Good day again from Newsweek headquarters at the top of the World Trade Center in a beautiful spring New York City. I'm Carlo Versano and this is the 1600.
This country was stone cold dead. So we were talking this week with Geraldo Rivera. We were talking with Geraldo, if you didn't see it, sort of about how Trump thinks, right? Geraldo is a longtime, you know, friend of, former friend I should say, of the president. What makes him tick, how he thinks, what he thinks about, how he thinks about war in particular. So we're going to sort of pick up that conversation today with another man who has a long and I guess you could say sorted history with our president.
Yeah, but I mean, Geraldo's wrong though. I mean, and I love Geraldo and we know each other a long time, but nobody's friends with Donald Trump.
Okay. So he's not a friend of Donald Trump. He was an acquaintance and a transaction in Donald Trump's field of vision, but there's nobody that's friends with him.
Okay. Fair enough. Okay. Well, as you could tell, Anthony Scaramucci, the Mooch in living color with me here. It's good to be with you, man.
Thanks. Just in case you don't, I'm sure you... I'm liking the socks, Carl. It's a little not Italian, those socks, to be honest. That's a little bit more... No, it's more of a waspy look, actually.
No, there's like a George Herbert Walker Bush like waspy thing going on.
It's your show, brother. No, your socks are great.
This is what happens. You get two Italians in a room together.
It goes to the socks. Okay, so the Mooch is with me now. If you don't know Anthony, obviously you should know him. He's been everywhere. He's an investor, he's an entrepreneur, founder and managing partner of SkyBridge Capital, and of course the co-host of the excellent and award-winning The Rest Is Politics US podcast. So Anthony, we got a lot to talk about.
It's great to be here. It's a great office. God bless.
Thank you. I appreciate having you. I've long appreciated you as a sort of figure in our weird moment.
You got to tell it straight, right? New Yorkers, right?
New York Italian guys. All right. So, what you were saying about Geraldo was interesting because that was actually my first question. When I was talking to him, he was basing, right? He was struggling to reconcile the fact that he thinks that Trump is basically insane. He's gone off the reservation. You know, he broke with him on January 6th. They had a falling out. But at the same time, he talked about how he was actually a good friend to him and that he was good to his family. He was always generous, a gracious host, a gregarious sort of acquaintance.
That's different from being a friend, though. Nobody's friends with Trump.
Okay, that's... well, that's...
You know, here's what friend... the definition of friendship, you ride the highs and lows together, right? And you're in it, you know, you don't have to be right about everything. You don't have to, you know, be in sync perfectly. You're not in sync perfectly with your spouse. You fight, but you're in it together. You know, no one's in it together with Trump. And nobody likes Trump. That's his fate. No family member likes Trump, nobody in his inner circle likes Trump. They make a Faustian pact to deal with the devil.
They make a Faustian... I did it, by the way. So, I know the Faustian pact. You don't even realize you're doing it at the time you're doing it. You're being driven by your ego. You're being driven by your pride. And unfortunately, this is the tale as old as time. There's a seductive pattern to power. And so trouble always finds willing, you know, levers to take advantage of basically.
Well, that's interesting because...
So Geraldo, I mean, just to give you a news flash because I know you listen to 1600. You can call me anytime. You have my cell phone number. You weren't friends with the guy. He has no friends. He doesn't think of you as a person. You're just an object in the guy's field of vision.
Right. Do you think he feels that way about his family?
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Everybody. No, he doesn't give a shit about anybody. You allowed a curse on this?
Yeah, why not? Okay. Sure. He'll take care of us.
It's interesting because I've... okay, so I think that's fair. But I have heard from a lot of people that he's actually much more sort of gregarious and self-aware in private than he is in public.
Okay, that's different. That's different.
Okay, so he can be incredibly charming. He can be literally effusive.
He'll kiss Gavin Newsom's privately, right? He'll be like, 'Oh, Gavin, we're good.' Right? He'll shit on a journalist and then five minutes later call them and say, you know, that was really just for the cameras over here. We're good. Right. That's part of his charm. That's part of the seduction of Donald Trump. Again, that's different.
