Transcription
Down in Texas, you had the annual meeting of CPAC. They had a poll, as they always do, of who their favorite leader is going to be. JD Vance won that by 53% this year. Marco Rubio came in at 35%.
But if I'm JD, first of all, the CPAP poll doesn't always prove very reliable. Um, Ran Paul won it for three years in a row before 2016 and we have never had a president Ran Paul as far as I remember. And JD won it by 61% last year. So he's actually dropped eight points in the CPAC crowd. These are the kind of insider conservatives. They're very MAGA down at CPAC. They still love Donald Trump. He didn't actually show up this year.
But is JD in that field of being able to be populist enough have enough outrage? He's tried it on a few times. He's trying on the mantle of going and torching Europe when he goes to the Munich Security Conference. He's trying it on online. He spends seems to spend an awful lot of time the vice president on Twitter. Has he got enough of that populism of that? Because I I think the problem with JD is he's a bit of a weather vein. He was being, you know, he's the guy that said Trump was cultural heroine and he doesn't have the charm. He doesn't have the charisma. He's a believer. He's an ideologue, but he hasn't quite got that authentic charisma that some of these influencers and people like Trump have. I don't know. I I think JD, even though he won the straw poll, he's got to be watching out for other people.
"If JD Vance was a podcast host, would you listen to him?"
"No. That Okay, there you go. Too super silious."
"She wouldn't listen to him, right?"
"No, I don't think I would. But on the other hand, do I want a podcast hop host to be my president? I mean, no espersions to you or me, but"
"you may not, but I'm talking about this young new group of people that are enthralled with this type of stuff. And I think we've established that the presidency is not a hiring decision anymore for the American people. It's a popularity contest."
"It used to be who you wanted to have a beer with. Now it's who do you want to listen to for 6 hours."
"Who do you want to listen to? Who's going to be in the media? Who's going to be on the top of the Drudge Report? Who's going to be in my face for the next four years? Can I or can I not tolerate them? And and are they entertaining? So you weirdly need somebody in that role that offers charisma and entertainment but is also a policy wonk and a student of history. Right? So it's a it's a very it's a very tough thing to find if you're looking for that."
Here's the thing I I would say to you about this whole movement that again has me worried Caddy is that no one has a vision. You know Clinton Democratic Leadership Council here's my vision. Nuke Gindrich contract for America. Here's my vision. I don't hear a vision from anybody. No, no one's sitting down and saying, "Okay, it's 2050. It's 20, you know, 56. It's 30 years later here in America. What do we want America to look like? Where is America going? How do we rightsize our deficits, expenditures? How do we fix our infrastructure? or how do we fix our K through2 environment? Hey, but by the way, Anthony, let me give you the heads up. That doesn't play on a podcast and that doesn't play in the attention economy."
"And somehow I think in the communications environment that we're in, the person who wins the Republican primary and who wins the Democratic primary is going to be the person who masters the communications medium of today. They're not going to win without that. But then here's the real question because Marco Rubio who only got 35% at CPAC and does lower I was reading a Manhattan Institute poll that was super interesting ranking all of the Republicans and I had a chat with them about it. Marco Rubio ranks lower than JD Vance in every single demographic except one. He ranks about 20 points higher than JD Vance amongst independents. and who actually decides American elections. Once you've got through the partisan nature of the primaries, which are more left-wing and more right-wing than the actual American electorate, you've still got to end up with that candidate who can win independence, who can win the middle of America. And if you look at that poll, the only Republican who can do that at the moment is Marco Rubio, who can get those suburban college educated white women. He's a bit more like McCain. He's a bit more like Mitt Romney. If he can get over his MAGA years with Donald Trump, and it all depends on how Donald Trump is doing in two years time. Marco Rubio in the polls is the only person that can get independent voters. So that's why the political system is even more screwed because you've got to get one thing for the primaries which is high octane, high outrage, high populism, but you've got to have somebody else who can run to lead the country and actually win over the middle of the country. So I don't know Anthony calling Anthony Scaramucci. If you don't have enough jobs, do you want to take this one on?"
"What job is that? Caddy,"
"run through the primaries, run through the general, and that would be good. Yeah."
"Yeah, that would be good. Yeah, I'm uh Yeah,"
"I don't know. I don't know. My wife I don't know. My wife's political platform is castration. We probably should start there."
