207. Is Trump Preparing for a Ground Invasion of Iran?

(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to the Restisted Politics US with me, Katty Kaye. - And me, Anthony Skyrumbur. She good morning, Katty. - Good morning, Anthony. - Today we're talking about the mess that is the Iran War and whether there could be a full-scale invasion this weekend. Katty, you've got some amazing insight on this. And we're gonna talk about how the Democrats are war-gaming the midterms. But first, Katty, tell us what you're hearing in Washington. - I feel, Anthony, a lot has been happening and I'm not sure the underlying fundamentals of the president's options in Iran have changed very much, but we have had an extremely busy week in the Middle East. And I have been told that we could have a very busy weekend with a major escalation in the Middle East as well. So the background of that is that there's reporting in the Wall Street Journal that America is moving 150 medical personnel has moved them to the Lundsaule Medical Center in Germany. It's sending more F-16s and F-35s to the region. But it's also sent aerial refueling tankers to the region and special operation forces have been moved from the US to the region as well, ahead of a possible escalation in the war. I don't know that there is a clearer strategy though coming out of the White House and what I've heard is that there are people in the White House who are worried that these night after night bombing campaigns have really not changed the equation in Iran. They're getting a lot of political heat for not having a clear exit strategy. At a time when opinion polls are showing that support for the war is declining and there are new concerns because of what is happening with the Houthis and another kind of front to this theater of operations with the Houthis attacking a tanker in the Red Sea that we've got oil prices going up today. I think they've just risen $4 a barrel, crude has just risen $4 a barrel and it's gone over $4 a gallon at the pump today, which is up over where it has been for a while. So my takeaways, we've got a lot of moving parts, Anthony, but the underlying factors just don't seem to change very much. The Iranians have figured out that they control the straight-of-all moves and Trump's bombing is not bringing them to the table. In fact, it's probably hardening their resolve. Even though their economy, according to the IMF, is going to contract by 6% this year and they have real problems of their own and maybe overplaying their hand, we are further away from a negotiated settlement than we were a couple of weeks ago. What do you think? What do you make of what's happening? Maria Bartoromo, a Fox News anchor. She's a friend of mine, I know her very long time. She was asking a question over the weekend. I thought we've devastated the Iranian Army and we've devastated the Iranian Air Force and we've taken out their missile capability. How are they able to do this? I think it was a rhetorical question. What do you reckon from Maria? Yeah, but it is to me a sign that they can't stay with the administration's policy. The voters and the watchers, when you do the ratings and you do the Fox News polling, they don't like the war. Even the people that ardently support Donald Trump do not like the war. When Laura Ingraham has now left the White House on war policy, it's a sign that she's getting from her boss, try to talk these impassals out of the war. Yeah, because she said that the clock is ticking for Trump to get out before voters go to the polls, calling the war unpopular. But I just wanna point out because Yofifa has a peace prize, trip US has a Thomas Jefferson denomination prize and I am now calling MBS. The crown prince of Saudi Arabia. Yeah, the Thomas Jefferson of his generation and just let me explain why. He got a 30 year nuclear deal out of Trump. That's not diplomacy, that's the greatest trade since the Louisiana purchase. And this time, we're the French, Cadi, we're the French. So to me, what Trump is doing is he's softening Saudi because in his mind, he can't get out of this thing unless he potentially launches a ground invasion. And so we've got probably 48 to 72 hours to talk the imbecile out of doing that because that will have very, very negative consequences for the global economy, very negative consequences for our troops. And it'll be just another forever war quack, Meyer. And Anthony, when Trump announced that deal, there was quite a lot of criticism of the president for not seeming to get anything in return for giving them this big prize of having American technology help them in rich uranium. But actually, Trump just this morning on Thursday came out and said that the nuclear agreement signed with Saudi Arabia was totally subject to the kingdom joining the Abraham Accords and recognizing the state of Israel no hurt from the Saudis on whether that's what they understand by this. But it would be a huge development if suddenly Saudi Arabia were to recognize Israel. So I'm now wondering whether there's anything to this nuclear agreement after all. And then the last point I just want to tell people is that the GOP does not care about you. Okay, they're worried about the inflation transmission mechanism at the war starts, where the Hormuz straight is