Scaramucci: Trump’s Incompetence May Be What Saves Us- The Fifth Column

When I called him the fattest president since William Howard Taft died. Wow. Yeah, that was harsh. And then I put up a little tiny emoji. I got knocked off of Twitter for fat shaming for 12 hours apparently.

12 hours. I said Trump was the fattest president since William Howard Taft. That got me knocked off Twitter for 12 hours.

I know a lot about it actually. You know a lot about astrology.

Well, you know what they say. The millionaires don't believe in astrology, but the billionaires do.

I know a lot about it.

Well, I don't think it's about that. I think it's about the position of the Earth in the context of the galaxy in the universe. They simply said that you're made out of stardust. Yeah. And as a result of that... Well, let me ask you this. I told you we should start. I didn't know how I knew, but I just kind of felt you coming in with your own operating system or not.

I don't know. Let me get your mother on the phone. Let me ask her if she recognized you from day one and if you're the same person that you were 45 years ago.

I think there are some similarities. Sure. You come in with an operating system. So they understood that. They understood that. Yeah. Did you follow the Artemis launch? Were you really excited about that? Are you into space travel? Because I'm old enough to remember the moon landings and I followed it. Yeah. Followed it, but not taken by it. I got a little emotional. I watched with my kids when they came back. I was looking at all the photos yesterday. The stars, the moon, kind of excited.

What do you mean? What's that?

Oh. Oh, that's where we are. [snorts] Um, I'm deeply skeptical of most of the UAP reporting that I've seen that suggests that the United States has recovered vehicles or biologics as I've heard some people refer to it.

Well, did you see the story in the Wall Street Journal, maybe two years ago, about this hazing ritual in the Air Force and in various other branches where they were telling people that there was this secret government program to recover vehicles and reverse engineer the tech? It just kind of got out of hand, and over the course of years, many people were introduced to this. There are legions of people who believe these programs exist, they've seen documents, they've never seen the crafts, they've been told by people who know what's going on. Most of the story sounds like a game of telephone. So no, I don't believe any of that stuff, because we can't keep secrets. The president gets a [__] in the Oval Office. Everyone finds out about it. If there were aliens and UFOs, we would know.

Oh, he didn't desecrate the Oval Office. [laughter] He desecrated the study.

Oh, did he?

So Steven Spielberg's got a movie coming out in June.

All right. Are you excited about that? I'm not particularly excited about it, I don't think. But I like sci-fi films. It's fine.

Yeah. You rather famously worked for the government.

If you say it that way... I say it that way to my therapist. It makes me feel like I was there longer. I noticed in your book that you were very offended that some people said 10 days and not the full 11.

Especially since I got my ass fired on that day. That was a pretty meaningful day, I thought.

Listen, I put that whole thing behind me. I made a promise to myself that I would never talk about him. But I'll just say this about opportunity. I'll just say this about him. I knew the Lizza family on Long Island. My dad worked with his father, worked with his uncle. And I would say the family was pretty close for 50 years. So the perpetration of what he did, it worked out fine. But as I said, I would never talk about him. I would never talk to him. And you're bringing it up and it's your podcast. I'll be respectful. But when he blew up like he did, I didn't really feel one way or another about it because I'm a real Italian. He's dead to me. So it doesn't really matter. He violated. It's not that he violated a... it's not murky. I don't need people to be silent, but I really thought I was talking like this... not off the record, but when you're talking to somebody where you know the family for 50 years, the question is: do I have to say the preamble 'this is off the record' and then say it four more times during the interview so that when he's recording you, you've got it in the interview four times? And so I would say no. If you're a Washingtonian who's jaded and cynical, they would say yes. So that's over. I didn't really get fired for that reason. If you know Trump, he didn't give a [__] about that. I didn't get fired for that reason. He was laughing about that interview. What I said about Steve Bannon is true. He's the [__] worst person you could meet on planet Earth. Do you believe in God? You're half Irish and half Italian. You believe in God?

I'm pretty close. When you want a restoration of your faith in God, I want you to think about Steve Bannon. Because he's charismatic, he's well-read, he's conversant in our history. But God made him so [__] ugly to protect the civilization from him. So just remember that. God's giving him the extra shirt, the three collars, the double D male tits and all the other [__] associated with it. He is literally the worst person you can come across on the planet.

