there, but that is just crazy.
Without any soundtracks, right? So, in other words, if you look at the documentaries, if they've got to purchase music rights, for the documentaries, they usually go, you know, pretty big ticket. But this doesn't have any of that.
So listen, 28 million of the 40 was to the Trump family for the licensure of the material. But I mean that's a small drop in the bucket of the 1.5 billion that the New York Times says that President Trump has collected during the first year of his presidency. But we know that that's a low number. But listen, a very dangerous time in America. We're going to prosecute adversaries of the president. We're going to use the Department of Justice to come after.
Yeah, let's talk about that because it's breaking news this morning. Don Lemon, I mean, what the hell?
We're in a very dangerous, slippery slope. I've said it consistently. I said it before the election. I've said it, frankly, since 2019. It's a very dangerous time for America. But I will say this, Trump is a byproduct of elitism, arrogance, and Trump is a byproduct of a failure of the establishment to help the working poor and the lower middle income people that are really struggling. And so, there's a culture war going on, whether we like that or not, Andy, that's going on. Trump is winning that culture war, by the way. The Democrats are in complete disarray. His success as a politician is directly related to the failure of the Democratic party. You have to just accept that. So the only politician that they put up against him, and this is before he was sundowning, Joe Biden beat him handily. Beat him like a drum to use Joe Biden's own words. But you put Kamala Harris in an impossible situation. 107 days to beat Donald Trump. He was beating her on the culture war. She wouldn't go into the lion's den of Fox News or the podcast hosting community and she raised a ton of money and she was very well organized for the debate and she's a nice person but she didn't have the name recognition. Even, you know what the most searched phrase on the evening of the election, November 2024, did Joe Biden drop out? That was the number one search phrase on Google. So we did her a disservice, the democracy a disservice, and now we're living with Donald Trump and he's going to get worse. Okay, so I'm going to stipulate to your viewers and listeners that as exhausting as the last year has been, the last year has been like he's been in office for three years. Okay? But you know what? He's only been in office for one year with three years to go. And he is going to get worse. And I will stipulate to people, it will go exponential after the midterms because no matter who wins the midterms, the Republicans or the Democrats, not going to matter. Trump is going to see these last two years of his power as a time to go crazy and full nihilism, full narcissistic nihilism. So, I don't know. At some point, you're going to have to ask yourself, is some politician going to stop him? So, I talked to Democrats, they're not going to stop him. They're very clear about that. I talked to Republicans. They're not going to stop him.
But you don't see like the beginning of some kind of pushback happening? Like something has changed a little bit which could lead to something bigger or could not go anywhere.
Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins said get rid of Kristi Noem. Is that why? No, I don't see anything gigantically changed. Okay. Now, people have told me that Thune and McConnell went to him before his trip to Davos and said, 'Okay, so if you invade Greenland, we're going to impeach and remove you.' I don't know if that's true or not, but where are they going to find the 20 senators, the Republican senators that they need to get that removal? That I don't know. Now, they also told him that there would be all types of other things that happen from the Allied community. And of course the bond market dropped on him and the stock market so he blinked. But your viewers and listeners should know we were running a military preparation for the invasion of Greenland. Okay. So that's how crazy we've gotten in the country where we're going to attack an allied country where we have a treaty since 1951 that allows us to do whatever we think we need to do from a global western alliance, NATO alliance, national security, international security perspective, not enough for Donald Trump. And so he wants to invade and flag Greenland. And by the way, we were running exercises, military exercises, and there were troops lawyering up because a lot of the troops are like, 'Okay, you know, I'm not going to attack a NATO allied country, result of which I'll be in mutiny, and so then what are my legal resources to disavow what I perceive to be an illegal order?'
So, how much do you think that's where we are now? So, we have to tell people where we are because where we are is so shocking to so many people, they're sitting around saying, 'We can't really be there.' You know, we are a group of people that don't like the truth. Andy Ostroy. We don't like the truth, so we pretend it doesn't exist and we live in some realm of denial.
I like how you just said my last name like my mother would be like Andy Ostroy. Because I want to wake you and all your viewers and listeners up to the systemic crisis that we have right now. Okay, we are...
