Visions for the future with Anthony Scaramucci
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Welcome to the LSE events podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences. So good afternoon, everyone. My name is Larry Kramer. I'm the president and vice chancellor here at LSE. And it's so nice that all of you came here to see me.

It's my honor actually just to welcome you to this very special event which is part of the LSE Festival. I'm trying to get the feng shui of this so we're like way over here. Yeah, we'll turn you a little right now. I'm trying to get more intimate with you here if you don't mind. Okay.

I'm flattered. The theme of this year's festival is Visions for the Future, which, you know, I think it's a theme, it's probably everybody in this room has a view about it, but our guest today is a particularly interesting person, I think, with whom to discuss the future given his, you know, fascinating past and present. Okay, so Anthony Scaramucci is a successful financer, a popular media figure, inveterate political animal, best-selling author, walk-in quotation,

television personality and general man about town in the circles of power in the U.S. He's a lawyer who earned his J.D. from Harvard Law School but never practiced law, instead going directly into finance. After more than a decade at Goldman Sachs, he struck out on his own. In 2005, he founded Skybridge, a global alternative investment firm that at its peak was worth $9 billion. $9 billion.

He co-hosts two podcasts. The rest is Politics US, which is an American version of Rory Stewart's and Alistair Campbell's well-known UK podcast. An open book podcast that is about, well...

He's the author, speaking of which, of seven books, the most recent being The Little Book of Bitcoin, which is a guide for people who may want to invest in cryptocurrency. It's perhaps most famous for his notorious 10 days as White House communications director in 2017. It was 11, Larry. Don't chip me out of that last day. It was a big day. I got fired on that last day.

I was leaving it out for that reason. Don't chip me out of 9.1% of my federal career. Keep going. Yeah, but what he should be most famous for was spending half of his junior year abroad here at LSE on the general course in 1985. That was good. Thank you. Look, rather than give a talk... For us Americans, LSE stood for Let's See Europe. I just want everybody to know that. Go ahead. Thank you.

Sorry. That's so depressing. It does not anymore. Any of you out here thinking about it? Love the place. Love the place. Anytime you invite me back, I'll come. Love the place. So rather than give it to you, am I supposed to call you the Mooch? I can say Anthony, right? Well, on the podcast, it describes you that way. I've been called so much worse than the Mooch that that's fine. Anyway, what we're going to do is have a conversation up here for about a half hour after which we'll open it up to the audience both here and online for questions.

Okay, so obviously you've had one of the most public rebrands in modern American life. So what was the hardest part about changing the narrative about yourself, especially when you've got a public that already thinks they know you and your story? Well, first of all, I want to say thank you for inviting me, and I really mean that. And I did love coming here as a kid, and it was a game changer for me because I grew up in a fairly sheltered,

middle-class environment. I didn't really do a lot of traveling as kids, so this was really my first

It's actually my first real trip abroad, so. And it was a great eye-opener and I love the city of London and love the school, so I really appreciate you inviting me. - Delighted. - On the branding thing, it's sort of a weird answer to say it this way, but I don't really feel like I rebranded. I feel like I had more exposure and gave people the opportunity to see who I am and then they could take or leave me as they chose. I think what ended up happening to me is because I got on the stage

quite publicly for a very polarizing person back in 2017 and then I was abruptly fired. It's very easy to make a caricature and then what happens in American political life, and I'm sure it happens here as well, you get two-dimensionalized and people try to put you in a box and they want to characterize you a certain way and in some cases they want to demonize you because if they demonize you and

I think we're here at a law school. I think one of the things they taught Larry and I at law school, if you're a trial lawyer, you don't have the facts.

do an ad hominem attack. If you can delegitimize the witness or you can take the wind out of his sail, you'll hurt his argument with the jury. And so that goes on in Washington all the time. And so when I came out of the White House, I was fired. I think Bill Maher called me a Jersey Shore cast member. I think that was one of them. I think I was called Tony Soprano on the Hudson.

I mean, I started losing weight immediately after they told me I was Tony Soprano, but the one that really got me is Bill Hader on Saturday Night Live said I was human cocaine. I sort of took that as a little bit of a compliment, actually. Maybe I was peppy? I don't know. Maybe he thought I did coke? I have no idea what it was, but it was bad. To say anything other than getting fired like that so unceremoniously and so abruptly, it was really bad. And...

you know, it hurt. To tell you otherwise, like to make it up and pretend, oh, it wasn't bad and I'm Mr. Resilient like a Superball or something like that, it's not true. It was really bad. Concurrent to that, if you remember the tabloids,

You know, my wife and I were sore at each other. Let's just stipulate that, you know, my wife hates Donald Trump like almost as much as Melania hates him. I'm talking about this. This is like, you know, that's like real Eastern European sort of hatred for Melania. You know what I'm talking about. But Deirdre really did not want me to go work for him. And so I just want you to imagine this. If you're ever having a bad day, and as long as it's not a health reason, I want you to imagine me on July 31st

of 2017. My now soon-to-be eight-year-old son was born on July 24th. I missed his birth. We were fighting. Deirdre, I was scheduled to be at the birth, but she was due on August 8th.

I was in West Virginia at a Boy Scouts event with the President, and we'd flown there by Air Force One. She went into delivery, and you may or may not know this, I didn't know this, but there's a 60-mile no-fly zone around Air Force One. And so even if I tried to charter a plane, I couldn't get back to New York on time. And so my wife had filed for divorce on me.

I had missed the birth of my son, and I got fired from the White House in a one week period of time. How's that? Okay, that's as rough as it gets without getting like a health issue. And so I had to go back to New York. I had to repair my marriage.

I had to rebuild my brand, as you're referencing, Larry, and I had to go on my instincts as opposed to people's advice. I think this is a big lesson for the younger people in the room. I met with some crisis PR team, and the guy looked at me and said, "Okay, this is an unmitigated disaster for you. You should disappear for five years. Maybe buy a house in Tuscany and disappear, come back to the United States sometime in 2022."