closed, the Red Seas under Houthi attack, and they're worried about insurance premium spiking in the Gulf. That's what they're worried about because they're looking, oh my God, this is time beautifully over the next 90 days to land badly for us in November. That's all they care about. They're not sitting there saying, this is bad for the American citizens, bad for the American servicemen, bad for the economy. And by the way, okay, and I have tried to restrain myself on this. But Pete Hexeth is one of the disasters of disasters that have ever had a role in the American government. And I set you a clip of him talking yesterday and the look of derision on JD Vance's face. Whatever you think of JD Vance, Hexeth is saying, alive before the cameras that the Iranians did not want to negotiate with us. And if you saw the head snap from Vance, he was like, okay, all right, guys, what are we doing? So my question to you, are we gonna have a war here, Caddy, where we have a full-on-ground invasion from the Americans alone in the region without their allies? - Well, it would probably be with the Israelis. They would probably step in. And you never know with Trump, right? He's capable of changing his mind multiple times and one military, former military general has said, look, this could be all a build-up to give him more options against the Houthis. He sees that area hotting up. The Saudis, obviously, are terrified of the Houthis hitting their export terminal in Yambu. That would have a massive impact on global oil prices and he wants to keep the Saudis happy. And it could also be a faint. It could be to show the Iranians, look, we're serious. We're gonna surge all of these troops here and force you to negotiate. It's not a strategy that Iran watchers think is gonna work because Iran has got more hard line in its demands, not less hard line in its demand. So I think there is a chance that we have this weekend, some kind of a major escalation. And the question then is, what is still his problem? What is the exit strategy? What you're gonna invade the whole country? You're gonna invade Carg Island and then keep American forces there. One former admiral pointed out to me that they've already got so many ships and marine forces tied up in the Gulf that now that the Red Sea is heating up, they're gonna have to move those forces from the Persian Gulf area over to the Red Sea area, spreading their troops even thinner and they're gonna have to also try to protect those Saudi export facilities. So I think it's whether or not we have a full blown war this weekend, I'd say the chances are looking higher. It feels like Washington is on a war footing at the end of this week in a way that it wasn't at the beginning of this week. But, you know, the hawks that you spoke about, the Pete Hegseths, who has not given, by the way, a news conference for two and a half months. I think they've realized he is not helpful. Senators this week produced all of his statements about how this was all over. But the hawks built the war and now it's got, you know, the Fox news hosts are the ones that are saying, "Please, can you get this over by November?" I don't know how Trump gets out of this, Anthony. I don't know how he gets out of it because there are two paths. Walk away and you leave the region with an IRGC which is emboldened and angry and more retaliatory and clearly, even in the short time of that peace agreement or whatever it was, the ceasefire managed to restock and is now launching missiles, not just drones. So the region is not going to like that or go for a full-fledged war because what they're doing 12 nights of bombing doesn't seem to have changed things very much. So, Anthony, look, if there is going to be a ground invasion, What does that look like? How many people would be involved? And where? exactly they're going to go. I think it'll be an unmitigated disaster because it should be 600,000 troops. Of course, it won't be. It'll be about 10,000 troops. He's probably going to go after Carg Island and he may some, send some troops to, if you're looking at the map, the eastern side of the straight, to see if he can clear up those boats that are attacking the ships. But I think it's going to be a disaster because it's not going to be enough troops to really solve the problem that we're in. His aircraft carriers are too far away. His air support is going to be mixed and they're going to be ready for it. Okay, they've been planning for this for 20 years. Okay, and he's going to not, and I've said this before and you've said this, I want to repeat this to everybody, we do not understand them, the Iranians, as well as they understand us. And so they'll be waiting for Donald Trump and they'll be waiting for our troops and it'll be a very ugly scenario for us. And we're locked into an undemocratic process about this war because if we pull people in the United States right now, do they want this war? They don't want the war. Moreover, this is not a war like World War II. This is a war of choice and this is a war of grave consequence for a very large group of people in this country. And you know, it just really pisses me off to no end. What did you make of the dignified return ceremony and then his speech in Georgia with the family of one of the fallen victims and