THE MILITARY HAVE TURNED AGAINST TRUMP: GAME OVER

Things are pretty chaotic in the White House right now. There's a lot of infighting and Donald Trump is falling asleep again in meetings.

We're going to get the great push back on Donald Trump and all things MAGA. They're feeling the heat.

What happened in Tennessee and why does it matter? Hello and welcome to the rest is politics US. I'm Anthony Scaramucci and I'm Katy K. And today, Anthony, we are going to talk about Tennessee's seventh congressional district, which is not something, let's face it, that most people around the world will have thought about, but it is actually a pretty important indicator of where the Republican party is right now, which I would say is feeling a little bit nervous. They had a midterm election, congressional election this week. Um, the Republicans won it, but they won it by one heck of a lot less than they won it in 2024 for Donald Trump. So, we're going to talk about that and see if we think that this is an indicator, a little bit of a canary in the coal mine for the Republicans.

Then, after the break, this is something that I wanted to ask you about because I can't help but have noticed that crypto is not doing as well as it was a couple of months ago. And I want to find out what's going on there, particularly the politics of it, given how much the Trump family seems to be invested in crypto.

But before we get into your menu, which you want to talk about, which is great, I got to give you some scuttlebutt and gossip if you don't mind, because I have been talking to people who are retired military and not in love with the whole heth situation and Donald Trump. And I know you've done your own reporting on this. I'm just going to say what I know and ask you to chime in if you agree or if this confirms some of the things that you've heard. But the general sentiment is that Hegth, they want him out of there. Uh the military is super upset with him. Uh some of it has to do with these strikes in the Caribbean and the second strike where he's now trying to totally disclaim himself and pass the buck. But the real issue has to do with Senator Mark Kelly, Democrat of Arizona.

Yes. Exactly. And so Mark Kelly, and by the way, Caddy, this is one of the more brilliant things that the Democrats have done. And so, let me set the scene for people. Six congressional leaders got together on the Democratic side. They ran a video saying that the military should not obey illegal orders. And that's their code of ethics. They should not do that.

And those six members, just briefly, were all either retired military or retired intelligence services.

Exactly. Exactly. And this is so important because usually Trump baits them and then they go up like bottle rockets and they shoot up all over the place. But they baited him. They all Trump had to say is, "Hey, I agree with those six senators. I have never and Pete Hgse has never given an illegal order, nor would we ever. Moving on." But they didn't do that, Gaddy. And and a result of which they claim sedition. And now you've got a tribunal going after Senator Kelly. And this is such a brocode violation of the military ethos that the complaints are being registered in the Senate, the House leadership, and even Donald Trump himself has again gone on his back foot on this. He doesn't like the pressure coming from these generals and these complaints. Now, is that consistent with what you've heard?

Yes. A couple of things on that that I've heard recently. I also spoke to somebody who was a a former senior person on the legal side in the Pentagon. Um, they told me that the other thing that members of the military don't like is the way that Admiral Horley, who was kind of pushed into early retirement by Pete Hgse and was the head of Southern Command, which oversees this Caribbean operation. They don't like the way that he was treated. Um, I was also told that Admiral Bradley, who is the person that ordered that second strike that we spoke about on that Venezuelan um, alleged narco boat, um, was eager to testify to try and set the record straight. If you want to look at something about what Pete Hgsth himself believes about the need for members of the military to follow the rules of law. Um, there is a video going around from April of 2016. Uh we played it on the show yesterday morning on Morning Joe. Uh which shows Pete Hex saying that it is the ethos of the military for the members of the military not to follow illegal commands and illegal orders. Just worth a little look. That was Pete Hexith back in um April of 2016 before Donald Trump became president.

I do watch you on that show, Caddy. And I watched that whole video that you played and I was like, my god, there's a video for everything, isn't there?

Everything.

Isn't there a video for everything?

So there he is claiming that Barack Obama is giving out these illegal orders and we have to disavow them. But not Donald Trump. Donald Trump can like blow people up that are floating around in the uh Caribbean Sea. Not a problem. All right. So, but before we go to Tennessee, Caddyy, just answer this question, Catty, if you don't mind. How did they successfully bait Donald Trump like that? I'm again surprised. He's off his game. I'm just going to submit that to everybody. Trump would have saw eight years ago.