On the left, you had all of these No Kings marches. Some people from the No Kings organization saying as many as 8 million people, Anthony, rallied at thousands of rallies all around the country to protest against Donald Trump over the course of this weekend. And you've seen the rise of some very prominent, very left-wing figures. Hassan Per is one of them who was very influential in the election of Mayor Mandani. He's got three million followers on Twitch. He spends hours live streaming every day. He was part of a big online rally at the weekend. He appeared with Bernie Sanders at a tax the rich rally in New York. He was at the No Kings rallies as well. He's weighing into the Michigan Senate race, trying to get a very progressive candidate elected down in Michigan, but his style is kind of MAGA. His following is very male. He is sort of being called a manosphere body with a progressive mind, I think, is how the New York Times described him. He's been accused of being anti-semitic in some of the things that he's said about he's very anti-Israel, but he's also been accused of being anti-Semitic. Accusations he denies, but he does has said that people in Israel are inbred, for example. He's been accused of being anti-women. He's just got this very assertive, aggressive style that some on the right say, "This is our answer. If we can get more Hassan Pikers into the mainstream of Democratic politics, then this is going to be a huge win for us because we can charge him with a whole load of things of being too extreme for American voters." But he's very popular online, very popular with young people, and very popular with young men. And I think it's indication that Trump, who did well with young men in 2024, is losing those voters. You've got a whole generation of, you've spoken about this with Scott Galloway so eloquently. You've got a whole generation of young men who are feeling they don't have a sense of purpose. They've slightly lost their way. Women are getting more jobs than they are in the kind of health care sector. They're losing their traditional jobs and they're looking for a political home and they went to Trump for a little bit and now they're looking somewhere else and they look to people like Joe Rogan and they look to people like Hassan Per and yes he's calls himself a Marxist and is definitely on the left but is there really much difference? What they want is more of a vibe and a style and an affirmation of what it is to be a young man. I know that in the media sometimes we overestimate the influence of influencers, but I do think he's a very interesting figure because of this thing of you've got a whole cohort of the population looking for a political home and they find them in the extremes.
"See, it's interesting. So when you say MAGA, that caught me off guard a little bit. But now that you're explaining it, what I hear is populism. And what I hear is left-wing populism."
"And I what I also hear is here's the formula for the provocator. Ready? Anti-establishment. Bypass the mainstream media. Right? This is what Rogan Bannon has done. This Piker's Twitch account is an example of that is doing it. Okay. And then to your point, you're targeting economically anxious young men."
"And you're you're you're getting a reward with these people if you are unpolished and authentic. Okay? And so that's the gravitron. And what's interesting about this is that Mandani to these people, he's polished and authentic. And so he goes into that sleeve and Caddyy, what I'm super worried about, um, and this could be a sign of my old age, frankly. Uh, I I'm worried about the"
"Agent Anthony."
"I mean, you said it, not me."
"I mean, it's unbelievable. I knew you were going to do that. I knew you set yourself up. Put it on. No, no, I left the opening"
"and you said, 'Here you go.'"
"No. No. I expressed that level of vulnerability. I left the opening to see how vicious you actually are. And you've now exposed yourself. You've exposed the viciousness."
"Oh, I'm sorry. That was hard. It's 8:10 on a Monday morning. That's a little rough."
"Let me keep going."
"The stinger I'm pulling it out of my back right now. Let me pull it out."
"But but what what I'm trying to say is that the establishment has failed these people. And what I'm trying to say is that we have the TSA not getting paid and we've got 6-hour lines at the airport."
"And what I'm trying to say is that the Department of Justice is no longer the Department of Justice. It's the Department of Retribution. People have lost faith in what's going on. So they're like, 'Okay, burn it down.'"
"Yeah. Blow it up. You're right. That's exactly the phrase. It's like, 'Blow it up. We tried everything else. It didn't work.' And now they're even saying, 'We tried Trump and Trump didn't work for us.'"
"Right? It turned out that Trump was one of them. Imagine that."
"Trump was one of them. Trump hasn't made our lives better. He's going and getting involved in the Middle East. I mean, all these no kings rallies, the number one issue that people were talking about now, he's replaced kind of, you know, immigration and anti-ICE and tax the rich is now the war. So, he's got involved with that. And I think you're exactly right. They tried Trump. Trump they now think is one of them. And so you've got a whole load of people and they're and the people in the middle of American politics, which I think is where if you've come from all of your life, they're getting squeezed out. So you've got people like Third Way, which is the kind of reasonable third way centrist groups in America, they are horrified by what they see in Hassan Paher. But young people, they're super energized by it. They feel, okay, well, we don't care if he says things that are outrageous. Maybe he does. Maybe he's not very woke. Maybe he says stuff that, you know, they certainly don't care if he's anti-Israel. And it's throwing the middle, these old establishment groups in American politics into a real spin because they don't know how to reach these people. They don't know how to reach these young voters. There is a desire to hear politicians be authentic. We've spoken about that a lot in American politics at the moment. But then it's when does that desire to hear authenticity flip into a desire to hear things that are socially taboo that you can say thing and you know Donald Trump has done some of this. I can get away with saying things that other people can't say and I'm going it's the shock factor and they will love me for it. I can get away with saying I'm going to grab women by the and and he did. He got elected after he said it. And that broke a wall of what was acceptable. And I think you've got now more and more of a push for amongst young people for people just to say things that they feel they're thinking, however politically unacceptable or out of the mainstream. Hassan Pike is getting Graeme Platner, the oyster farmer who is running up in Maine to be the Democratic candidate for the Senate and who may well win, has in been endorsed by Hassan Per. Gavin Newsome has said he'd go on Hassan Piker's show. And all of these politicians now in the mainstream are how having to figure out how do I deal with these influencers who may have said things that I don't like and I don't approve of but also have big followings and reach with young men and they're so they're trying to say well I think it's important to discuss with everybody. It's it's important to have open conversations with everybody, but it's putting the Democratic mainstream in a bit of a conundrum in the way that Joe Rogan, Nick Fuentes, Joe Rogan less so, but Nick Fuentes puts Tucker Carlson put the Republican mainstream in a similar conundrum. How far am I prepared to go along with these people on the lines of being authentic or being outrageous?"