And I was like, okay, well, I'm definitely not doing that. And so what I did was I went on the Bill Maher show. I went on Steve Colbert's show. I think in Steve's case, I own a steakhouse in New York. And Steve invited me on the show. My PR person told me, don't do it. You're going to get set up. It's a trap and don't do it. I said, I'm going on the show. I made a steak knife with Steve's name in it, on it.

And because I had said in the White House, I said, I'm really not a backstabber. I'm more of a frontstabber. And so I gave Steve a frontstabbing knife on the show. And he gave me this animation. He was running animations of me all week when I was in the White House. And I made him sign the animation cell to my mom.

on the show. And the point being is that go forward and learn how to laugh at yourself and not take yourself that seriously. You know, I tell people sometimes, you know, I'm not a tall guy. I'm almost not tall enough to have met the height requirement for my roller coaster career. But you know what? I'm here. And rather than take yourself that seriously, lean into things. But I'll just finish with this statement.

Larry, I will say this, that I feel it's a gift today because it's given me a platform and it's also given me a little bit of wisdom and understanding. I didn't work for Donald Trump for 11 days. I worked for Donald Trump for a little over a year. I campaigned with him. I traveled on his plane with him. We were doing everything on that campaign. We were

doing media strategy, we were raising money. It was a very flexible entrepreneurial campaign. I learned a lot about the country in that travel.

And in the 11-day period of time, I got to fly Air Force One three times. I did a White House press briefing, read the presidential daily brief, fought with the president. I'm making one of you who read the brief. Yeah. Well, you know, the thing about the brief is when they give you the brief, it's on this encrypted iPad, and the analyst comes in and they take you through the brief, and then they give you access to, I think you get 60 days of the prior brief so you can catch up with the rest of the team.

And I remember talking to President Bush about this after I had gotten fired. He said, "You read the brief?" I said, "Yes, I read the brief." He said, "So are you able to sleep?"

And I said, sometimes, no, I'm not able to sleep. Because when you read the brief, it's very different from the news. It's a very, very complicated world, which both of us know. And it's not Hollywood. I mean, Trump tries to make it like Hollywood. He tries to act like a television director. But it's not Hollywood. There's a lot of things that we don't know. You know, we read the brief. It's a...

10% chance of this, a 20% chance of that, there's a 50% chance of this, and you're making decisions. Remember, if the decision gets to the White House, it's because there were 5,000 other people in the executive branch that could not make the decision, and so it ends up on the desk of the president, and now you're making the decision, well, this really...

is a bad idea, or this is a slightly less bad idea. If they were easy decisions, they wouldn't end up with the White House and its staff, and you realize how complicated the job is. So I think I'm blessed with that experience, and I think it's fortified me later in life. But man, I did really get beat up pretty badly. Actually, you may have answered this, but just while we're on this topic... Is this vodka? By the way, if it's vodka, maybe we'll have some together. No, I'm kidding. Okay.

What do you think is the biggest misconception people still have about you? You know, we stereotype each other. I'm a blue-collar Italian kid from Long Island. I grew up in a neighborhood. My father was a crane operator. Most of the people in my family that are of my generation did not go to college. Everybody in my family, if you understand Italian, you get named after your grandfather, so everybody in my family is named Anthony. So we have...

We have an auto glass installer, he's Anthony Auto Glass. We have a guy cutting deli meat in my family, he's Anthony Deli. I have another cousin that runs a pizzeria, he's Anthony Pizza. When I go home, I'm Anthony Hedge Fund. And that's it. And that is exactly it. I live two miles from my neighborhood, two miles from where my parents raised me, two miles from my mom and dad's home. I never lived in New York City.

And so when you see me, you're going to look at me and say, okay, I've got this guy pegged. I'm going to stereotype him in the following way. But then you forget that, you know, I did go to Harvard Law School. I do read a batch of books every year. I do a lot of traveling, and I'm intellectually curious. And all of a sudden, people see maybe not the exoskeleton that I represent, but there may be a little bit more depth and a little bit more...

I mean, look, I built a couple successful businesses, thank God. And those are best-selling books for a reason, by the way. I bought those books. And if you don't believe me that I'm a best-seller, you can come into my basement. I'll show you every copy I had to buy to make those books best-selling. Let's talk about some of the things that you've done. I want to start with SkyBridge made a big pivot to crypto.

Yes. And as I recall, you didn't start out as a fan of crypto. So what made you change your mind? Are there lessons here about how and why this works? You know, herd behavior from an investment perspective, what it takes to create conviction? Sort of how did you get there? Yeah. So it's a great question. And I'm not going to do that question service by answering it in a few minutes. So I'm going to say a few things. I would say, number one,

For me, it was an odyssey. I started out as a crypto naysayer, a Bitcoin naysayer. Michael Saylor, who now has about $45 or $50 billion of crypto, is a contemporary and a friend of mine. He also started out as a naysayer. He bought his first Bitcoin in August of 2020. Skybridge bought its first Bitcoins in October of 2020. And so I'll say three things, and then we'll go to another question. Number one, you

You have to do homework on Bitcoin to really understand it and understand the properties of the blockchain and understand why people like myself and somebody like Michael Saylor thinks it's valuable.

If you do that homework, I find that people that do the homework on Bitcoin generally accept it and like it. I have another friend by the name of Larry Fink. Some of you guys may know him. He's one of the largest asset managers in the world, CEO of BlackRock. As recently as 2021, very negative on Bitcoin, and today he has the largest Bitcoin ETF in the world. Ray Dalio, you may know him, best-selling author, negative on Bitcoin, now positive. Paul Tudor Jones,

I can name a lot of people in the investment finance space, Stanley Druckenmiller, all start out negatively biased towards it, think it's a Ponzi scheme or think it's something that people shouldn't value or evaluate. But I disagree. It took me about 10 years to get there, by the way, and I do write that in the book.

So I would just encourage you to learn more about it. Don't invest in it if you don't understand it, though, because I think that's a big problem for people psychologically. If you're buying something you don't understand and it's not doing well from an investment perspective, emotionally you'll get charged. You'll end up selling it at the wrong time. So I would just recommend to people to do homework on it.