That would have come across Trump's field of vision. He said, "Oh, these sons of are baiting me." He probably would have put out a truth social or Twitter at that time and said, "Aha, they're trying to bait me. Let me flip it back on them." But he didn't. Fell right into the trap. Why is that, Gaddy?

This is a story that's actually been unfolding in front of us that perhaps we haven't paid enough attention to over the last couple of months because you've got the incident itself in September. You've got Admiral Holey stepping down mid-October. You've got then this video that comes out a couple of weeks ago and I think you and I were thinking, why have they suddenly put this video out now? They don't say what the illegal commands are that they're referring to, but is this because they had got wind of what had happened on September the 2nd and so that's when they put the video that that's the kind of speculation here in Washington at the moment that that's what they were referring to. So has this rattled even though the president in that cabinet meeting this week had Pete Hegath sitting next to him and seemed to double down in support of Pete Hegseath is are they all feeling a little rattled by Pete Hegsth and his position at the moment? And remember it was Pete Hegsth that came out and said we're going to bring back Senator Kelly and you know potentially have him caught marshaled and yet the president seems to be standing by Pete Hegsth for the moment. I think there is a lot of things that are not going very well for the White House right now in terms of legislation that they have tried to propose in terms of the tariffs in terms of what's happening in the Supreme Court in terms of what's happening around the country. And I think that's what brings us to this election in Tennessee that they're feeling the heat. They had this first run of eight months where everything was going very well for them. It was full of you know um storm and drum and you know non-stop action and they seem to be getting away with an awful lot and the legal process moves slower than the political process and the uh fallout of what the president has done or not done particularly in terms of prices which I think gets us into Tennessee as well. All of that is starting to come back to affect the White House and the morale in the White House. And I've been told uh by people who are pretty close to the White House that things are are pretty chaotic in the White House right now. Susie Wilds seems to have been a little bit sidelined. She was the chief of staff who kind of kept things running and the trains on the track. She's been a little bit sidelined. Steven Miller has not been sidelined and yet they're watching the opinion polls showing that these ICE raids are not particularly popular. So there's a lot of infighting and it's and it's pretty public between Marco Rubio and JD Vance over Ukraine. Uh and I think that's and the president then at the same time is waking up to headlines in the New York Times saying Donald Trump is falling asleep again in meetings and is off his game and is showing signs of being 79 years old and this man who seemed to have endless stamina is suddenly looking a little bit more frail. I think that some of that plays into what we're seeing. What do you think?

Okay. Okay. Well, I do think all of that and I do think that you're going to see a lot more activity January, February into March or you're going to get the great push back on Donald Trump and all things MAGA. So, we'll we'll we'll see if we're right about that. But Tennessee,

Tennessee, who we'd be talking about Tennessee's seventh congressional district.

Christmas red was purpling before our eyes, Caddy. So what happened in Tennessee and why does it matter?

So Tennessee's seventh congressional district which includes part of um Nashville, Tennessee. Any of you who have been to Nashville, Tennessee have probably been to the music strip known as Bachelorette Party Central. Um Nashville a little bit more blue like many cities around America. You get these blue islands of liberalism in red states in the country and Nashville is definitely one of those. But Tennessee 7th district is not just Nashville. It's a whole load of rural Tennessee as well and suburban Tennessee as well. So, actually an area that Donald Trump won by 22 points in 2024. So, a true red bit of the country. A congressional election was held there this week, a special kind of off-year election like we've seen in Virginia, like we've seen in New Jersey. Uh we've seen a couple in other places, too. And Democrats started to realize that actually maybe they had a chance to win this election. So, they pour $2 million into the election, but this is beaten by the Republicans who pour in a whopping $3 million to try and defend this seat because they don't want to lose it in Congress. And they also realize that it would be unbelievably embarrassing to President Trump if suddenly a Democrat won a seat that the president had won by 22 points. The election comes along, 180,000 people vote in this election, which I think sounds like not very many people for $5 million worth of spending, but there you go. That's politics in America these days. And the Republicans actually managed to hold on to it. But their majority goes, their lead goes from 22 points in 2024 to just 13 points um this week. And it's seen as so although the Democrats lost in a way they won Anthony because it shows that this is part of a trend right we've seen it in New Jersey we've seen it in Virginia this shift towards the Democrats and the big issue the big voting issue in Tennessee this week of course was around prices and affordability uh that's what people were interested in the Democrats ran a a surprisingly I think progressive candidate for what is a kind of red purple district. Somebody who in the past had talked about defunding the police, who had called herself a radical. Uh she still managed to do pretty well. But during this campaign, what was the issue that she ran on? She ran on the issue of affordability. I don't know how much of a bellwether you see this as, but I can tell you that there are a whole load of nervous Republicans, members of Congress, waking up after that election thinking, "Oo, what was my margin in 2024?" Because if their margin was 13 points or less, they're going to be feeling pretty nervous right now.