what he said about the war in that context? Well, listen, he's trying to do the right things and he's trying to be presidential, but then he has his buffoonery sidebars and his buffoonery side tracks and even you texted me yesterday, he's like winking and waving at people while we're taking flag-draped coffins off of the the transport planes. And the poor families, that's one of the hardest moments for them and then he's he called it a skirmish. I mean, how do you these people have just these kids have just given their lives for the country and he won't call a war, he calls it a skirmish. And he also put out on true social which ended up on Twitter the casualties of the different wars and he's implying that because we haven't had that many casualties yet, that this is not a big deal. So he has that disassociation tendency and he has that indifference towards people and indifference towards human life, which to me is very callous and nonsensical, but I I want to go to our history and I want you to answer this and put your British hat on, if you don't mind, or your internationalist hat on observing America, why do we make the same mistakes over and over again where we have these incidents of gradualism in war, we have incidents of gradualism in Vietnam, incidents of gradualism and then surges in Iraq and Afghanistan and deescalations and resurges. And you know, he's going to put probably 10 to 15,000 troops on the ground. It's not the 570,000 troops that he actually needs to do the job. And of course, he can't do that for political purposes. So why do the Americans make the same mistake over and over again 60 years of actually doing the exact same thing over and over again? Such a good question. I mean, obviously each case is slightly different and each president is slightly different, but there is something of a pattern. One is the belief that because you have the largest military in the world in this country, that alone is enough, that military force is enough, and that you can beat ideology with fighters and missiles and tanks and bullets and just ask the Ukrainians, that is clearly not the case. America has a tendency to fail to understand the other side's will to fight. I've had Senator King has talked to me a lot about this, both in Afghanistan recently it failed to understand the world fight of the Afghan army, which was nonexistent. In the case of Ukraine, it failed to understand the world fight of the Ukrainian people, which was very existent. So they have a sense of hubris about the power of their own military combined with a lack of understanding about the enemy. And that lack of understanding, I think, is the part that is particularly egregious. And it's this failure to learn. So you don't stop your State Department and your CIA with the right kind of people at the right kind of time. After 9/11, famously, there were only four people in the State Department who could speak Arabic fluently. They'd all been Russia experts. And then Russia comes roaring back and guess what? We have a whole load of Middle East experts. We don't have enough Russia experts. So having the expertise that really understands foreign cultures that has lived there, studied there, knows the language, knows the people, that is not something America has been good at investing in. The power of the American military, combined with the weakness of American knowledge and curiosity, is why you keep ending up in this position. Since we last saw each other Monday night, I went to the Odyssey. I took the kids to see it. Oh, I went to. I thought I loved it. Did you? Yeah, I thought it was brilliant. That Trojan horse scene is fantastic. Yeah, I read the book four times. And so I thought he he followed the story and the critics and go scram because the movie is brilliant. But what I didn't remember, which I want to emphasize here, is Odysseus is now talking to us 3,000 years later, because Odysseus was his own enemy. Okay. He had his pride and he had his ego. Cady and I've often talked about this. When you say, well, we're going to do this or we're going to do that or bomb their bridges and tunnels, that's your pride and ego. And what we found in the Odyssey, he couldn't find his way home because he was cursed. Not by the gods, Gady. He was cursed by his own pride and he was cursed by his own ego. Okay, even when he turned around and he shot the Cyclops, okay, this was his ego speaking more than it was the gravitas that you need to be a real leader. And we're, you know, I don't want to use the word, but we're aft. And I'm going to tell you why we're aft because we have nobody that is willing to call this out. And we have nobody that's willing to look at the situation and redress the situation. So we're going to probably end up with people there. Well, you have lots of people. They're just not the people around Trump. I mean, you know, the mystery of why Trump has such an iron grip on his party and his followers is still one that I think has not been fully explained. But you do have lots of Democrats and you do have lots of former Trump people who you know who you served within the administration who have called this out very publicly. Yeah, just remember when you're escalating a war, the people that are making the decision to escalate the war never. And