Great. So let's switch. There's so many topics here. Let's talk about media. This is not Donald Trump orange, by the way. This is Bitcoin orange. This is like a good lecture. I thought it was Syracuse. My favorite color orange is Bitcoin orange, not orange war paint that certain people wear every day. I'm not touching that. So let's talk about...

Media and its effect on society. So you've been involved in a huge range of media projects, television, podcasting, books, now film, and also in a pretty big variety, you know, from like state programming like Wall Street Week to infotainment and reality TV. So just tell us, are you worried about, I'm just going to, I wrote it, are you worried about the ability of media to keep Americans properly informed and what would you do about that?

Well, I mean, I guess we have to ask ourselves the rhetorical question, is it the responsibility of the media to keep us informed? And so Larry and I are of a generation where David Halvorson once wrote a book called The Powers That Be. I don't know if you remember that book, but it was about the concentration of American media. And here are the three or four different media outlets, and they have an obligation for objectivity, an obligation to serve the public's interests.

I think we've morphed from there. I'm not a normative person. I mean, I don't walk in a room and say, well, things should be this way or it ought to be this way. I think those are words that get us in trouble. I think we have to deal with the world the way it is, not the way we want it to be or the way it should be. I mean, it's

It's incumbent upon us to try to get the world to go in that direction, but let's just look at where the world is today. It's a very fragmented media environment, very fragmented media properties, which has, frankly, created the space for these podcasts, and I can explain why I think those are successful. But I would say to you that our shortcomings in the United States are actually based on the education.

We have a civic duty and we have a duty from our public servants to build a framework of education in the country that provides equal opportunity. We're not doing that. Our K through 12, as exemplary as our university system is, and I think you and I would agree that despite the current struggles that are going on, I think it's a

top of the field, right? The university system, more or less. Yes, possibly not for long, but yes. Yeah, I think it's under, but I think Larry's right. I think it's under threat right now, and I think we have to combat that threat. But I think the university system, I think you give it an A+,

but I think you give the K through 12 and what the people in America call the public system, which is basically the state-sponsored and the local school system, which is tied to our property taxes, I think it's very uneven, and frankly, I think it's very unfair. Moreover, if you told me the zip code of the child, I can tell you whether or not the kid

is getting a good public school education. And by the way, that wasn't the case 50 years ago when I was in elementary school. It was a different environment. There was a different culture. There was a different level of

state funding in addition to local funding. And by the way, I think it was Jimmy Carter that created the Department of Education. There was federal funding into these smaller communities to try to even out the playing field. And so we've dropped all of that. We stopped teaching...

the civic duties in the country. I think people really don't understand when I, if I say separation of powers to a 12 year old in the sixth grade, we learned about that. I'm pretty confident you learned about that in Chicago back in the day. But the kids aren't learning about that now. They're not understanding the system and the beauty of the system, the decentralized system that's created

all of this growth and all this prosperity. So that's where the real threat is. If you don't educate the people, then they don't get the joke about the democracy, what Churchill said about the democracy. It's a terrible form of government, democracy, Churchill said.

until you compare it to the other forms of government. And if you want to live in freedom and you want your kids to have an aspirational life and live in an aspirational society, you can have the government on top of you and you can't live in an authoritarian structure because just study authoritarians throughout history. They take power, they funnel money,

the money at the top of the cone to themselves and their friends, and then they become very arbitrary and capricious about the law. And once you lose predictability about the law, then you lose the flow of capital.

And so a lot of people don't 100% understand this. They sometimes think that a move to authoritarianism is a quick-fix solution and it's a faster and cleaner, more efficient way to form or administer a government, but it's very, very dangerous. It always ends in tears for a very, very large group of people. I'll just make this one last point because I think it's an important one. 5.7 billion people...

fellow travelers on this planet currently are living under some form of totalitarianism, some form of autocracy. And so we're in the minority in the free world. So we have to join forces with each other. We have to protect each other. And when you're getting these populist messages out there that people are clinging to because they're angry about their situation,

Those political leaders are appealing not to the better

angels of our nature, like Lincoln would say, but they're appealing to the more purient, more atavistic instincts in our personalities, and it's very dangerous. So I think the media has a responsibility, Larry, but it's so fragmented now that we're not gonna get that galvanizing thing that we had as kids, but where we have to get it from is the education process. We have to force more critical thinking, and we have to endow our kids with an understanding

This Make America Great Again stuff is, actually Reagan came up with the term, which is funny, Trump thinks it's his, but it is a,

Now, true, America was and is great. It's in decline. I think we have to be honest about that. But you could reverse the decline. You could cheat history if you put the right policies in place. Actually, I think it was Lindbergh who came up with the term first in his proto-fascist period. Actually, Lindbergh came up with America first. If you read H.W. Brands' book. So H.W. Brands just wrote a great book called America First.

And Lindbergh came up with America First. It was Sears, the campaign manager for Reagan, that came up with Make America Great Again. I want to stay on this media point just for one sec more because, of course, I agree. Actually, having been here in the U.K. now, the K-12 system here is so much better than the U.S. K-12 system, which I worked on for a bunch of years. But in the U.S., even the well-educated...

are every bit as polarized and crazy as everybody else. So, I mean, it doesn't cut across any of those categories. So it's still the question is, you know, if

If not the media, then what? Or how do we deal with this? Because it is a problem that is spinning out of control. So I am curious what your thoughts are, even if we fix the education system. So, I mean, I think what you're calling for maybe is then some FCC regulatory reform, right? Remember Ronald Reagan signed in the quote-unquote Fair Practices Act in the mid-'80s, which led to the birth of conservative talk radio, which evolved into the conservative television channels starting with Fox News in 1996. And so...

I hear you. We are fragmented, and I think what Larry's getting at, in the United States,

If you tell me the television channel you're watching, I can tell you what facts you believe. And guess what? The other television channel is eliciting different facts. And so now when we go to argue with each other, we can't even argue about the facts anymore because we don't believe each other. Said differently, if you're a TikToker and you're below the age of 30 and you're a white male in America, 31% of those people believe that the moon landing was faked.