Fortunately or unfortunately, I've been doing this a very long time as a political fundraiser. They're panicked. Let's just not pretend because money matters, Caddy. But sentiment matters more than money, right? Hillary Clinton outmanned Donald Trump.

Yeah.

Right. She outmanned him. She had more staff than him. Didn't matter. He won. Okay. Some could argue that the Harris team had more money than Trump. It's hard to really when I look through the numbers, I'm going to call it a tie. But the point being is you could get the money because you're an incumbent or you're sitting there waving the money. Citizens United, write me hundreds of tens of millions of dollars of checks for congressional race. But if you don't have the sentiment, Caddy,

you're going to lose the election. And so the plot is going to thicken as we get into the midterms because caddy if I tell you prices are lower and you're going to the supermarket and the prices are higher and you're buying stuff and you're like what is this guy saying the prices are lower? The prices are not lower. If I tell you that the tariffs are not a tax and then you get something in the mail from FedEx and you open it up and it's a bill, it's a charge for the tariffs. They say, "Oh, by the way, you owe us this and since your credit card's on file, if you don't send us a check, we're going to deduct it from your credit." What What is it? It's a tax. The tariff is a tax. Scott Basset said something yesterday. He was up here in New York yesterday and I just marvel at the guy because literally when his when he opens his mouth now, the tongue is so severely twisted. It's like an Aunt Annie's pretzel where it's like a bow tie coming out of his mouth. And so

okay, I'm just joking.

You're you're choking on the prices, Caddy, or you're you're choking on

choking on the wisdom of what you're saying.

The the wis the wisdom. Yeah. All right. We're going to have to get you CPR because I'm going to keep being wise, Caddyy. It's going to continue. the the wisdom is going to continue till the morale improves. Okay,

but anyway, he's out there talking like the tariffs are not attacks. And he was making this big syllogism and this logical argument that was out of control. And I was looking at him like, is he really going to say and do this? He wrote an investment letter. His last investment letter at Keybridge was about the tariffs being inflationary. And guess what? The tariffs are inflationary and he's trying to tell people that it's not a tax and it's not inflationary because he works for Donald Trump. So when you have Alice in Wonderland going on in the government and people want to pretend things are not happening that are actually are, it may work in an authoritarian regime where they control all the media and they control the election and the tabulations of the election. But in a country like this, it doesn't work and they're going to feel the heat, Caddy. And this is a very important signal to what's about to come in the midterms. I think the other thing I took away from the Tennessee election that I think is why it's worth talking about is that there's a message here as well to Democrats on the kind of candidates they need to be running because they did run this candidate who as I said is is progressive. Actually, the most dumb thing she said in an election campaign in Nashville was to say that she hates Nashville and worse than that she hates country music, which is what she told a podcast a while ago. Perhaps don't run a candidate who says they hate the city that they're running in and that they don't like the industry of the of the city that they're running in. But the message I think to Democrats is they need to choose their candidates carefully. They do have this opportunity. They had this big swing. People, as you say, are fed up about affordability. Donald Trump is not helping himself. He's sitting there in the cabinet meeting in the White House on television saying that affordability, this word that suddenly seems to have been invented, is a Democratic hoax. I mean, he's literally saying calling it a hoax. Like, I mean, they've got this chance, but they also need to think who are they running in which districts they're running. They can run Mamani in New York City. I think this is a this is really confirmation of that. AOC did a virtual rally with the candidate down in Tennessee just on the eve of the election. But they can't run radicals everywhere. You've got to choose your candidates. And I think for the progressive wing, this has actually been a great week for centrist Democrats because it gives them the ammunition to turn to the progressive and said, "Fine, go with Mandani in New York City, but we need to find the candidates if we're going to take this opportunity to defeat these vulnerable Republicans." And the idea that a Republican who won by 13 points is vulnerable suddenly is wild in and of itself given where we were a couple of months ago and we thought that the Democratic party had died an early death. Uh but clearly the 35 House Republicans who won by 13 points or fewer are going to be feeling pretty vulnerable about 2026. But the Democrats have have the wind behind them. They've suddenly got energized. They found a message which is affordability, affordability, affordability. As James Carville said, it is still the economy, stupid, but you have to run the right candidates for the right districts.