Yeah, you got to understand who he is. Once you understand who he is, the patterns are pretty easy to predict. And then, you know, even though he's quote unquote unpredictable, he's actually very predictable.
He's predictably unpredictable, right? And we all, I mean, we know this guy better than any of us probably ever wanted to now. And he hasn't gone nuts by the way. This is him. You got to know who he is. He's not nuts. He's exactly the way he's always been. His ankles are a little swollen. His brain is moving a little slower.
It's the same guy. No different.
I remember in the first term you were very critical of his personal demeanor. And I remember one of the things that you were very vocal about was that shooting in El Paso. It was like 2017 or 2018 maybe. I think it was at the Walmart in El Paso. Do you remember this? And I remember you said there was something about how Trump carried himself during that visit. It was supposed to be sort of a solemn visit to, you know, talking with the families.
He's doing a thumbs up pictures, people like this, right? Where the people are dying and there's a mass shooting going on. You know, there's no pathos. There's no empathy. There's no connection to human beings. And so it's a weird time in America because we elected somebody... a very large group of Americans are very angry, they feel left out of the system. They feel, you know, the people I grew up with, I was in a blue collar family as a kid, we were economically aspirational, we thought we were getting ahead. Those very same families today in America are economically desperate, right? And justifiably, and they're angry about it. And so he's an avatar of their anger and he's a representative of the anger without a solution. And so unfortunately they picked the wrong guy. And so he's, you know, and the other thing, the weird thing about him, and you got to give him credit for this, he's a persistent sob. And so he could have after January 6th faded out, we all thought, right? You know, but I don't think, you see, the problem is, and the Democrats didn't understand this, because of the lawfare, they were ridiculously going after him. If they just left him be, he probably would play golf, right? But he looked around and said, 'Hey man, if I don't go back in, I'm going to jail.' Yeah. Right. And so he had to go run again. So, but he's persistent. He's aggressive. He's making himself billions of dollars now. God only knows how many bribes he's taken through this whole process. God only knows.
Well, no, I want to ask you about that. So you said something...
This is one of the worst people on the planet. And this is like one of the worst people to have at this position at this time in American history. By the way, we're going to be fine. I'll give you my whole theory on that in a minute. But we're going to be fine. But I mean, you got to look around, step back and say, 'Guys, this guy is not who we need, right? In a country like ours, okay, who has been a country of great success and a country of general benevolence, not perfect. We had the stain of slavery, discrimination, racism. I'm not saying we're a perfect country, but it's a country that's striving to become more perfect. This is just a bad stain and bad mark in our history. We have to reflect back on it when it's over and try to renew ourselves.'
Yeah. Okay. I want to get to all that. But one of the things I want to start with is the war because I feel like this is a... he really hoodwinked his voters on this thing. You know, we've talked on the podcast and the newsletter about, I know you have on your show, about how the whole point of MAGA, the whole point of bringing this guy back in office was no new wars and cheaper groceries. Now we've got inflation going back up and we've got what looks to me like a cluster in the Middle East right now. You know, who knows how this is going to go. It's been going on for about five weeks or so. How do you think he... how did we get here? How did he get pulled into this after saying explicitly he was not going to go to war anywhere but explicitly with Iran?