I want to repeat never bear the costs of the escalation of the war. And so I just wonder if they could take a focus group of military families or a focus group of working poor in the country and set them down in the east wing. And so how do you guys feel about this? They would say GFY use sons of bitches. Okay, because you're going to put us in another problem that we actually don't need to have in this country. I think there is a realization that you're right Anthony that this is looking increasingly like a forever war, which is exactly why Trump was voted into office was to have America get out of forever wars. And that's why you have these Fox News hosts now. And it's coordinated. They don't do it just one by one. This is a coordinated effort by Fox News to get a message to Donald Trump. Be very careful because you are getting into something you will not be able to get out of. Okay, we're going to take a break and come back and talk about midterm politics and what the Democrats are doing. This episode is brought to you by Zip Recruiter. It's easy to tell when somebody is passionate about what they do. Look at our world, the whole political world. You can tell the ones who are in it because they love it and who are in it because they've been there too long and they've got a little stale. I've been hiring people for 21 years in my company. And that's a double one thing that we look forward to looking for passion and enthusiasm. It's very hard in an interview. And so you need people like Zip Recruiter to help you figure out the wheat from the chaff caddy. And you can find passionate people for your role for free at ziprecruiter.com/politics. Zip Recruiter's newest feature helps you meet the most interested qualified candidates. First, they can even tell you why in their own words. Find candidates who really want your job on Zip Recruiter. Four out of five employers who post on Zip Recruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/politics that's ziprecruiter.com/politics. Meet your match on Zip Recruiter. Welcome back to the rest of the politics US with me Anthony Scaramucci and caddy Kay. Cady. We've got a lot of midterm fears on both sides. So we've got some election deniers, and we've got the Democrats putting together their Doomsday midterm scenario. And all the while, we're trying to get the Clarity Act passed for the Bitcoiners and the blockchain people. I predict that that won't pass, by the way, that this is a business show, but I just think they're mud slinging in a way where it won't happen. But, Katty, tell us about state representative Alexander Kolodin. What is going on there? Oh my God. What is in the water in Arizona? Why is it always Arizona, Anthony? I went down to Arizona in 2022 and spent like, oh, God, it was hot as hell down there. And spent a month talking to people before the midterm elections. They are full of crazy theories, some of the most crazy theories about what happened to 2020. And guess what? We're back there again, because this week we've had a whole slate of election deniers, basically, who have been nominated in primary positions on the Republican side. State representative Alexander Kolodin, who I've educated lawyer, echoes all of Trump's 2020 election campaigns. He's going to now be the nominee to become one of Arizona's top election officials, the Secretary of State, hugely powerful positions these Secretary of State's, because they get to control how the elections are run. Then in the gubernatorial race, you've got another one, Andy Biggs, also an election denier who has the Republican nomination to go up against the sitting Democrat. I don't know. Arizona just, I don't know if it's the heat or something in the water, but it always seems to be ground zero of election denierism. And that's on the Republican side. But look, this is all stoking fears amongst Democrats, right? There could really be some effort to interfere in the election in November. So Democrats are trying to come up with plans of their own. What are you hearing from the Democratic side about what they want to do to try to counter any election meddling? I think the problem is something that Stalin said. It's not who's voting. It's who's counting the votes, Katty. I think the Democrats are sitting around saying, okay, how do we war game this to make sure that we have a say in how the votes are getting counted because Trump is coming hard. And Katty, Trump says, and I quote, there are 35,152 non-citizens that voted, okay, and this is Trump numbers that always have a fake precision to them. Why does he do that? Why does he make a number so precise? I'm so wrong, but also so precise. Well, he thinks that makes it sound more voracious to the unwitting, right? The more decimal places for Donald Trump, the bigger the lie. Like I had 1,637,000 people at my first inauguration, something like that. I just think it's so bad, okay? And I think that if the Democrats don't get their arms around this, the Republicans are going to surprise people with how well they do in the midterms, despite their approval ratings, you know? This is a Victor Orban moment for the United States. This is a group of people that have corrupted the situation, and now we're going to see what the outcome is. And the Democrats are, I think, trying now