Okay? And I I know we're going to take a break, but I'll just I'm just going to chime in for 30 seconds and say this is a special election, and I don't want to overly read into it either,

of course, because sometimes special elections don't play out, but there have been a there have been several of them now, right? We're seeing a pattern. And just to remind people outside the United States, the structural realities of these districts, Caddy, are always in play. And so there's going to be a big fight over the next 6 months over the gerrymandering of these districts. And the Republicans may win that. And it may make it harder for the Democrats to win. So I don't want people to get complacent or think, "Oh,

this is great. There's going to be a great blue wave coming in the midterms. It's going to be still a challenge.

Yeah. And also, you still have you still have to raise the money. I mean, it's not great for the Republicans because if you're spending money in Tennessee, which is a red state, that's money you then have to raise in order to still spend money in Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania, which are actually swing states. Um, so a lot of this is about money, too. Where you're spending money in one place, that means you'll have less to spend in another place. But I agree it's still a year away to the midterms and the president has the opportunity to do things about prices. He's going to get a new Fed chair in in the spring of next year which would give him the opportunity to have somebody who lowers interest rates that could help with prices. He can revise his tariff policy that could also help with prices. Uh they have they are proposing several measures to give money directly into the hands of voters that can also help voters feel better about the economy. So there are several policy options the president still has to do something about the economy. It's not always easy for a president to bring down prices um and address this issue of affordability. But I think the very first thing that the president could do is start sounding a little bit more empathetic about it rather than say that it's a hoax. Uh okay. Um, we're going to take a quick break and come back and talking of prices, talk about the price of Bitcoin.

Before we get into all of that, Caddyy, we've got pre-sales going on right now. I'm talking about pre-sales for a live show on the 6th of September. It's open now. So, members, listen up. Check your inboxes for that ticket link. And if you're not signed up, you can still go to the restpiticsus.com to become a founding member and get exclusive pre-sale access. And for those of you who aren't members, general sales will happen on the 11th of December. Caddy,

it feels like a very good Christmas present to me. What do you think?

I think we need a Trip US mug. By the way, I'm going to be talking to people about that as well. Everybody's got a mug. Caddy, you and I need a mug. Okay. That's one of the other things that we need for Christmas. Christmas, a time for family, friends, and reflection. As the turkeys carved, one side of the table praises the portion sizes, the other demands a recount. If you're shopping for the politically obsessed this Christmas, give them something calmer than cable news. A founding membership to the rest is politics US. What could be better than ad-free listening, weekly bonuses, a question and answer session, early access to our live shows, and our deep dive series on people reshaping modern America. We've already explored President Ronald Reagan and unelected President Elon Musk. And let's just say the casting calls keep coming.

It's measured, intelligent, and global in outlook with just the right dose of perspective and humor in a world that's running short on all of that. Well, listen. Whether you're in New York or Newcastle, democracy still deserves a closer listen. So, if you'd rather give a gift that sparks the conversation instead of another argument,

make Christmas great again, head to the restispoliticsus.com and click on gifts.

That's the restispoliticsus.com and click on gifts. Merry Christmas everybody.

Welcome back to the rest is politics US. This is going to be a little bit different because it's basically going to be me asking for answers from Mr. Scaramucci. Prof. Actually, no, not Mr. Scaramucci. Professor Scaramucci for the purposes of this half, but only this half of this one episode.

Um, Professor,

there's like there's such mocking and a little bit of derision in the Professor Scaramucci stuff. And look at the smile. See, can't help yourself. All right, go ahead. Go ahead.

