Raging Moderates with Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov
The Real Housewives of the Oval Office (Feat. Anthony Scaramucci & Gov. JB Pritzker)
Tue, 04 Mar 2025
Jessica Tarlov gets the inside scoop from Anthony Scaramucci—the man who lasted 11 wild days in the Trump White House—on where Trump fumbled in his meeting with Zelensky, what really went down during his short but chaotic tenure, and why Elon Musk’s growing influence in government should have all of us paying attention. Then, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker joins the conversation to break down the creeping authoritarianism in the GOP and make the case for why Democrats need to get back to basics—like fixing the economy—if they want to win big. Follow Jessica Tarlov, @JessicaTarlov. Follow Anthony Scaramucci, @Scaramucci. Follow Gov. Pritzker, @GovPritzker. Follow Prof G, @profgalloway. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: How did Anthony Scaramucci's time in the Trump White House unfold?
Well, it's very sweet of you to bring me on. And I haven't seen you in the flesh in a long time. We used to work at Fox together. People forget that because it's probably a decade now, but I hosted Wall Street Week for Fox Business. And we used to be able to share the set together on the Fox News channel and also Fox Business. So it's great to be with you.
Yeah, those were I can't believe how long ago that is, but also how long I've been there. Like when anyone asks about it, I'm like, it's my entire media life has been at Fox. But that was great. And Wall Street Week was such a great and I don't want to say serious. It was obviously serious. There was some levity to it, but it was so substantive. That's the word that I'm looking for.
Wall Street Week was so substantive.
Look, Maria Bartiromo, a very good friend of mine, is still doing that show. She calls it Maria Bartiromo's Wall Street. And so the show had legs. And I got the education of my lifetime because I left Fox to join the Trump administration. Yeah. And so it's been the education of my life.
Well, we still talk about your tenure there. Scaramucci's or Scaramucci is a... I don't want to say daily use. I mean, certainly on the Internet, it's a daily use. But we think about it. But you have unique perspective.
Yeah, listen, I'm just glad that the president, when the president goes after me on his Truth Social account, he does use 11 days. And I think he should be the official scorer because some of these journalists that don't like me, they use 10 days. And that hurts my feelings, Jess. I don't want to have my feelings hurt. Why chip me at a 9.1 percent of my federal career?
No, it's interesting that he's the one that's more generous about it, though.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, he knows. He knows.
He knows exactly. There are some things he does know, and he knows exactly how long someone worked for him.
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Chapter 2: What happened during Trump's meeting with Zelensky?
Zelensky left early, the press conference was scrapped, and Trump later posted that Zelensky can return when he is, quote, "'ready for peace.'" Where do you think this leaves U.S.-Ukraine relations? And what's your general response?
I've seen some of your posts on social media, but for our audience, can you just talk about, you know, your gut reaction to what happened and where you think we are now?
Well, first of all, I maintain that that was a setup. And I maintain that the way J.D. Vance, Vice President Vance, went after President Zelensky was a setup and it was contrived. And I, you know, I watched it now several times. I think the one thing that President Zelensky did, which I wish he didn't do, Was he said, you know, you're protected by this ocean, but you'll see what will happen.
And that obviously antagonized Trump. But the outcome of that would have been the same if Zelensky was Mother Teresa in that meeting and he was the combination of Keir Starmer and Macron and other people that have been president. lauded by the press for doing well with Trump, it's still, that would have been the outcome. They were trying to get that outcome. They were trying to eject him.
For some reason, they've aligned themselves with the Kremlin. They use Kremlin talking points when they're talking about the Ukrainian situation and the country, Ukraine. And that's fine. I don't agree with it, but that's them, right? So they went hard at him. Trump is a television producer. He even admitted that this is good TV and reality television, which Trump was a star of for many years.
You need conflict. And so this is the conflict setup. It was sort of like watching the real housewives of the Oval Office when they were doing this to President Zelensky. And I think it has real ramifications for the United States. I just want to give you this analogy, and I want your viewers and listeners to think about this. Let's say you have a blue-collar kid, and he rises in his family.
He's got a lot of poor people in his family. And he rises and he's wealthy now. And so maybe he buys a few cars or maybe he helps out with some tuitions or plays some emergency medical expenses. That's one family. And then the other family, the same thing happens. And the person builds this big, beautiful mansion with a swimming pool.