And they believe it. And you could sit there and talk to them and show them pictures and show them scientific evidence. And the country of India and their space agency took photographs from their satellite of all of the remnants of our artifacts that are on the moon. But, you know, you have 31 percent of the people in the country don't believe it. And by the way, the president understands this.

literally better than anybody. I think there's a couple of messages I want to convey here. If you think the president is stupid, you don't know the president.

The president may talk like a fifth grader. He may have weird idioms and a lot of personality idiosyncrasies, but he's a very smart and very clever guy. If he's not a well-read person, it could be from dyslexia. He could have a hyperactive disability where he's got ADHD, but these people are still very smart. They pick up information differently. If you're blind, they say you can hear better. If you're deaf, you can see better. If you can't read,

you pick up the room better, you train yourself

to absorb information differently than other people. And so if you're making the assumption that he's not smart, then you don't understand him because he went from being a reality television star and a moderately successful real estate developer to the American presidency in 18 months, and he just re-ascended to the presidency. And let's be objective about it. It is the greatest comeback in political history. It's a greater comeback than Grover Cleveland. Grover Cleveland's the only other

American to do that. We've had 45 presidents, 47 administrations, but only two people have been able to do that. So don't underestimate him. And he understands this trick that Larry is referring to. And the trick is to tell the big lie and to repeat the big lie and to create a mantra and narrative around it where it's a group of people that are going to believe you no matter what. And

attack the other side as being the liar. See, that's the projection. And so, yeah, no, I can't believe the other side said that I'm believing Trump. And by the way, that's worked for him. And it's working less for him now, incidentally. He's about to fracture his base here with these decisions that he's making about Iran. But it has worked for him.

So and I want to get to this. I just want to ask two more questions picking up on this about politics, because you've also spoken out against political extremism on both sides. And so to get at sort of what you make of what's happening in the US, let me ask kind of on both sides. So on the one hand, on Trumpism, do you think that's-- does this have legs, right? Is there some set of something, values, or an agenda that will carry on after him? And then on the other side, what do you expect or think is going to happen to the Democrats?

Okay, so let's start with Trumpism. So I'm an optimist. I'm too short to see the glass anything other than half full. So I'm chosen to be an optimist when I look at the glass. And so I will say to you guys that I believe that Trumpism is a personality cult. And I think Trumpism will have a diaspora once he's off the stage. And if you like him...

I'll give you bad news. He's a decaying political asset, and by the midterms he will be fairly ineffectual. And then the party will have a great civil war intellectually about where things are going, and there'll be MAGA people in the party, and there'll be non-MAGA people in the party. And I predict that there will be a reformation of that party. There will be some populist elements, but it will not look like Trumpism. Because what Trump said yesterday from the Oval Office

I believe he said that America first, the policy and principles of America first are whatever I want. He said that directly from the Oval Office. There's no guiding principle to what they're doing. It's the whims of Donald Trump. And so therefore, that provides evidence that this is a personality cult. And when he departs, they won't even be able to figure out what it was he was doing. He calls it the weave, right? You ever hear him call it that?

And so it's going to be very tough. If you think J.D. Vance is his successor, you don't know Donald Trump. J.D. Vance is already halfway through the wood chipper. You remember that scene in Fargo where they put the guy in a wood chipper? J.D. Vance is already up to his knee. And he's like, man, I'm getting wood chipped here. I don't know what to do. And I can give you specific evidence of that.

because Trump kills everybody around him. If you're in Trump's perimeter, he's gonna take you out. If you don't believe me, call Mike Pompeo.

or call Mike Pence or Nikki Haley if you don't believe me. Okay, and that's what he does to people. And so Vance, if you think Vance is a successor, he will not be. And so I think that's a big debate that's going to happen, and I think Trump is a decaying political asset. So if you don't like Trump, wait this guy out. Sometime late November of 2026, the whole game is going to change. And you can already see the superficial cracks. Mitch McConnell...

who's up there with Melania H. I mean, really hates Trump. John Thune, I mean, he really hates Trump. And these guys will talk to you privately about how much they hate him. And McConnell's now finally at 82, 83, talking about the hatred openly. You can see it in his public statements and disavowing some of the populist nonsense. So I think that's that side. The other side, the best thing that Donald Trump has going for him, in my opinion, are the Democrats.

It's by far the best thing that he has going for him because the level of righteous hypocrisy and the level of 360 degree firing squads where they're shooting at each other from every direction is stunning to me. And they've decided that they don't hear the music on the ground of the United States. It's a center-right country. There's a Christian orthodoxy in the United States that no longer exists in Europe.

travel the United States. There are Christian orthodox people in the United States. There's a Bible belt, but then there's also the buckle of the Bible belt. And these people literally interpret the Bible. And if you don't believe me, ask Larry. I did 71 campaign stops with the president. I'm intellectually curious. I go out and talk to people. Trump's base, are you ready? Trump's base is fiscally liberal.

and socially conservative. I was on the plane with him once. He said, you know, you're a dummy, Scaramucci. I said, I know I'm a dummy, Mr. Trump, but why am I a dummy? He said, well, you're a Wall Street guy. You're socially liberal and you're fiscally conservative because that's every Wall Street guy. Aren't you that? I said, yes, I am. He said, you're a dummy. My base is the opposite of that.

He understands his base, Larry. He understands who he's talking to. The Democrats have no idea who they're talking to. They're in a cacophony of their own music, and they're working on pronouns and transgender bathrooms, and they're trying to trigger people with wokeism. And the people are like, you know what? I don't like it. And if you don't believe me, ask Van Jones. When Trump won in 2016, Van Jones, an African-American man,

commentator on CNN who worked for Barack Obama said, "You know what, this is a white lash. This is a white lash." And it was a white lash. And Donald Trump, again, hate him, or not hate him, observe and analyze him. He is the Napoleon of the culture world. You remember your biographies of Napoleon? He could see the entire battlefield and he could anticipate where everybody was moving on the battlefield and he was six steps ahead of everybody.

And he was the most brilliant battlefield strategist. Nobody understands the culture war like Donald Trump. And he knows how to trigger people. We have six, seven, eight, Larry, you'll correct me or fact check me. Maybe there's 10 transgender people that have participated in women's sports in the United States in the last two years.