Okay. Okay. Prof. So, Bitcoin, which I know that you are a great champion of, and this is what I want you to explain to me. I Okay. It it has come down about 30% from its all-time high in early October. When Donald Trump came into office, there was a lot of speculation that his enthusiasm, particularly the enthusiasm of his sons and his family for Bitcoin was going to push cryptocurrencies ever higher because they were juicing the market so much. They were putting so much money into it. Uh they were coming up with the kind of regulation that the crypto industry wanted to see around cryptocurrencies and so many people were getting into it that this was going to be something that were just going to have to carry on rising in this particular political atmosphere and yet we've seen it come down a huge amount in a very short period of time. I know you are uh you've written a couple of books on three books I think now on cryptocurrencies. You are invested in them heavily yourself. You are a great believer in them. I know that you think there is always going to be volatility around cryptocurrency. But I'm particularly interested in this intersection of this new technology and the Trump family and Republican and Democratic politics and the kind of generational shift between older voters and younger voters when it comes to cryptocurrency. What's going on?

All right. So, it's it's there's a lot there and I don't want to over complicate it for our viewers and listeners. So, I'm going to stipulate a few things. So,

okay.

To understand the blockchain, Caddy, simply it means that I can transfer value to you without permission from a third party. And if you go back 5,000 years, when we transact with each other, we typically use a third party. If I'm going to buy your house, you give me your wiring instructions. I send my money from my corresponding bank to your corresponding bank. Those are two parties, but technically a third party. and we and then we transact for the house. We've created technology now where we can transfer value to each other without the intermediary. So let's say you go to a restaurant and you want to pay the bill. We have the technology now where you could have money on your phone, digital money that you transfer to the waiter or transfer to the restaurant owner and you could avoid the three and a half% charge from Mastercard, Visa or American Express. And I can give lots of examples of this,

but this technology has been stalled

during the regulating process or the regulatory process. Go back to Uber as an example. When that ride sharing technology came into being, the taxi cab commission said NFW, we don't want that. Uh the mayor said we don't want that. But you know who wanted it? The people actually wanted it and we ended up getting it. And so what's happened here is very similar to that. We now have this technology. There's property on the internet. One of the pieces of property is Bitcoin. This is sort of a a value-based token that we can transfer back and forth to each other. And there's utility uh being developed for this and other cryptocurrencies. But the regulation during the Biden administration had stalled this. Some European regulation has stalled this. But now Donald Trump has come to power and he was heavily influenced by the crypto lobby and Donald Trump who was a naysayer on crypto in 2018 became a positive force on it. Uh but the real person that uh is really behind this is Paul Atkins. Now who's Paul Atkins? He's the acting SEC chair. You know he's current SEC chair, personal friend of mine and as somebody that has been pro crypto for the last 5 years. He thinks this is going to be the future of of financial transactions. They're going to move more quickly and they're going to be at lower costs. And I'm going to I'm going to get to the politics in a second, but it's important to understand all this. Caddy, we spend $4 trillion globally verifying transactions. You can go to chat GBT and verify that. So that's credit card fees, wire transfers, wire transfers internationally, which have lots of different charges and an admin fees. Uh when we sell houses, we have lawyers that that are baked into that. And so if we can start avoiding that, we can unleash a lot more economic innovation. So this is why somebody like me that studied this is a bull on this technology. However, most technologies like this are quite volatile. Let's use Amazon as an example. If you were smart enough to buy Amazon on the public offering and you put $10,000 into Amazon in May of 1997 and then you were successful in writing out seven or eight 50% downdrafts and one big one in March of 2000 where it went down 90%. Uh today you'd have about $35 million worth of Amazon. Now only one group of people did that. That was the Bezos family and his trust. Everybody else circulated out of it. And so what's happening in Bitcoin right now, there's a lot of circulation. The original investors are leaving. Institutional investors are coming in uh to replace them through these ETFs and these other things that are going on. And it's creating a lot of volatility. When the Trump family came in or let's say Donald Trump himself, Bitcoin was like 65, 70,000 ratcheted up to 100,000 and closed the year at 93,000. in December of 2024.

Yeah. Bitcoin climbed what? 40% in a matter of weeks after Donald Trump was elected.

40%. So now everybody got long Bitcoin. Short-term investors said, "Ah, Donald Trump is the guy. He's going to carry us at 200,000."

He called himself the first crypto president.

So, so let's get long Bitcoin. But Trump being Trump, you get good Trump and bad Trump. I do like the crypto regulation coming from Paul Atkins, but Trump being Trump, he launches two meme coins on the eve of the election.