to do something that is more than just talking about this, because they had this secret meeting in the Senate just yesterday on Wednesday, a group of senators in a room right by the Senate floor, a dozen Democratic senators with a bunch of election officials did meet to start wall gaming. What they would do in anticipation of the White House trying to meddle in the elections, because what they don't want is to be caught like they were last time in 2020, where they had to kind of litigate it after the fact. So they want to have the lawyers there, and the lawyers were there, Mark Elias was at this meeting, getting ready to say, how would we respond? But they've realized they've got to be proactive about this. So apparently what they were doing at this kind of tabletop meeting was looking at specific areas like, what would they do? The federal law enforcement were sent to polling places. How would they respond if the voter rolls are challenged? How would they deal with misinformation campaigns? How will they deal with the count? Because as you say, it's like, who does the count? And how are they going to make sure that the count is free and fair? Apparently, they spent a lot of time focusing specifically on Texas. They're very concerned about Texas. But they are clear. The courts can't just keep being the last line of defense. We've spoken about this before, Anthony, how it is coming down to the courts time and time again. And because some of the things that have changed since the last, since 2024, in terms of regulation, they don't want this all to come down to the courts. What they really want is to make sure they get enough people out of the polls and enough of a margin of victory that this phrase "too big to rig" comes into play. So they're really focusing on trying to make sure that there isn't room for people to actually meddle with this. They're doing this, they say, because they think what Trump has been saying recently about the elections and his refocus on the 2020 election is why they're worried that there could be something that happens in November. Carrie, I missed the hanging chats. Oh. The hanging chats. I missed them. Oh. I missed the pregnant chats. You remember the pregnant chats? The pregnant chats. I liked the idea of a pregnant chat. We have AI deep fakes now. We have voter purges. We have ice at the polls with their masks on. Do you think we should remind people what the hanging and pregnant chats are? Yeah. Well, wanting to tell people what the hanging and pregnant chats are, but I just, I missed that world. I'm longing for the hanging chat. It felt so innocent and kind of, I know the 2000 election. This is all about the 2000 election and the vote down in Florida and in Miami and we all spent a long time talking about whether a chat, which is an electron paper ballot, had a dimple in it and therefore was marked for a Democrat or did not have a dimple and was it pregnant or was it hanging, was the actual piece of paper hanging off because it'd been punched. We all got very afraid with those terms, but I don't know. I look at that world. You know, you look at the world of misinformation now and what AI can do to election campaigns. Add to that foreign meddling from the Russians in 2016. Chinese I'm sure would love to meddle, which is not to say that the Chinese actually changed any votes and went into the system and actually changed the voting machines, but I'm sure they would love to influence people. And just, God, that 2000 era feels kind of nice and cozy and fuzzy, I have to say. To me, it's going to get worse and there's no transformative leader to stop the noise that's coming out of the system. And so if anything, they're reacting to each other in this low brow, lower level consciousness, sort of a way based on fear and based on retribution and based on ego. So I'm not happy about it, but I'm hoping that the American people will look at this situation the way they did in Hungary and they'll send a tsunami of voters into the mix that will destroy the corruptive forces that are going on right now. What do you think, Anthony, is the fallout of this story that's come out of New Jersey about a few thousand non-citizens being added through a clerical era. It looks like in a one year window of time onto the voter rolls, it's people who were given driving licenses who were not citizens. I'm not a citizen. I have a US driving license. That's totally normal. I do not have the right to vote. So I'm not only a voter roll, but these people were put on the voter rolls as well as being given driving license. I think we're now looking at about 6,000 plus people. Statistically, it makes no difference to the outcome of the election in New Jersey because New Jersey isn't overwhelming or has been an overwhelming democratic state, but it's going to be politically significant, I think, right? I'm waiting for Trump to come back with something big on this. Yeah, this is the genius of Donald Trump, 6,000 people misregistered of those 6,000, though caddy, only 400 of them voted. Okay. And Italian wedding in New Jersey, okay? It's not even a decimal point, but Trump will make that into a big deal, the way he made the trans issue with the high school athletes, 10 of those out of 330 million people, played high school sports, made