Donald Trump made this a cause celebre like you would not believe. He spent $200 million running advertising about this issue in the swing states. I find it personally reprehensible. I'm an inclusive person, and I don't care what you do in your personal life. I want you to live a great and happy life. But he knows that that is a triggering cultural event for people in the United States. The fact that the Democrats do not understand that

is mind-boggling. I did a podcast with Gavin Newsom, the governor of California. And you've lived in California, so you know the complexity of the state. It's the fourth largest economy in the world.

Does everybody understand that? This is an unbelievable economic colossus. Southern California is the idea exporter of American culture through Hollywood and all the great entertainment software down there. We did get Disney World out of there. We also got McDonald's out of there, so take what you will from that. But Northern California, in addition to the amazing school Stanford where Larry was a part of, you've got Silicon Valley, you have the tech hub

of the United States that has transformed our productivity and enhanced our GDP, global GDP. But it's a complex state. There's a lot of poor people in that state. There's homeless people in that state. And it's a battle to govern that state. The left has done a very poor job of brand management of California. The right pillories that state every day.

homeless people, protests, blah, blah, blah. But the state is a great state. And Newsom is running that state. He's doing a decent job of running that state. And when I said to Gavin, what is wrong with you people? Why are you fighting with each other over policy and picky you nonsense and canceling each other?

Instead of focusing on the broader purpose, why not open the tent and make this a pro-democracy, pro-American party that believes in the system of America and open the tent and bring everybody into the tent to defeat Trumpism and this perverse form of Lindberghism that we're looking at? Why not do that? We can't do that. We're fighting with each other.

We've got to go after each other. And when they send AOC and they send Bernie out on the road and

and they're searching for like a more perfect form of socialism, Trump is laughing at them. Do you guys understand that? He's laughing. You may like Bernie and you may like AOC. They're not winning a general election at this moment in time in the Americans, I guess. That's my opinion. One last point. I think this is an important one. The Harris campaign called me. They said, last summer, you know the president. We'd like you to get involved in debate prep. I said, no problem. I work with them regularly.

for three weeks on debate prep. I was in Philadelphia the night of the debate for the Harris team, and I went into the spin room to represent the vice president. And she slayed Donald Trump in the debate. I don't know if you saw the debate, but she was very well prepared. She was very articulate in the debate. Two of her campaign operatives said, okay, Anthony, you've really helped us

The vice president would like you to travel with her on the campaign. Would you be willing to do that for us? Yes, I would, because I understand the existential danger of Donald Trump, and I'd be very happy to do that. Okay, great.

Two days later, I got ghosted. On the third day, my assistant called, listen, he's got a packed schedule. You've got to tell us. And then somebody called me back and was very honest with me. No, you can't travel on the plane with the vice president. There are hard left people on the campaign. You once worked for Donald Trump. You're canceled to them.

They said, "NFW, over our dead bodies, you're not coming on the campaign plane, and so I'm really sorry. We think it was a good idea, but the hard left will never accept you because you once were for Donald Trump." Okay, guys, that's fine. I'm cool with it. I don't need to be accepted by anybody. I'm a very comfortable outsider. But if you don't want to accept me, what are you going to do with the 80 million people that voted for Donald Trump? Are you going to cancel them?

Because if you're canceling them, you can't win elections. But if you can bring them into the tent and you can articulate your vision to them, maybe you'll move some of them into your way of thinking and maybe we can defeat this sinister populism. So I just think it's important for people to understand that the Democrats are in complete and total disarray. And if they don't start fixing things, they're going to lose the midterms. So what do you mean? How could they lose the midterms?

Because they're in disarray. And let me tell you something about the Republicans. Watch me. Look at my hands. When it's time to face the music, this is what the Republicans do to each other. Oh, I hate Donald Trump in the primary. He's the candidate? Okay, good. We're all for Trump. The Hillary Clinton voter, when she was a senator from New York running against Barack Obama, she lost the primaries. He was the nominated candidate. 85% of the Hillary Clinton voters crossed over

to vote for Barack Obama. You need the crossover vote in your party. The Teddy Kennedy voters didn't cross over enough of them. Some of them did, but not enough of them for Jimmy Carter. The Bernie Sanders voter felt ripped off at the Democratic National Convention.

And they were ripped off, so much so that Debbie Washington Schultz, you will remember this, she had to resign because they got caught on the emails gaming the system for Secretary Clinton to win the nomination. And so the crossover voter didn't show up for her, and 22% of the Bernie Sanders voters, they voted for Donald Trump. Does everybody understand that? So stay in disarray, stay in a full-out civil war,

You guys are saying that you're the party of the democracy. Okay, but Joe Biden cannot run against Hillary Clinton in 2016. Barack Obama stuffed them in a garbage can. Okay, no problem. We're the party of the democracy. Let's try again in 2020. He wins in 2020, says he's not going to run again. He's impaired. He's sundowning.

Your aides and staff tell a lie because they want to stay in power. And I said this to Jake Tapper. You know, I didn't realize it at the time, but there was an obvious tell that Biden was not in charge. You want to hear what it was? Nobody got fired. Nobody got fired because in every administration, people get fired or they get replaced.

but he was letting everybody control their own little power structures and they all stayed in their power structures for the whole term and they were like oh this is great let's see if we can prop him up with some amphetamines and keep this power structure going while it's weekend at joe biden's but you know that's what it was but that's what it was and so now oh by the way we're the party of the democracy but let's cancel the new hampshire primary

Let's kick Bobby Kennedy out of this party. We're not going to let him primary Biden. We're the party of the democracy, but Joe Biden is obviously sundowning, so he's going to leave the race, and we're going to anoint somebody. We're not going to do a mini primary. We're the party of the democracy. So guys, there's a systemic problem on both sides.

And you have to understand that if you want to defeat Donald Trump, which I do, I think he's a very dangerous guy. And I think the people behind him from the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 are even more dangerous than him. Because believe it or not, they're more thoughtful than him. They're more malevolent and they're more organized. So, yes, we have to beat those people. Get your shit together so that we can do that.

I had to have one curse word, right? I'm at LSC, right? I had to have one curse word. - Right, let's open it to-- - It's not even the worst curse word, by the way. It's like a mild one, right? - We have time for questions from the audience. So if you're here in the theater, just raise your hand. Someone will bring you a mic.