One for him and one for Melania, right? I remember.

So meme coins again just are like gambling tokens. They have very little value. I mean, let's just pause for a second there and remind ourselves of how wild it is that the future president of the United States on the eve of the inauguration is issuing effectively gambling tokens in the name of him and his wife.

Right? So, he's done this. These meme coins go up in value. He takes 5 or $600 million out for himself and his family. And these meme coins over the last seven or eight months have crashed in value. How much of a surprise was that to you that they would crash? Well, the not only was it not a surprise, I spoke at the World Economic Forum with Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, one of the larger cryptocurrency brokerage companies in the US, if not the largest. And he can't say this cuz he's running a publicly traded company, but I'm not, and I said it. It's just going to be a huge problem for the industry because if you have a president that's running a self-interested memecoin, which is a worthless token, he's susceptible to grift and graft. He's susceptible to people buying the token and then, you know, trying to influence him. And lo and behold, Trump says, "Yeah, go buy my token or make a $5 million donation to me and I'll meet you crypto people at my Virginia Country Club." You remember when he did that, right? And so what this did actually is it soured the industry. It had the opposite effect.

It had the opposite. Well, I know cuz I remember you at the time saying, "This is not great. I don't love this memecoin. It makes it look like this is a sort of bunch of scammers and we're trying to be a serious industry here and there's so much crazy stuff has happened that sometimes we forget this. And then he does this dinner at his he does this dinner at the Virginia place for some of his investors which again also looks, you know, a little odd perhaps for a president. It's certainly not I don't think what the founding fathers had in mind when they were thinking of how presidents should operate. Um, but since then crypto has carried on rising. It went up to 126,000 uh which was a record on October the 6th. So there just seems to be the industry is watching the politics of this and on the one hand saying we don't like what the president is doing in some ways but we also like the fact that the Trump family is clearly invested in it. So which is it? How is the industry responding to the Trump family over this?

So, so these are all great questions and so the industry is like, well, this is still better than the the Biden Harris team that were anti-crypto all the way. We have favorable cryptocurrency regulation, but we would really not prefer the self-dealing because what happens when you have a president that's operating with self-dealing, you're turning off his political adversaries. So his political adversaries at the end of 2024, if you said to me the following question, could you get pro-crypto legislation passed in the House and Senate in a bipartisan way? I would have said, Caddy, I think the time is now that we can get that done. Trump launches this memecoin. His political adversaries on the side of the Democrats said, "Wo, this is salacious. This is ridiculous." And they've slowed down that legislation. Okay? And then what what happened was people got very very excited. When they get excited, you see these markets, you know, go crazy. People borrow money to buy things, which is the worst thing you could do. By the way, I would tell anybody listening to this, we're not giving you investment advice, but I am telling you, please don't borrow money to buy things that are this volatile. And so, people borrowed money. The the Bitcoin went up to 126,000. Trump put out a tweet on October 10th that said he was going to be fighting with the Chinese on rare earth minerals and he was going to put a 100% tariff on the Chinese. It caught the entire industry off guard and it caused a cascade of selling and pushed the prices from 126,000 to 80,000. And today, as you and I are talking, they're back up to where they were at the beginning of the year. They're basically at 93,000 where Bitcoin is. But he has put pressure in the system. And I think this segment is really about if you have politicians in a liberal democracy that are operating in this level of bald-faced self-interest, you're going to slow down the regulatory positions of doing what's right or wrong for the industry. It's either going to be hard left or hard right. And this is something if you ask me what I would like to avoid. This gentleman David Saxs that works in the administration has said over and over again. We want to have transformational regulation that is nonpartisan. We want to make it what's good for the consumer, what's good for innovation, what's good for cost savings, as opposed to this sort of self-interested stuff. And so, so listen, I'm a long-term holder. Uh I will tell people publicly I bought Bitcoin the last couple of weeks at these lower prices. I do believe that the fundamentals are intact for that story. But I do think that there are uncertain regulatory headwinds and it's a broader meta. It's a broader macro issue Caddy because the president is so self-dealing and so self-interested. He's causing a problem in the Middle East because he wants hotels and he wants them to give him money. He's causing a problem in the diplomatic corps. Okay? And I get it. There's patronage everywhere. But he's gone so far outside of the norms now. He's creating a lot of cynicism and he's creating a slowdown in what I would suggest is uh economic progress or what's in direct benefit of the American citizens.