Well, I mean, look, it's a long complicated story and there's different viewpoints and there's different intelligence. So let's just talk about that quickly. If you look at Iran and North Korea as rogue states, as Americans would define rogue states, they are satellites of two of our competitive adversaries. That would be Russia and China. And so then the question is, have they been more or less kept in control by those two countries? And for North Korea, we would say yes. Clinton made a mistake. He probably could have been more aggressive and kept them from getting a nuke. They got the nuke and now we're not going to mess with them. It becomes a whole separate issue with the nuke. And the Iranians don't have a nuke and the Israelis have been very good at making sure that they haven't had a nuke. And I want to be generous to the Israelis here for a second and just remind people that in the Islamic Republic's constitution, the Islamic Republic of Iran, the constitution says two things. One, we're going to export our form of radical fundamentalism. That really upsets the Gulf states who are generally secularists. And number two, we want to eliminate Israel. Israel does not have a right to exist. And Ahmadinejad years ago, 2001, gave a speech here at the UN saying that we really do want to wipe Israel off the map. So if you're the prime minister of Israel, of course you have to have part of your national defense strategy, you know, an aggression against Iran. So now the question is the United States, where should the United States be on this? Okay, they are a satellite state, by the way. We have our own satellite states technically, of course. And so then the question is where should we be on this? And Trump made a decision. Why? Could it be the Epstein files? Could it be something they have over him that they were pushing on him? Is it a distraction? What was the decision that he made? Because he bombed them in June of last year and then said that their nuclear capacity was destroyed. So no one has been clear why they did the war. No one has been clear, which is why I've been dead set against it. We're in it now. I love our troops and I'm an American and I obviously want us to be successful, but guys that want ground troops on the ground, I would say to them on your show, have you been to a military hospital? So, you haven't been to a military hospital before you make the decision and be all gung-ho about a war, why don't you go to a military hospital? Number two, I've been on civilian trips to Afghanistan and Iraq, okay? Troop support missions. One in Iraq in 2011, one in Afghanistan in 2015. So when you get on the ground and talk to people, it's an incredibly complicated situation. And by the way, the incentives in these countries are totally different than the incentives in the country that you and I live in. And so we have to think all of those things through. Did he do any of that? He did not do any of that.
They told him they were going to close the strait. They told him, explained to him how they were going to close the strait. And he got it in his head that he was going to be able to do this because he's Donald Trump, supreme narcissist and he was going to be able to... he did the Maduro operation. It was more or less... be able to convince them that this was going to be a secular takeover of Iran and they told him it's going to be like the Six-Day War in '67 or the 12-day war last year. We're going to take this thing over. You're going to have some big meeting somewhere in the Middle East with the new supreme leader, right? And everyone's going to laud you as a hero. And the area of the world and the dynamic between all of the different players and the energy proposition in the world makes everything that I just said incredibly difficult. But that's the simplistic narrative. And by the way, you guys did some reporting on this and so did others. Vance asked them and told them, 'Please don't do it.' And then Vance went after Netanyahu and said, you know, you sold a cheap bill of goods to Trump on doing the war, right?
No, that strikes me as Vance's people trying to get in front of this and put him out as kind of the... he was against the war, but he at least, you know, he's going to try and be part of the peace, whatever that is.
Look, he's a reluctant war hawk now, but Vance is finished. I mean, he finished himself.
I said this on my podcast, Rubio, Vance, they're finished. You can't be this close to Trump. Trump destroys everything in his path. Everything. Now the question is, it's an amazing country, 250 years storied history, lots of exciting things, a grand experiment on the world stage. Can we survive Donald Trump? And the answer is maybe, you know, likely.
But you know what I'm concerned about is the Article One and Article Three of the Constitution. Dudes, what are you guys doing? Okay. Because you know if Washington were around, he'd be looking at you saying, 'What are you doing exactly?' So Article One is Article One. The Congress is supposed to check Article Two. What are you guys doing? What do they do all day? Yeah. Well, Lindsey Graham's over there in Disney World like riding Space Mountain.
I think Thune has really been surprisingly bad, you know. I mean, and you probably saw him on Friday sneaking around the TSA line to get the escort around security. He's just so out of touch, you know.
Yeah. And someone go to the phone. He calls. Look, listen. Here's the situation. Okay. If you don't knock it off, I'm going to call Schumer. We're going to get the 67 votes set up. Okay. So, now whatever happens in the midterms, likely the Democrats will get the House. You'll get impeached in the House and we're going to vote you out.
So, if you don't knock it off and start to conform your behavior, you know, he's also doing something that is so quintessentially un-American. This is the first time in our history where we're down to decision making by one, right? Okay. Washington didn't do that. Lincoln didn't do that. You know, Lincoln had a team of rivals. Trump has a team of mirrors.
They're trying to reflect back to him what they think he wants to hear, which I think is why we got into this war. I don't think we would have gotten into this war in the first term when there were people.
He wanted war in the first term. Kelly stopped it.