Try and keep it to one short question. Give us your name and affiliation, people online. You can do the same thing through the Q&A feature at the bottom of your screen. And likewise, let us know your affiliation. So you're standing like there's nobody who has their hand up. Let's start down here.

And by the way, if you guys want to stay, I have time, so I'll answer every question. So no problem. You look friendlier than the White House press corps, by the way. And you look slightly less drunk than the White House press corps, but just slightly.

- Hello, I just want to say thank you so much. This talk was amazing. Definitely worth missing school for. I just wanted to ask, the event today is called Visions for the Future. What are your visions for the future of America so long as it's governed by the Trump administration? - So I'm actually optimistic. I think everybody heard the question because you had a microphone. What is your first name? Emma?

Emily, Emily. So I think Emily's got the central question, but I'm optimistic because I think the system is actually still holding. And so this is sort of a miracle that took place. I'm a big believer...

There's the great man and woman theory of history, and then I think there's a great group or a bad group. So a bad group would be the murderous thugs that formed a political party in Germany, took over a sovereign nation, and became murderous thugs. That's a bad group in history.

But in the 1760s to the 1790s, it was a great group of people, men and women, that built the foundational principles of the American democracy, but they overlaid that democracy with a republic. And the goal of that republic was to defend people that lived in the minority. And by the minority, I mean people that were not

Winning the popular vote, there were protections for them. Two senators for every state provides that. Electoral college, the diversity of representation. And what were they trying to do? Their central thing was to block a tyrant.

They came out of Europe and they made a decision that we're going to decentralize the government, and if we decentralize the government, we're going to create a lot of individual liberty. This is a concept from Rousseau and John Locke and J.S. Mill obviously writes a lot about this in the Enlightenment. And so they put this together and they got it working. It wasn't perfect. We had slavery in the document, which is the original stain, which the country's still suffering from, frankly, and dealing with.

But there was a semblance of some system there and there was ample opportunity due to natural resources. And so we built this very prosperous country. And there's discrimination and racism and all that other stuff. But, you know, my grandmother can come in in 1923. There are signs that say no Italian need apply. She can't get a job. She works as a maid.

but one of her kids goes to Tufts, Harvard, and London School of Economics. So there's an idea, there's a guiding principle that you're gonna do well. And how do you do well? You do well because the society doesn't have this tyrant. Jack Kennedy, if you have time, go to YouTube. His first year in office, they interviewed him. So Brinkley and Huntley, they got together with Jack Kennedy. He's in the rocking chair in the Oval Office, and they said, "Well, how did the first year go?"

And Kennedy says, well, you know, my dad told me to run for the House of Representatives. I'd have a lot of power. So I did that. I got there. It turned out I had absolutely no power in the House of Representatives. I said, OK, no problem. The power's got to be in the Senate. I'm going to go to the Senate. And so I won that race. I'm in the Senate. Turns out there's no power in the Senate. He said, the power's got to be down the road at Pennsylvania Avenue. I'm going to run for the presidency. He goes, fellas, I've been in this job for one year. There's very little power here.

And he was saying it with Jeffersonian amazement. He was saying it in the idea that there were so many checks and balances in the system that no one person could control the system. Trump is trying to liquidate that. Go look at Project 2025. They believe in a perverse reinvention of Cheney's idea

of the expansion, they call it unitary executive power. And so they're trying to expand his power and they're trying to liquidate the other two branches of the government. That would be absolutely terrible for America. But I predict that that's not gonna happen. It's not just the courts, ladies and gentlemen, that are gonna stop him, it is the money.

Because whether you like it or not, in the United States, different from here in the UK, the money really, really matters in the United States. They're throwing billions and billions of dollars at these campaigns. Larry and I haven't had this conversation, but I'd love to have it with him. I think Citizens United is one of the most damaging Supreme Court decisions that we've had in the modern era. And just to remind people what that is, in

In January of 2010, Justice Scalia said we can send unlimited amounts of money into the politics. It's your exercise of your First Amendment right.

Larry would know this, some of you may not, I think that's the Plessy versus Ferguson of our democracy. And so many, many years ago, the court ruled that you could have separate but equal facilities for blacks and whites. You remember this court decision? This was an unmitigated disaster for the country. It took 80 years to take that decision back through Brown versus the Board of Education, and we're in our 15th year

of a separate but equal democracy. But the money is flowing against Trump right now. So when you go to K Street and you go to the lobbyists, the lobbyists are getting paid by the corporations saying, "Hey, we gotta stop Trump."

We've got to stop his tariffs, we've got to stop his inane nonsense, we've got to stop the militarism that could potentially happen. And you're seeing it now come out. Rand Paul is referencing it, Ted Cruz is referencing it. So we're going to stop Trump, and Trumpism is going to end.

The question is, what do we do with the country after Trumpism has ended, and how do we knit back the country, and how do we end what Larry started with? Larry started with, we are very tribal, and we are very disconnected. So there's three things we could do that would help that. Number one, we'd have to end gerrymandering. For those of you outside of the United States, in our country, in a democracy, the

People are supposed to pick the politicians, but in our democracy the politicians pick the people. So we're in a democracy where the politicians pick the voters and they figure out who likes them and who doesn't like them and they gerrymander them out of their districts. This was actually the first time this was done was in Swampscott, Massachusetts. It was a guy by the name of Gary, G-E-R-R-Y. He redistricted

And his opponent said, that looks like a salamander, the way the map looked. It's a gerrymander, they called it.

And that's the origin of that story, but we've done this in a way where you cannot recognize these congressional districts anymore. We need to return to congressional districts that look like geometric shapes that we would recognize from geometry, not the jigsaw puzzles that they represent today. Number two, we have to end the separate but equal democracy by having massive campaign finance reform, which can be very hard to do because these politicians love the money.

And then the third thing is we need now some form of national service. Whether people like that or not, we have to re-knit the country. Because when George McGovern, who was a staunch Democrat, was in the Senate with Bob Dole, who was a staunch Republican, they got on. They were in the U.S. Army together. They fought in the Second World War. Even though one was from the Dakotas and the other was from Kansas, they got it.

