Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello and welcome to The Rest is Politics U.S. with me, Katty Kay.
And me, Anthony Scaramucci. Good morning, Katty.
So, Anthony, how are you spending Monday evening?
The only thing, by the way, for all of our listeners around the world that anyone in the States is interested in right now, and particularly anyone in New York City is interested in right now, is... Well, I'm going to the Knick final, but Trump's going also to the Knick final, so he's got the entire city on lockdown. So, you know, c'est la vie.
Raining on New York's parade.
Yeah, it's all good. You know, no problem. I just, I didn't, I didn't want my kids to miss it. So I bought the tickets. We're ready to go.
Let's go New York. Everyone's going to be excited. But in the meantime. Yes. Are we fighting?
Katty, tell me how you define a ceasefire. The president says, well, you know, a ceasefire on the other side of the world may or may not be a ceasefire. A few bombs here and there.
I thought that was just a very interesting way of saying other people do things differently from how we do them. Tell me how do you define a ceasefire and are we in a ceasefire right now, Katty Kay?
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Chapter 2: How does Trump influence Netanyahu's actions in the Middle East?
He tells those reporters what he is about to tell Benjamin Netanyahu. So Netanyahu hears it from the Financial Times or from Axios, exactly what Trump is going to do. And I think that it's symbolic of the kind of chaos in the decision making.
This is malpractice from a diplomatic standpoint to be answering phone calls and announcing your policy to journalists before you've told your ally what the policy is going to be. but that is perhaps not the only thing we need to take away from this incident. What did you make of it?
For people that want to really understand Donald Trump, whatever the norms are, I'm above those norms and so it doesn't matter. So if the norms are talking to my allies quietly, talking to my adversaries quietly, well, I'm not going to do that because those are the norms.
And so I am telling you, everybody prior to me is a dummy and every procedure and protocol that's happened before me is ill-advised and dumb. And so only I am the person that's able to do things. And so therefore I'll do the things exactly the way I want them, whenever I want them. And your job is to be in the sidecar with me and do exactly what I want when I want them.
And so that's the biggest problem here. But I want to go to the Israelis for a second because the Israelis are definitely not on Trump's page.
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Chapter 3: What defines a ceasefire in the context of US-Israel relations?
And you know that and I know that. And so the Israelis are like, we're being threatened by Hezbollah in the north from Lebanon. These guys want to take us out with a nuclear weapon, likely. the prime minister of Israel. We can debate his strategy because I think he's hurt the Israeli brand. If I'm being honest, that's not anti-Semitic to say that, okay?
I'm a pro-Semite, but I think he's hurt the Israeli brand because of the way he's approaching things. There's no delicacy to what he's doing. And so the Israeli position right now, he's going to back the deal with but he's still going to shoot missiles into Lebanon. And that's not going to work, Cady. So for me, you're not going to get a Hezbollah carve out of this thing.
You're either going to have a ceasefire and the stuff's going to end. But I think Netanyahu is in a terrible position because I think he's boxed in from both sides. The opposition leader is accusing Netanyahu of failing to secure Israel's demands as part of the ceasefire. That's Yair Lapid. He's got the ultra-Orthodox coalition, which has been with him the whole time.
Super mad at him because they feel like, believe it or not, he's been too weak on this stuff. So reconcile for me the relationship between Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump. and the triangulation with Iran and why, and again, I'll just state my opinion first, I don't think they get to a deal anytime soon.
No, I think, okay, so I think that's the one thing we can take away from this is that there is not a deal coming anytime soon and we can get to oil markets reactions to all of this in a second because I do want to ask you about that. But I think Iran has imposed a new equation on the region just in the last 48 hours.
Trump has made it completely clear that he has run out of patience with fighting. He has said as much, I was getting bored. The whole process was getting boring. He wants this whole thing over. And the message there to Iran right now, after that phone call that Donald Trump had with Netanyahu yesterday saying, do not strike back, do not make this another big escalation, the message to Tehran
You can strike Israel without retaliation, without the risk of Israel retaliating against you, because Donald Trump will protect you. At the moment, American gas prices are shielding Iran from retaliation by Israel. That is a phenomenal turn of events. Imagine if that had been Barack Obama.
Imagine if Barack Obama had protected the Ayatollahs against America's number one ally in the region, Israel. because of high gas prices, because that's effectively what happened in the last 24 hours.
Let's go to that thing, because I think this is very important. Why is Trump treated differently than Barack Obama? Because if I listed everything that Trump has done, and I said, Barack Obama did these things, Washington would be on fire, or Washington would be on fire.
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Chapter 4: What are Trump's options regarding Iran and Israel?
The single most powerful driver here is that Donald Trump owns his party.
Okay. I want to take you into the Trip US situation room.
Oh, good. Okay.
Okay.
And now we're going to- Are we both being promoted? Do we have like buttons and stuff we can press?
You're the one that's promoted. Okay. No one's letting me near any buttons, Katty. Okay. Ask my wife, I'm not allowed near any buttons, not even the ignition.
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Chapter 5: What happened during Trump's controversial NBC interview?
You're barely allowed to the Knicks game this evening without an escort.
Not even allowed to the ignition to my car, but we're in the situation room. We're in the TripUS situation room and I'm going to posit something and then I need you now to make the decisions. Okay, ready? So, we are sitting here, Iran attacked Israel, Israel attacked Iran, that's this morning's news, and then Iran announces that they're done attacking Israel, right? Saw that.