He would like to isolate the country, bring it back into the 1890s, disavow the David Ricardo principle of free trade, push black and brown people out of the country, and manufacture everything the country needs inside the country.

Well, Trump loves all of that stuff, but there's a difference between Steve and Trump. Steve can actually articulate it. He can cite philosophical references through the canon of history. He's actually read Mein Kampf. Trump may have had it on his nightstand like his first wife said he did, but I don't think he ever read it. Trump has ideas of what he wants and instincts, but Bannon could really articulate it. Bannon was an incredibly dangerous guy.

That's an example of it. And he also had this big castle in Italy that the government took away from him, by the way.

And it was supposed to be the training ground for the far right in Europe. He had a plan. That was in 2018, 2019. You have to remember something, okay? We have to remember the sacredness of what this whole experiment is. There's this beautiful mosaic of people that live here, and it is based on an idea. There's no ancestral cultural lineage. The Italians go back thousands of years, the Irish go back thousands of years, the French, etc. Our government is the longest-dated government now in history, lasting 250 years, but it has no history, and it's teeming with immigrants. Every year we have a new circulation of people that land in the country that have to assimilate. This is why it's such an amazing gift to the world, but it's also why we go through things like what we're going through right now. We have no generational memory. So every 80 years you start the revolution. 80 years later we get the Civil War. We can't reconcile slavery through diplomacy and politics, so we end up reconciling it through violence. That's because we lose our institutional and living memory. Every 80 years we slam ourselves. 80 years after that, we go into the Great Depression, which is the precursor for World War II. And we go into it again. And then guess what happens? We fix ourselves. But now it's 80 years out, and we don't have the living memory of the war. We forget why we set up all these institutions and processes to protect ourselves. So animals like Steve Bannon, these intellectual fascists, think they know better than the rest of us. They would put themselves in power as overlords because they think that's more effective and efficient, like Italian fascism in the 1930s. But this would disavow what Lincoln said about us. Lincoln would have said we have to adhere to the processes of our liberty. Or what would Cicero say about us? We have to be slaves to the law in order to be free. This subordination is what makes us safe to express our individual liberty. These guys don't want that for you. They want to lord over you.

Well, first of all, Trump hated that book. The title was 'The Brutal Collar President'. If you go back and look at the book, I was critical of the immigration policy, critical of his opinion of the press. In fact, that's where the original break started with Trump. Because in that book, I argued that the free press is not the enemy of the people, as he was saying. It's there to check people in power, but it has a secondary, perhaps even more beneficial effect: it teaches people to speak and think freely. When you teach a second grader to speak and think freely, they go on to create Facebook, Apple, or Google. If you suppress that, like in China, you can't rebuke the political leader, so you end up in a camp to be evaluated and helped to think better, which curbs creativity. Those points I made in the book. What I did like about Trump in the beginning, which I referenced in the book, was my upbringing and the challenge of lower-middle-income people in our society who have been completely disenfranchised. We went from aspirational working-class Americans to economically desperational. We did that because we made well-intended mistakes after the Berlin Wall came down. We brought China into the World Trade Organization and left them unfettered and unchecked. They came in with emerging market status, were able to protect their markets, and send goods and services to the West unfettered. We prosecuted a war in the Middle East for two decades, $7 trillion of expenditure, no tax increase — first time in US history. Then the governmental bailout in 2008 gave all the money to the banks, none to the little guy. They got upset, created Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party. Those two morphed together and had a baby that became MAGA. In the first book, I wrote about Trump identifying a cause for the lower-middle-income people. I also said in the book, and it doesn't reflect well on me, that when I was on the campaign with him, he was seeing something about America that I myself didn't see. That's something I have to own for the rest of my life. I was getting the collective biases of my adult experience. I grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood, my dad was a crane operator, but I went to Tufts and Harvard Law School, then Goldman Sachs. I was seeing the salons of the wealthy. I built two hedge fund businesses and got the confirmed biases of the people I was hanging out with. Trump saw the grievance. Maybe because he has a chip on his shoulder, but he saw that grievance.