it a big issue. I'm not sitting here telling people that there aren't mistakes and there aren't some people that voted that shouldn't vote and things like that. That does happen. I am saying what Homeland Security said prior to Trump's arrival, this stuff does happen, but it's very, very scant and it does not influence the integrity of the election. Right. Well, the outcome. Yeah. Donald Trump is reading off of Vladimir Putin's script and he's finding things to surface to make the American people at least 25% of them that are clinging to him believe that we have shoddy elections to believe that the quote unquote system is rigged. But again, when he's winning the elections, it's not rigged. When he's losing the elections and he's running the elections that he's losing apparently, then it is rigged. Isn't that funny how it works like that? I don't really get the whole thing 100%, but I understand him and that lie is something he will bang on, we're mid-late July right now. He will take that lie into November about as aggressively as he can. Thank you, right. And honestly, what he'll hope for, Caddy, is a lot of people won't show up the vote because he'll be cynical about the vote. And the Democrats are aware they have to be a little careful about that. They can't make people feel fatalistic and that's why they're not making such a big thing about the elections or the elections or the rigged or could be rigged. because they don't want people to stay home. They're having that discussion as well. We are now at what are we? End of July, I think the framing of the battle lines are pretty much drawn. You've got Republicans are going to paint all Democrats as communists, and they'll point to the Democratic Socialists of America party and say the Democrats are too far out there. And this is not your father's Democratic party, and you can't vote for them without America risk in becoming communist. You heard Trump say that down in Georgia yesterday. And the Democrats are going to run on a very simple message which is stop Trump. And in a midterm election, negative energy is probably more important than positive energy. It's a referendum on the party and the person in power, even though Trump's name is not on the ballot, don't fool yourself guys. This will all be about Donald Trump. And it's worked for them before in midterms. It's probably going to work for them again. They'll play that playbook one last time before Trump is out of office. And they will hope that the enthusiasm gap that is at about 11% according to Fox News, new Fox News poll that's out will drive them home in the midterm elections. I don't think it helps them in the 2028 election. I think then they have to come up with a governing agenda, a theory of the case, four Democrats. They've got to get over their own internal civil war. They've got to get over all of their own culture war stuff. But for the midterms, that's probably enough that negative energy will get them through the house at least, I reckon. That's what you're going to hear for the next three and a half months and all for the pleasure of probably what, a few hundred billion dollars. We'll have to see. But the Democrats guys wake up. They want to control the certification. They want to control the vote count. OK, and they've read Stalin. OK, and they're taking Stalin seriously. So wake up. OK, guys, we're going to leave it there. Thank you very much for listening. We can have a great weekend. We hope it is not a too busy one, despite what we're hearing here in Washington. Don't forget to grab your tickets for our live tour this October ahead of the midterms. Head to the rest is politics US.com or scan the QR code on your screen right now. Can I, I got to do a little shameless promotion? Hold on. Oh, I like that. I like the t-shirt. Daddy, shameless promotion. The book is coming out, guys, September. For all of you who can't see what Anthony is holding up, it says, Anthony Scaramucci, there's a very fetching picture of Anthony's face. All the wrong moves is the name of the book you can pre-order now. You can go to Amazon, Waterstone A place. Please help your podcasting friend out and buy one of my books. Thank you, guys. And we will be back next week. Hello, everybody. We got some exciting news for you. That's right, Cady. We are holding a summer sale on our founding members' subscriptions. From now until the end of August, you can get a year's membership to our show for a third off. I think that's a real bargain. Okay, you just need to use the code summer26 when you sign up for an annual membership. And you'll unlock ad-free listening. You'll get our bonus episodes and, of course, our exclusive mini-series. We've got a series covering Marco Rubio, Elon Musk, Trump's health, and so much more, including these very popular, Cady, these question and answer sessions. So head to therestispoliticsus.com to claim this discount. We'd love to have you with us in the club. We'll have plenty to talk about over the next few months, so make sure you don't miss out. What more could our listeners want, Cady, K, than this uninterrupted sound of our voices? Maybe not my voice, but certainly your voice, Cady. Okay, we want to accompany you on all your summer travels. So go to the code summer26restispoliticsus.com and sign up.