Okay, so now I am going to posit to you that there's a 50 to 55% chance that we have a limp along deal where we get to a perpetually fragile non-war. It's sort of like a MOU, frozen transactional relationship where they go for 60 days without fighting. I'm going to now say to you three things. You tell me if you agree with any of them because I was working on this this morning.
Iran, everybody that I talked to on Wall Street, all the analysts in the Middle East that I'm close to, they are economically battered. They definitely need to sell oil.
Yes.
Okay, so they cannot afford a real war at this point if they're just gonna be honest with everybody. Trump also needs oil to be under $100, okay? He's gotta get this inflation down before the midterms and they're feeling the pinch. So for those two reasons, I do think We are in a quagmire, but we're in sort of a stalemate, which could reduce prices.
But here's the spoiler, Cady, and here's the question.
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Chapter 6: How does Trump's relationship with the media impact public perception?
Israel is a spoiler. It's the one party that's been restrained here rather than empowered, and they've got a political tug of war going on inside the country about what they should do and how they should deviate from the United States. And so, what would you recommend to President Trump to get Israel on side?
Trump is running out of options in the region, and Iran has exposed his lack of power in the region. But the one lever of real power that he does still have in this conflict is his ability to restrain Israel. By calling up journalists and telling them what he's doing, he's giving Iran a live feed of American decision-making process during a shooting war.
He's also burning some bridges with Benjamin Netanyahu, but Benjamin Netanyahu can't, Mr. President, actually do very much at all without American support. It needs American search and rescue. It needs American refueling. It needs American logistics.
So when Donald Trump tells the Financial Times, my friend Ed Luce at the Financial Times, who's one of those journalists who's got his numbers and just calls them up, I call all the shots, in a way, Donald Trump is right. Yes, there was a small retaliation, but it was a kind of kabuki retaliation. America calls the shots when it comes to Israel.
For Netanyahu, this is a disaster situation because he's looking at the choice between staying out of prison by being reelected. It is existential for him. He's got to win that election. But in order to win that election, he's got to be tough on Iran.
And yet there is Donald Trump, who is so desperate not to have a resumption of fighting that he is saying, you can't do that, which means that Netanyahu could be pushed into a position where he has to admit electoral defeat at home. Because Trump has made it very clear he's not gonna resume this fighting and he's not gonna let Israel screw it up for him.
So if I wanna manipulate Trump, because what we know now is that he's calling journalists and he's free forming and effectively laundering the strategies of the American government. And so if I wanna manipulate Trump, how do I do that? Because what's happening here
If you're Netanyahu, you mean?
Netanyahu, yeah. Even the Iranians, but he's handing the counterparties, both Netanyahu and Iran, frankly, a free read on his psychology. Now, how would you manipulate him if you could?
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Chapter 7: Why is the Strait of Hormuz critical to US-Iran relations?
Mr. President, I'd like you to stop speaking to journalists. You're hurting our ability to get the peace. F you, and you're fired after 11 days. I'm going to continue to speak to journalists. Okay, but then what would you do? Recognizing that you have Trump in power, and you're recognizing that this is the disaster that is Donald Trump. So what would you do?
I think you need to get to two things, right? You need to create space for the negotiations to succeed. And that's going to mean a couple of things. One is that the Iranians are going to have to have some kind of upfront payment. Like you say, they're running out of money. They need money now. Sanctions relief won't cut it. The return on that is gonna take too long.
They need some assets unfrozen. So you need Trump to get to a position where he can describe unfrozen assets as being the very opposite of what Barack Obama did when he gave Iran unfrozen assets. You're going to have to trick him into thinking there is a way to sell unfrozen assets, Iranian assets, back to Iran as a win. Because without that, I don't see how he gets a deal.
And he really wants a deal. The trouble is he's gone around telling everyone who will listen in Washington, including members of Congress I've spoken to, that the one thing he doesn't want is money going to the Iranians up front. He's going to have to swallow that. That has to be on the table if you want to get some kind of a deal. Otherwise, diplomacy is not going to work.
So he's going to have to be able to present himself, and you're going to have to give him the language to present himself as the master negotiator who managed to get the Iranians to reopen the Strait of Hormuz for very little money that was theirs anyway, while we got access to the nuclear dust that they had already agreed to water down.
Well, I mean, for me, okay, I'm going to put myself in the Israeli position here for a second, recognize everything I know about Trump. I would go to Trump and say, listen, I'll trade the Lebanon front. You want the deal. I get that. You're telling everybody no nuclear weapons, no nuclear weapons, nuclear dust, blah, blah.
I would say, hey, I'll trade the front, the Hezbollah strikes for more definition and more delineation. on getting the nuclear material out of that country, which ironically we had under Obama. But let me just explain, because if I can get it out of the country, my position inside of Israel is I'm eliminating the nuclear threat. We're always going to be at war here.
Our neighbors and us, for whatever reasons, since 1948, are fighting each other. But I don't want to get wiped off the map. And so for me, that would be the move. There's 440 kilograms of uranium. And I would definitely push for that.
And you'd find a way to make Trump accept that he's going to have to pay some money up front. I mean, he's going to have to pay to get the Strait open. That's just what it is. And he's going to have to accept that.
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