When you're splintering the country and you have no connectivity through the service process, said differently, 1985, the year I was here, 85% of the Congress served in the military. When they asked Bob Dole, who was a conservative, they said, "Hey, Bob, why were you prepared to vote against Richard Nixon? He was in your party."

And Dahl said, well, you know, I lost the use of my right arm. I'm paralyzed from a war injury. But I got out of there alive. The guy next to me was my best friend. He got his head blown off by a sniper.

And every time I think about what to do here in Washington, I think about my best friend fighting for freedom whose head exploded like a melon in front of me. And Mr. Nixon went against the Constitution. And my best friends who died in Anzio were fighting for that Constitution. So you know what? I'm going to sit here and I'm going to defend the Constitution over Mr. Nixon. I'm going to be a patriot first and a partisan second. And so in order to ignite that, we've got to combine again.

And we have less people that are in the military, less people that are meeting each other. And so when you don't meet each other face to face, if we've got different skin colors or different religious origins, we can get very nativistic. We can get very tribal. You spend two years with somebody, you realize, you know what, we're very similar. We're very, very similar. We don't need to be going off on each other the way we are. And that's what we need to do.

It's too long-winded of an answer, so I'll be shorter on the next one. I'm sorry. So let's, up there in the white shirt with this hand up. Yeah. Hi, I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy. LSE IQ asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question, like, why do people believe in conspiracy theories? Or, can we afford the super rich?

Come check us out. Just search for LSE IQ wherever you get your podcasts. Now, back to the event. My name is Ify, former LSE student and currently in the headphone industry. Actually, I agree a lot with your analysis of what you think is going to happen in the mid-term. I sort of saw a foreshadowing of that in the special elections where Republicans didn't do that great. But I guess the counter to that is...

In theory, there's this big beautiful bill that could be passed and then inflation could go down and the US is very finance led, as you said, so you may get to midterms and the markets are doing quite well. I guess, so how do you factor that into your view

on what you think is gonna happen in the midterms, and I guess, wound into that is, what do you think ultimately is gonna happen with the tariff situation? - Yeah, so it's a great question. Of course, none of us know the answer, so I can just speculate alongside of you, but if the economy's going very well, and the Fed is cutting interest rates, and we're seeing a little bit of an economic boom, everyone would say, well, that would certainly help Trump, that would help the Republicans. But remember something about America, most of the time,

In a presidential term, the first congressional midterm election goes to the opposition. So the bias is that it should go to the Democrats. And so the Democrats, in my opinion,

They've got to get off the anti-crypto stuff, which it seems like that they're doing. They've got to get on the bandwagon of economic growth, and they've got to return to the focus, frankly, of the white, lower-middle-income worker that Franklin Roosevelt had a franchise with, Jack Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and things like that. So you have to tell me what the narrative is going to be. Right now, their leadership in the DNC is fractured. I think they just kicked out David Hogg, who was ill-suited for that job.

but you have to tell me what the narrative. If the narrative is we hear you and we're re-knitting a coalition that has some progressive features and believes in economic growth, it's a little bit more of a Bill Clinton-esque or a Barack Obama coalition, they can win the midterms. Even if there is economic growth, they can win the midterms. And I can point to other times in history. But in their current configuration...

with them fighting with each other the way they're fighting, and it looks like more extreme left-leaning candidates will get these nominations, I think it's going to be a lot harder. And that's basically the rough assessment. Let's take a question from online. Okay.

So you've been involved with many serious things, but do you think we should behave as seriously as the world sometimes seems to warrant? Do you think there's some benefit to acting unseriously with serious things or with levity? I don't know. I'm really, I don't know. Listen, I think we should be serious and we should be unserious. You know, I like, I mean, Katty Kay is so posh. Do you not know how posh she is? I mean, she's on a boat in Turkey.

Okay, and you know, she's so British that she doesn't want to let anybody know, but she's actually bougie, champagne socialist, right? So I have to call her out on that, don't you think? Don't you think that's my responsibility to call her out on that?

And by the way, yesterday on the podcast, she got all Eminem on me like an eight mile, you know? You know, when Eminem is like at the end of the movie and he tells the other rapper all the bad things about himself. She's like, I'm on a boat in Turkey. I'm off the coast. Okay, go ahead. What do you want to say? I'm still going to attack you. Of course, you have to have some fun. And by the way, I believe in...

What the Greeks would say, there's comedy and tragedy and things, and you have to be able to make fun of yourself and fun of life, and you have to be bemused by it. But the other thing is, if you're too serious, people will miss the message. You have to have a weave of less serious things in your message because they won't pay attention if you're too serious. So I think there's truth in that.

But you don't think Catty's posh? Ask the guy online if he thinks Catty's posh. See if he comes back. Actually, right here in the middle. We should do a survey. We should do a survey. No, no. I love her, by the way. Next to you. You know I'm just teasing. I think she's great. Next to you.

Hi, I'm Lucy. I wanted to ask you a question about the Harvard drama with Trump as a fellow alum and how you think that's going to play out. Like, what's his end game? Where do you think this stops? And what does that mean for America? And another follow-up question is, will you run for president at the next election? Run for president. LAUGHTER

Well, I definitely don't have the height requirement for that. I mean, by the way, I'm ready for re-election in my marriage. I just want to make that clear to everybody. Just really trying to stay married, you know, and I do love my wife, and I think she would probably castrate me if I ran for political office. But the truth of the matter is, let's say that I wanted to run for president. What party could I run in? I can't really run with the Republicans because they're controlled now by...

Trump and his family, they decapitated the Republicans and they put MAGA in there. And so unless you're telling me we could retake that party with a different message,

That would be one possibility. It would be very remote. I can't run with the Democrats. I learned that in the Harris campaign. There's too many left-leaning Democrats that cannot stand me. And there's a lot of people. I've made some wealth in my country. I'm financially independent. A lot of people on the Democratic side really hate that shit. They just hate it.