And then they say to their family members, okay, you can come over to my swimming pool today on a Saturday, but I'm going to charge you admission into my swimming pool. And America has to understand something about itself, whether they like it or not. The world sees America very different than Americans see America.
And so how does the world, at least when I was growing up in the world, the world saw America as a benevolent country, generally. The world saw America as a peacekeeping country, generally. Not that we didn't have failures in Vietnam or Afghanistan and so forth, but in general, We were trying to provide a security umbrella for the free world. And, you know, Trump doesn't understand this.
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Chapter 3: Why is Elon Musk's influence in government significant?
I was once in a blue collar aspirational family over 30 years of bad policy. I'm now in a blue collar, desperational family. Okay. And so, so you have to, everything you just said at the top line is true, but we have to understand how we got there. OK, and this is a politician's lapse.
You know, you're raging moderates who used to vote for Jack Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, their grandparents or their great grandparents, Franklin Roosevelt. There was nobody there, nobody there to help them. And so in comes Donald Trump in 2016 with his message. And they're like, hey, I'm a white, lower income voter. No one's speaking to me anymore. Right. He is.
I'm with him whether he shoots somebody on Fifth Avenue. So unless you're telling me you're going to find a leader that can go to the American people, explain to them what happened...
and then tell them why where we are now is wrong, and we have to reset the table for ourselves and reset the table for our lower and middle income people, but also stay integrated into the world, we got a problem because Trump doesn't care. He's very transactional. Trump is using Putin's talking points. Why is he doing that? Okay, I don't know.
I'm not going to say that he's an agent for Vladimir Putin, but he acts like one. So why is he doing that? And then what you're saying is absolutely true. 50% of the country says, I'm done helping the world. I need help in my own backyard. And my response to those people is, you're right, you do. But we also need to
help the world because if we don't help the world and a fire breaks out somewhere in the world, we're going to get drawn into it. You know, USAID, you mentioned that. Let me just point this out. When we were pumping USAID into Guatemala and into the lower part of the Yucatan Peninsula, we had less border traffic because it's like an ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of cure.
You put one, two, three billion dollars into those economies and people have jobs and they have some satisfactory living standards. They don't run with their newborn baby 800 miles to the border. Right. But we're now going to cut the USAID. And so you're going to cause more problems, more stress.
But by the way, if you've got medical illnesses and you've got viral activity in Africa or other parts in the world, are we breathing the same air, Jessica? Are we? I think we are. So what's going to happen? What's going to happen? You don't want to stop the illnesses in Africa? You want them to transfer to everybody around the world? Is that what you want to do? Okay.
But again, it's the rich mansion holder. Is he going to help the world or is he going to charge them to go to a swimming pool? You got to make a decision and you got to educate your people. Yes, yes, we left you out. We left you out due to our ignorance and our apathy, but we've got to integrate you back in.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of Trump's relationship with Russia?
That he and Mike Waltz, who has a similar view of the world, the national security advisor, were the ones that executed the taking Zelensky out of the White House. Right. And essentially saying we're done for the day and all of this. And what do you think has happened to these traditional neoconservatives that have found their way into the Trump administration?
Because I do not believe and I know some of them. that they have just wiped the slate clean of everything that they have believed for decades. Some of them who sacrificed, you know, have veterans that have gone to fight for us and protect this new world order. I don't think that they had a lobotomy. So what is going on with the people who are working for him?
And do you think there's anyone that is going to stand up like there was in the first administration?
Okay, so there's so much to unpack there, but let's talk about Trump and the Russians for a second. So, Curtis Yarvin, who is a philosopher out on the West Coast, who believes that the democracy is obsolete, and Curtis Yarvin believes that we should no longer... have a democratic process. There should be some type of oligarchic monarchy.
Very smart people should run everything and leave everybody out. And obviously, you may remember this from the remains of the day, right? There was an allegory there where they were asking Anthony Hopkins to Butler questions. He didn't know the answers, and then the aristocrats scoffed at him and said, well, why would we give him the vote?
In the meantime, they're bringing the Nazis into the front door, right? And the allegory was, even though you may be rich and think you're smarter than Anthony Hopkins, the mundane butler, you need everybody. You need the democracy to have this sort of wisdom of the collective crowd, right? So there was an allegory. There was a warning there. But let's give Trump the benefit of the doubt.