Well, that implies that I'm asleep, which I am not. But I do want to ask you this because there's a lot of people who believe because there's a pattern to what Trump does. You know, we've seen him do this before, which is how he's gotten the name, you know, taco boy or whatever. Trump always chickens out. How much of what he does, be it Greenland, be it arresting Don Lemon, be it going after Tish James, be it all the other that he's been doing, how much of that at the end of the day is just to distract from Minneapolis that two people were murdered, to distract from Epstein because he throws out these bombs and then the courts smack it down or he chickens out and then he goes on to the next bomb. Is that maybe what's happening here? If I want to be as optimistic as I can.
Okay. Okay. But you see, you said you weren't asleep, right? You just said that you're not asleep. I'm implying that you're asleep. Okay. But I got to wake you up a little bit more than that. Okay. Let me hear. Hold on.
Because just playing devil's advocate.
No, but you got to pay attention because first of all, they're releasing 3 million things this morning. The Epstein files, everything's been redacted related to Trump. It just took him months to get whatever Trump's name was or his visual images or whatever he did related to Epstein. Remember one of the victims said that there's stuff in the videos that if it came out Trump would have to resign, right? And so now his Department of Justice has gone through there to get rid of it. Now the bad news is the KGB and others have the video. So they're going to hold it over the president's head. So the distraction is related to that. Some of that and there is a distraction going on but there's also a money grab going on. So Trump wants to distract all of us while he's taking a couple of billion dollars for himself. So Trump's goal has always been I don't need to serve the American people, don't care about the American people. My goal is to create chaos, make you have your attention and your eyeballs on me, and then my secondary or perhaps tied for equal goal is to make money. Those are the two goals. They've always been the two goals. And look, for me, I'm looking at the situation just back from Europe. I spent two weeks in Switzerland, one at the World Economic Forum, and then I flew to London and met with European leaders. Prime Minister Carney is a personal friend of mine. I've met with business leaders all over Europe. And he's breaking the alliance. He's breaking the European alliance. He's forcing Europe, European countries, European companies to rethink their strategy related to the United States. By the way, he's stopping people at the border. You know, there's a young American student that I know, I guess he had pictures on his phone that they didn't like it, so they took his phone and his laptop. Eight months later, hasn't gotten his laptop or phone back. They're doing things to intimidate people into silence. The Fortune 100 CEOs, they will not say a word. And by the way, if you say a word, and one word was said where Jamie Dimon said, 'Hey, I'm not going to give the money to the ballroom because the next administration comes in could cause me a problem.' They say, 'Okay, great. $5 million lawsuit against Jamie Dimon.' $10 billion lawsuit now against the IRS and the Treasury Department. Okay. So, Andy, you tell me. This is some serious stuff, man. And this is stuff that we have nobody in the country. This will be if we get through this and I'm an optimist. I believe we will get through it. But if you're 50 years out writing this history, you're going to be like, 'Okay, how did that happen? Would Eisenhower have allowed that to happen? Would, you know, and you say, 'Well, Joe McCarthy, they let Joe McCarthy run roost, but that was a three-year thing. This guy's looming over the United States for 10 years.' A very, very consequential, systemic, long-term, and in many cases, Andy, irreparable damage. You have the prime minister of the UK visiting with President Xi and more or less saying to you that she, despite his authoritarianism, is a more practical bilateral partner than the United States. You've got the country of Canada, northern border, are practicing war games now because they've been told by President Trump that he's thinking about invading them.
Okay, but that's what he said. But don't you think that's just nonsense? I mean...
If you're a responsible prime minister and the president of the United States is saying he's contemplating an invasion to take over the country and we're going to call you the 51st state and you yourself the governor, what do you do with your Department of Defense? You say, 'Oh, you know, it's just nonsense.'
No, no, no. I'm not saying they shouldn't prepare.
You do have Trump's... Is Trump just spewing nonsense? Okay. But they still have to prepare for it. Andy, you have five-eyed intelligence that have caught the troops in exercise to potentially invade Greenland. So now you're telling me what do you want to do? If you're the PM of Canada and you're me or you, you going to go to your defense department and say, 'Okay, let's war game this. How do we defend ourselves?' So now, what are you going to do? Are you going to ask for the UK to put air bases and put their military alongside of yours to defend yourself against the United States? So, you have to think about the nonsense of all this that you have to think about what percentage of mind share are the leaders around the world. These are corporate leaders and governmental leaders. They have to now contemplate the insanity of Donald Trump. So Tim Cook, also known as Tim Apple, he's got a business he's running, but then he's got mind share related to how he's going to deal with the forces of Donald Trump. Also, the Supreme Court was supposed to render a decision on the tariffs.