So I read I don't know if you read Katie Martin um in the Financial Times I always read her column in the weekend FT. I like that newspaper a lot and I like her column a lot and she writes in a way that is kind of accessible to people who are not in finance and she is obviously a crypto skeptic. I think the FT tends to be and the Economist actually both tend to be more crypto skeptical than you are. And she wrote a funny column last weekend, I don't know if you read it, where she said, "Oh, finally I found a use for cryptocurrencies." And she compared it to her 17-year-old son who' finally cooked a dinner, done something useful, and that is that they've actually the only use for crypto is to predict what is going to happen in the broader stock market. And the big sell-off in crypto, she's saying, is really just precaging the kind of market correction that everybody has been talking about because the markets are so hot and frothy and so dependent on these tech stocks at the moment. And she says, "This is crypto is just doing that." Um, she didn't tie it necessarily to the Trump family. I was interested to see Eric Trump doubling down this week and saying, "Yep, this is a great buying opportunity." A bit like what you've said, this has been a a buying opportunity for you. My instinct had been the Trump family weighing in so hard on crypto is going to make this a good asset for people to buy because they're not going to let it collapse. But what you seem to be saying on this program is it would actually be better if Eric Trump and Donald Trump dialed it back a bit and were not so outfront and public and calling themselves the crypto presidency.

Yeah. I again Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. are entitled to have businesses. You know, I always thought that Hunter Biden was entitled to have businesses.

He should have been a bit more judicious about which businesses he had, but anyway.

Yes. And I and I and I agree with that. But I'm just saying, you know, these people are got so much pressure and they're in a fishbowl and they're getting destroyed publicly. They they should be allowed to have businesses. And I and I don't want bureaucrats and academics and lawyers running Washington.

Sorry. There is also a line I have to point out. There is a line between having a business as the son of a president and having a business interest that your father who is president or your if you're a daughter can influence the outcome of your business. Obviously that is not the founding fathers were very conscious of that. They didn't like the idea of nepotism and I think we're seeing quite a lot of questions now about whether the Trump family is benefiting from their father being president which compromises potentially the politics.

Yeah, we we don't disagree, but this this segment's theme, and I think it's important. The reason why Catty and I wanted to bring it up today is this segment's theme is about the doctrine of unintended consequences when you push societal norms so far outside of the mainstream that you cause all of this activity in the marketplace and all this activity uh in the economy that I think has a negative ripple effect. Caddy, and you know, you brought up a potential market crash and what Katie is saying in the Financial Times.

Correction, not crash, I think, is what people are talking about.

I understand. Or or correction, but I'm going to push back on. I'm going to explain to you why. Cuz Trump is looking at this and he's like, I am going to flood the capital markets with money uh in January. I've gonna get Kevin Hassard or somebody Fed friendly to lower interest rates, jam them down, and I'm gonna flood the capital markets because I want the economy booming going into the midterms. Number one, I got to win these midterms because I don't want investigations related to myself dealing by the Democrats. Republicans are too chicken to investigate me. And number two, I've got to make sure that my family is protected from these investigations. I know how Trump thinks. So, I'm telling you that's what's going to happen. And that will slow down the potential lending crisis in the country. It'll slow down the potential stock market correction. Uh because those are the maneuvers that he's planning. But again, this is about is this good for the country or bad for the country? Good for the world, bad for the world. I submit to people this is very very bad policy and we will likely survive Donald Trump. I predict that we will. But we better get people in the room after this debacle is over and say, "Okay, how are we going to protect ourselves from future debacles like this?"

I think we're going to leave it there. Thank you very much, Professor Scaramucci, for that. I will go away and do my homework right now. And thank you all for listening. We will be back next Monday. And for our founding members, we're now releasing our episodes on Wednesday uh instead of the weekend. We've just released the second episode in our Epstein series. So, of course, you can hear all of that series right now. And we will be back next Wednesday for the founding for our founding members with more of your questions. Please keep those questions coming. We love getting them. And if you would like to become a founding member, you know where to find us. The rest is politicsus.com. Join the club. Thanks everyone. Thanks for listening.

Thanks guys. We'll see you soon. [Music]