Yeah, you have a good memory. What I said in New Mexico, I stepped out of the security perimeter and went into the crowd. I asked people, 'What are you doing here?' The composite interview was, 'I'm here because I lost my job. We had a factory here. My dad was there for 30 years, I was there for 12, and then I lost my job.' One gentleman said, 'You think you're in New Mexico, but New Mexico would be Mexico. Since the signing of NAFTA, we lost 65,000 factories from the United States.' NAFTA was signed in 1993. I gave that number as of May 2016. I walked back onto the campaign plane. We took off for California for a fundraiser, and I looked up my dad's wages. His 1976 wages were down 26% in 2016. So 40 years later, someone on my dad's job operating a crane in the engineering union had nominal wages higher, but purchasing power wages were at the poverty line. We would never have lived in the small house I grew up in. The point is that we shifted these people from thinking their kids would do better to thinking they would do worse. That's the difference between aspiration and desperation. So if you read both those books together, you would see somebody who believed in the promise of Donald Trump, disagreed with his position on immigration, his attack on the free press, and ultimately the elements of fascism he's perpetrating now, but did see, as I'm trying to point out in the next book, that we have to heal this. We have to reconnect these people to the social contract. We have to make them feel they can have a living wage. If you don't, you'll have more right-wing and left-wing populism. I don't want socialism. I do want a platform of equal opportunity, not equal outcomes. I want unequal outcomes. If you're working 10 times harder, you deserve the economic rent. I have no problem with Jeff Bezos delivering packages to my house. But I do want kids from my neighborhood fed, educated, and with healthcare so they can reach the starting block.

Take a little shot at him. Let me look right into the camera. The worst [__] guy I've ever met in my life is Steve Bannon, because he's smart, articulate, and he's preying on something primal to human beings: fear. To be a great leader, you have to profess hope and give people an opportunity to see the better angels in their nature, something Lincoln would have said.

Thank God he's got those by the way. He's so unpleasant from an aesthetic point of view that you can't really get...

Yeah. If it was just the [__] technology of radio, we'd be in a lot of trouble. But thank God he looks like that. If you take the hit on him for Ricardo, I agree. You say you generally agree with Donald Trump's instincts on economics, right? He attacked China, the WTO ascension is a big set piece in your book. I'm trying to figure out what...

They are about immigration because there's fear. But if you're aspirational, if your income is moving up, you're agnostic to immigration. If you're in decline and can't catch up, you're very fearful of immigrants. But the immigrants built this country. Every truck driving into East Hampton is driven by Hispanics. Rich people enjoy lower costs, but poor people are worried. Is that understandable? When you're in Riverhead watching people drive in, you say those used to be Italian, Croatian, Irish guys. Now it's all these people, and you think they're illegal immigrants undercutting you. That's the appeal of Trump's economic message. It's not coherent, but it resonates.

That is the second derivative of what they're there for. They're there to create deportation, fear, mania, to get black and brown people cowering in their homes. Eventually, for the voting in November 2026 or 2028, people like Steven Miller would like their presence in blue states to suppress the vote.

It's a theory threaded through Project 2025. If you read the 925-page Heritage document, which I've combed through, the goal is to subvert and repeal the Voting Rights Act. They won a big case last week to do that. The goal is to put ICE in every blue city. They don't put them in red cities, which have as much crime. It's 100% political. The goal is to create fear and suppress the vote, because the rising black and brown population concerns these people. They like democracy when white people run things. If black and brown people overwhelm whites demographically, they no longer like democracy.

I 100% agree with you. That's the good news. If Trump were organized and had super competent people around him, you would have a very different outcome on January 6th. But he's very disorganized. Trump wants sycophants and loyalists over competence. Everything you said is good news, because if you took Project 2025 and hired super competent authoritarians, they would execute it more aggressively. The overexuberance of someone like Steven Miller dropping poll numbers by 15% in Minnesota forced Trump to fire his Homeland Security head and bring in Tom Homan. That's disorganization, but it's what will save us from Donald Trump. He's not listening to anyone. He makes decisions intuitively. Someone said, 'If you hit Iran, they'll implement the Mosaic Defense Doctrine,' but Trump said, 'I'm going to do it anyway because my gut instinct is I had success in Venezuela.' Netanyahu pitched him on a six-day war, and he saw himself earning a Nobel Peace Prize. But it wasn't thought out. The Pentagon thought it out, and many said it was wrong. So that's great news for the country. We'll survive Trump because he's menacing and malevolent, but fortunately for us, he's disorganized, has a short attention span, is about to turn 80, falling asleep in meetings. He'll weaken after the midterms. But he's done incalculable damage to the brand of the US.