So I don't really have a home to run in, but I do appreciate your confidence in me. Thank you. I'll tell my wife that you want me to run for president so I can get her very emotional reaction. What was the second part of the question? Harvard. Harvard. Harvard's a very complex thing because I am an alum there. I love the school. I'm a donor to the school. And the school did an enormous amount for me. The school transformed my life.

because it helped me get my first job, it gave me a great education. I have two partners at SkyBridge that

that are 40-year friends that were in my section at Harvard, and they helped me run the firm, which allows me to do the things that I'm doing, like be here talking to you. And so I absolutely love the school, and I want the school to do better. But I want to be objective here. I'm just going to, you should be donating to all of the schools. We'll talk about that. We've got my, we'll talk about that. Thank you.

You see, that's why he's in his job, okay? I'm just telling you, you should have asked me that about two hours ago and then repeated it again, but you're doing well, and I'm going to give you some money, don't worry. I'm not going to give you as much money as my colleague John Fanolin because he's richer than me, but I'll give you some money. If you can get into his ballpark, we'll be very happy. Yeah, no, you know, I know John well. He was in school with me at the time that we were both here together. But the Harvard thing, and again, I'm just being brutally honest,

I don't mind the left lean of the universities. In fact, I actually enjoy that. I'm not a left leaning person. I'm sort of right of center on most things, except for social issues. I probably left her than most people should really live their lives the way they want to live their lives and they should have control over their bodies. And I believe it or not, I actually think that's a libertarian idea more than anything. So I'm a big believer in that. But with Harvard, what's happened to Harvard, there's been too far of a shift to the left.

And when you have Jewish students at Harvard that are literally running for their lives, they're 18, 19 years old, and they're getting locked in dorm rooms where people are chanting death to the Jews outside, and it's private property at a private university, I do have a problem with that.

Okay, my buddies that went to University of Pennsylvania, one of them runs Apollo, which is a very large private equity firm. You know, Mark Rowan has said to me, you know, I'm sorry, I'm gonna give $50 to $100 million to the University of Pennsylvania. I don't want death to the Jews chanted on the campus.

Do you understand that? I just think that that's a bad thing. And I'm dead set against anti-Semitism or any form of this type of racial attack, religious based attack, et cetera. So Harvard has to look itself in the mirror and provide some level of reform.

I'm not saying they've got to go to the right. I'm not saying they have to listen to Trump or anything like that, but they have to look in the mirror and say, "Wait a minute. We've probably taken things a little bit too far, and we've gone off the curve of where we need to be. We've let too many things lapse here in terms of the equality of ideas on the campus." Now, let's talk about Trump. I applaud the university for doing what the university is doing.

And I wish all the law firms that I happen to be a client of did the same thing. Unfortunately, many of them did not. WilmerHale did, actually, because they're a Washington-based firm. And what I would say to Harvard and any other university, team up with each other. Call your cohorts at Stanford. Call your cohorts everywhere and team up. I wish when the AP got kicked out of the press room, I don't know if people know this, but the Associated Press calls the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of Mexico.

And so Trump doesn't like that, so he kicked him out of the press room. I wish every single member of the media, maybe not these stupid podcasters and some of the right-wing lunatics, but I'm talking about the other people, the UPI, whatever it may be, Fox News even, walked out of the press room. If they walked out together, Mr. Trump likes attention more than anything in life other than money.

They would have all been brought back into the room. And so what I applaud about Harvard is Harvard stuck its neck out. Harvard's going to fight Trump and beat Trump, despite the spite job that Trump is doing on them. But I really do think that these universities need some reform, and they need to protect their students. You can't have... By the way, Claire Shipman, who wrote a best-selling book with...

Cady Hay, my co-host. It's called The Confidence Code. It's a phenomenal book. She's now the president of Columbia. If you have a private conversation with her, and she said this publicly, so I'll share it,

We don't want people to feel unsafe on the campus. And when these protests were happening, they were organized paid protesters coming to the campus. There were chains. I'm friends with Eric Adams. When the police went onto the campus to get the chains off of the university buildings, they were links that you can't buy at Home Depot. These were industrial, military grade chains.

which was the implication was that a lot of money was being spent on these protests. So that's how I feel about it. I think Harvard's gonna win that and I want them to win.

So I'm going to take the last question, which is-- Sorry I can't get to all the questions, so I apologize. Which is, what would you advise a 24-year-old version of yourself who was-- because we have a lot of students here-- who was going to enter public advice now? What advice would you give that 24-year-old version of yourself today? Enter what? Like public service? Well, maybe part of it is-- Like say, don't do it, maybe? Is that what would be the-- I'm kidding. Go ahead. Well, let's say, yeah, someone who wants to at least do good in the world.

Well, I mean, it's interesting. So I would say to the person, if you have a passion for public service, I would say build as big of a coalition as possible. Because unfortunately, whatever your idealism is, it's going to be met with massive amounts of cynicism.

These people don't play the game the way you would like them to. A friend of mine is a gentleman by the name of Michael Dobbs or Lord Dobbs, and you may know him from the author of The House of Cards. I had lunch with him the other day. The incentives in politics are different from academia. They're different from politics.

They're different from business. In business, we're all on the green team, green meaning money. If Larry and I don't like each other, but we're going to split a billion dollars, we'll fake liking each other for the time period necessary to get the money. But in Washington or local politics or the parliament,

People have so many different incentives, Larry, that they start shooting at each other invariably for different reasons that you don't understand that may or may not even be based on logic. And so what I would tell that person, you've got to build as broad of a coalition of people that are like-minded with you to help shield you from this and to help get done the changes that you want done.

And I think it's very hard, but I think it's a noble thing to do. It's a very noble thing to do. I am not embarrassed by my wanting to serve. I'm embarrassed by some of the decisions I made. I think I served the wrong person. I think that was an ego-based and pride-based decision. But I'm not embarrassed by wanting to serve, and I think people should consider doing it.

And I think everyone will agree this has been really wonderful as well as entertaining. Thank you guys, I appreciate it. Unfortunately, we have other events. Thank you for listening. You can subscribe to the LSE Events podcast on your favorite podcast app and help other listeners discover us by leaving a review. Visit lse.ac.uk forward slash events to find out what's on next. We hope you join us at another LSE Events soon.