Kelly stopped it. Right. Mattis stopped it. He wanted this in the first term.
He's always had a bug up his ass about Iran, right?
He asked people privately, I'm not going to get into the names because it's not fair to them, 'What would be the ramifications if we nuked Iran?' This is how nuts the guy is, you know? See, when Geraldo says he's become crazy, I don't agree. He's always been a little crazy. The question is who's going to be around him to try to corral it? And the answer is nobody. Now, so...
Do you think Susie Wiles has any sort of ability to do that?
Zero. They let him do whatever he wants.
So back to the war briefly, if we're going on the time, so you were in the White House for 11 days, I believe, as the chief of communications.
I worked for Trump for nine months. Yeah. I knew him for 20 years prior to that. I'm not saying I had a great relationship with him. Again, anybody that tells you that they're Donald Trump's friend, they do not understand the relationship. Are not friends with Donald Trump.
Okay. And by the way, you know, he was searching for friends in 2016. He was like making up people, you know, because he's not that close to anybody, right?
He's inside his own head talking to himself all day. So, yeah, I knew him. I guess the only thing I would say about my relationship with him back then, because you see the way I'm talking to you, that's how I talk to him.
Okay. And I think he appreciated that about me.
Well, he's a New Yorker, too.
Yeah. Exactly. So like guys like Priebus, I mean he was a joke of jokes. I mean Priebus was like... first chief of staff in the first... he was like this guy Ryan Priebus was like from Wisconsin. So he tried to play like Richie Cunningham and like howdy doody and like golly gee. But what a backstabber. I mean you never seen a backstabber like this. I used to call him Kenosha Nostra, you know, because he was from Kenosha, Wisconsin, but he was really like a mobster. He would be like, 'Oh golly gee, Anthony.' Then he'd be on the phone with Newsweek saying, 'Right, could you please write a really bad story about Anthony?' I mean, this guy was a terrible human being.
He was dropping dimes on Trump left and right. And but I will say this about Reince Priebus. He got Trump's number early. He once said to me, he'll deny of course saying this when I don't really give a shit, but he said to me, 'I don't think you realize how crazy he is.' And this was like two, three months into the administration. Because he was the first chief of staff. He said to me, 'I don't think you realize how crazy he is.' And Reince, if you're listening, you're right. I didn't realize how crazy he is. I do realize how crazy he is now.
So the war is going on for Scaramuccis, give or take, if we go by the... or one Liz Truss. It could be one Liz Truss.
So Liz Truss was the British prime minister who lasted about 10 days.
Just say... I mean why are you jipping me out of the day? And Carlo, don't hurt my feelings. I mean, I know it's your show, but I mean, it's 11 days. Well, you're dropping lights. Everything's going badly.
We're dying here. Okay. I'm sorry. 11 days. All right. So, the war is going...
You also say 954,000 seconds because it sounds better.
All right. So, the war is going on about four Scaramuccis. How many Scaramuccis do you expect us to be in this mess?
So, you have decision-making by one. And so there's nobody that could really predict. He could announce ground troops. We're talking before his 9:00 PM address today. He could announce ground troops. He could announce a ceasefire. I don't think anybody really knows. My guess is he's going to put ground troops in the area.
Ground troops are coming.
Yeah. Because I know Trump, he's a 12-year-old in certain ways. You're not moving things into the region, right? Not to use them, right?
Okay. And so we do have a little bit of a munitions issue. All right, because we're pumping out, you know, these missiles that we use, 2,400 missiles. We can only make 650 of them a year. So, we do have a little bit of ammunition imbalance now, which I know they're worried about.
Yeah, we also put our aircraft carriers at a striking distance of these hypersonic missiles. So we are worried about the way we're set up still as a Cold War military in sort of this guerrilla drone war activity that's happening now. The modern warfare is probably different than the way we're traditionally set up. Having said that, these fighting forces who've got 20 plus years of experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, 82nd Airborne, the Marine Expeditionary Forces, they're second to none. And so if he's going to drop them in the area, it'll probably take them six weeks, clear out the area. You know this, most people do know this, but these sort of scuba tank sized uranium canisters, they've got decoys all over the country.