"So, couple things. Okay, the fir the first one is institutional collapse. Let's just call it for what it is. The the institutions that have held up the country successfully for some reason are collapsing either due to neglect or laziness or a lack of understanding how important that process was to getting us here. The second thing is the masculinity crisis. I I think you know as you pointed out Scott Galloway and I have addressed this but if you're spending time video gaming you know and what does Scott say go to the bar try to meet people you know no one no one's no one's doing that and then Caddyy the attention economy cannot be overlooked here because everybody in that age group wants to be an influencer and the way you become an influencer is you create outrage right outrage is actually the product"
"gets attention is the product and you monetize outrage."
"I can get Governor Nome to come on, right? Because he needs the attention if he's going to run for office. But here's the thing I would say to you that I'm worried about is where does it stop? And then if it doesn't stop, Caddy, where does it go? I mean, who becomes leadership in a situation like this? Well, I mean, you've got, you know, Mamani, I think, in a way, has harnessed some of this and the platforms of this. Um, we're going to talk about this in our founding members Q&A this week, because we had a question come in for you actually, Anthony, about how well you think Mamani is doing a few months into his presidency, into his tenure as mayor. And a lot of people, I think, were very afraid of Maani and saw him as this kind of gung-ho socialist who was going to gut New York and was bound to fail. And actually that doesn't seem to be the case at least so far. So you can get a populist type leader. The question I think is everyone where you have to start drawing lines. You draw lines on misogyny. You draw lines on anti-semitism. You draw lines on you know gratuitous cruelty to other people. There have to be certain lines that politicians in the middle draw and say actually you know what I'm not going to have anything to do with people who I think fall into any of those buckets. that I'm not going to go that low just to pick up a few more votes because you know what they say Anthony, don't wrestle with a pig because you might get dirty."
"I'm with you and but I I think the real question for people is who is the new political class, right? You mentioned Mandani. Okay, he's part of it, right?"
"I don't know that he he how much further does he go outside of New York City? We've always said, you know, that's very different. Maybe the country is not ready culturally at this moment. Maybe it is."
"Yeah, but could be could be heading there."
"AOC is part of this movement, right? So, weirdly Josh Shapiro is the other side of it, right? Josh Shapiro is like the counter model, you know? He's like competent and centrist."
"Get things done. Keep your head down."
"Right. Exactly. Get get done. Right. Exactly."
"No outrage. Right."
"Dial down the outrage. Don't go trolling Trump on social media."
"Right. So, he's almost the counterdo to that. Right."
"Yes. I think that's right."
"The other thing is, which I think is really true here, none of the people that you're mentioning are hooks. I don't hear the hook yet. Okay. Now, weirdly, someone like Shapiro or Newsome could be a hook because they're not a hook and they're not trying to be hooks. I feel like if you're trying to be a hook like a Vance or a Rubio and you're not a hook, then it almost disqualifies you. You there's an inauthenticity to your personality is that like you've got an overbite and you're like trying too hard. We'll see. But both parties right now are simultaneously having an identity crisis and so far you've read me the list. You've done a very good scouting report. And who knows, Caddy, it could be Deos Xmachina. It could be"
"if somebody could come up."
"It could be a military leader. It could be an Admiral McCravenlike figure."
"Let's see where we are in two years time. If we're still at war in Iran, then we might be wanting for something totally different."
"The field is open, Caddy. The field is open."
"Yeah, JD may think he came out of CPAC with this one in his pocket, but I wouldn't be measuring the drapes in the brand new ballroom quite yet."
"I just want to challenge you before we leave. When Schlap was talking and he mentioned impeachment, people cheered and then he said, 'Okay, uh, let's go back to that.' And they cheered again. I think the CPAC people generally are very upset with Trump over this war. Generally, that's just my impression."
"So, it was interesting. There was more disqu over the war and a lot of questions over the war. But I I think I'm right that there was only one candidate that was up on stage who actually criticized Trump and didn't criticize Trump by name. He did it by saying you can criticize the president and still be a patriot, right?"
"And that was as far as anyone went on the stage in criticizing Trump. Let's see. Hey, listen. If they're voting for JD, they're voting for Trump's little guy. So then that makes you think they like him still."
"I just want small things right now from our government domestically. I'd like him to open I'd like him to open the airport, Caddy. That's all."
"It would be so nice to be able to go to the airport and not have to queue for 6 hours. And listen, if we can't open airports in America right now, what are we doing trying to open airports in Venezuela and Iran and Cuba?"
"Yeah, exactly. Exactly."
"Okay, guys, we're going to leave it there. Join us for our founding members episode. We'll get into Mamani more during that. You can sign up and become a family member at the restispoliticsus.com. I'm sure you know where to find us. We would love to have you with us and we will see you later this week."
"Thanks guys. See you later this week."