Because it's been mismanaged. They could have had a coup if it was properly executed on January 6th. They're misexecuting, so you're getting an organized response. The Democrats are nowhere, by the way. They're the best thing Trump has going for him. But I want to read something from 'The Nazi Mind' by Professor Laurence Rees. The subtitle is '12 Warnings from History.' Let me read the 12 chapters: spreading conspiracy theories, using them and us, leading as a hero, corrupting youth, conniving with the elite — look at those guys behind at the state dinner — attacking human rights, exploiting faith, valuing enemies, eliminating resistance, escalating racism, killing at a distance — those are missiles and bombs — stoking fear. I got him a 12 out of 12. When I use the word fascism, I'm grounding it on historical analysis. We didn't even get into naming things after himself. We're putting his name on the US dollar, inside the passport, naming arches after him. We're in a situation where the figurehead of the state is becoming the representative in every way. Washington, Eisenhower, even Reagan wouldn't have done that. Obama was a constitutional law scholar who understood that the founders created a decentralized system. When you have an authoritarian, you have corruption, kleptocracy, and crony capitalism at the top. The rest feel left out unless they join the corruption. He acts like a fascist, and I agree with you that we rebutted him and dropped his poll numbers. There's still enough noise and defense mechanisms to protect us, but we are close to breaking the system. We need forward, transformative, post-partisan leadership to rebuild and renew. We need a new Federalist Papers. We've had 27 amendments since 1789, roughly one every eight years. No amendments since 1993, and that was procedural. The last big amendment was 59 years ago, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which the Supreme Court has gutted. But the duopoly of Democrats and Republicans has created a tight cartel. Through gerrymandering, they have perpetual incumbency. Congress has a 14% approval rating, slightly above Kim Jong Un, but a 95% reelection rate. Why? Unlimited money through Citizens United and gerrymandering. Is it a real democracy if the politician picks the voter? Shouldn't the voter pick the politician? These districts become more extreme. It's just marketing competitions.

If you're cynical, you'd look at the current tribalism and the split in the country. You need 37 states to ratify an amendment. Anyone who understands the process would say it's never going to happen. But if you're an entrepreneur, you have to go from zero to one. You have to germinate the idea and explain that power is in the people's hands. Ten or twelve years ago, no taxi authority wanted Uber, but the people wanted it. We'd have to go to the American people and say, 'This is hurting you.' Gerrymandering started in 1816 by a guy named Gerry, and it's become exponential. We need a constitutional amendment to end gerrymandering and create a system based on demography. For example, Alabama doesn't have a single majority-black congressional district, but you could create two or three if you drew geometric shapes. Instead, they look like jigsaw puzzles. In California, 45% of registrants are Republican, but there's no Republican representation. We need proportionate representation to liquidate extremists. We might also need mandatory voting like Australia. But gerrymandering is something they should look at. Second, Citizens United has destroyed democracy. Remember Plessy v. Ferguson? It took 80 years to repeal with Brown v. Board of Education. In 2010, Justice Scalia's 5-4 decision in Citizens United said unlimited money is a First Amendment right. Donations are up nine times in 16 years. It skewed the legislative agenda to big business, big food, big pharma, tax cuts for the rich. The big beautiful spending bill is an example: huge savings for millionaires, but those in the 50s or 60s lost $700 in benefits. We took 17 million people off Obamacare. All of this pisses people off because we're no longer serving them. So those are two big amendments. If you could explain to the American people how damaging they are, we could get out of this tribalism. Maybe these guys want to be trillionaires, but if you need a barbed wire compound, you're losing the plot. Earlier generations got it right. Henry Ford, despite his flaws, paid his workers enough to afford the products they made and put them in single-family houses with good schools. He didn't want them descending on his home with pitchforks. If we don't fix this, it's back to Teddy Roosevelt and the robber barons.

Let me ask you a question. If I looked at the 435 congressional districts leading into the 2026 midterm elections, only 8% — about 32 districts — are contestable, meaning purple. Is that in the interest of the American people? Or should all 435 districts be contestable?