This is a Curtis Yarvin thing. This is Peter Thiel, acolyte of Yarvin, J.D. Vance, acolyte of Yarvin, Elon Musk, the same, a follower of Yarvin. And Trump, who's less organized than them, more transactional, they've bandied together with him and they wrote something called Project 2025.
And they're going to dismantle and weaken the checks and balances in the system and expand the executive power due to this ideology that the democracy is obsolete. And Thiel's publicly said that to people. So that could be the best case. The worst case is that they've laundered money through Trump and they've laundered money through the Trump organization.
And he's tied to the Russians and he owes the Russians something and he's trying to deliver to them what they want. That's the worst case. OK, so that's Trump. As it relates to Walsh and Rubio, I understand that perfectly because I live that. And it doesn't reflect well on me as a human being, but I did live that. I was a George Bush, Mitt Romney, garden variety establishment Republican.
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Chapter 5: How is the Trump administration affecting the free press?
And we need to make sure that these people feel restored and aspirational and then they won't care about fascism. And we need to fix the democracy. We need to end gerrymandering, end Citizens United, right-size the deficit, do really smart, powerful things to help the American people.
I'm totally with you. And I, you know, I was young during the 90s, but I talk a lot about the Clinton years and how it feels like we are... ripe for something like that to happen again, if there is a charismatic leader with that kind of common sense approach to everything.
I just want to say, and I want to move to a conversation about the free press, but what you're describing as what happened here in America, which it certainly did, is happening all over the world. I mean, the liberal order is failing, you know, across Europe. Far-right parties are getting larger shares in Thank you for having me.
And London was as jazzed about Obama being elected as they were back home. But something has shifted. I know the AFD underperformed what Elon Musk and J.D. Vance wanted in the German elections, but they still got a bigger share.
And this conversation specifically about immigration is really what's fueling it, because everyone has lost any semblance of an idea of what borders or national character means to the average person. And while they might be benevolent insofar as thinking that
were pro-immigration and that people should, you know, have rights to some goods and services, we all basically laid down and just said, you know, come on in. That will be Angela Merkel's legacy, which is sad. for her and everything that was accomplished during that time. But that's what it'll be remembered from.
And you just have to look at what the CDU looks like now to understand how badly she messed that up and the lessons that that sent through Europe. But we need to take a quick break. So stay with us.
The Trump administration is defying a federal judge who's demanding details about a flight to El Salvador. It carried almost 200 men who the administration says are gang members and who were flown from U.S. soil after the judge said, don't.
President Trump and El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele posted video of the shackled men being pulled from the plane by guards in riot gear and transported in white buses to prison. The official White House Twitter account also reposted a remix of the video set to Semisonic's closing time. Semisonic responded, the song is about joy and possibilities and hope.
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Chapter 6: What are the challenges facing the Democratic Party?
And I would say I feel like the Democrats are very happy to have you talking the way that you're talking about being pro-democracy.
They don't put me in their tent. Trust me, they won't put me in their tent. They let me help Vice President Harris on the debate because I understood Trump and I was able to get some fun lines into the debate. But they won't bring me in because I'm not a Democrat.
Well, I used to even have that much so less since I started co-hosting The Five. But people, Democrats are suspicious of me because I work at Fox.
Right, exactly.
Like it makes no difference what I'm saying or to how large of an audience.
You're helping Fox prosper. But by the way, you know, I applaud Fox for supporting AP. I applaud them for that. And again, you know, there's opinion people at Fox, there's journalists at Fox, and that's a point of view. And we should have that point of view and we should have a healthy, rigorous debate about it. But the Trump stuff has taken it to a different level.
Trump thinks like a Victor Orban. He doesn't think like a traditional American president. Okay, the presidents since Roosevelt were grounded in some bipartisanship and grounded in some democratic principles and were committed to the idea of containment and the promotion of freedom and raising living standards around the world.
Okay, they weren't, hey, it's my swimming pool and I'm now going to charge you to come into the swimming pool.
Yeah, I think the defining distinction between what's going on right now and in the past, and I'm certainly not combing this to the way that we were split during the Civil War, but is the information game in all of this and the disinformation.
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