Anthony Scaramucci | Full Q&A at The Oxford Union

[Music] [Music] all right thank you you dressed up just for me good thank you coming to Oxford this evening and joining us um I wanted to start and as you will know Hillary Clinton has just released her book what happened and I thought perhaps this could inspire the start of our interview what happened could you talk us through from the phone call from the president asking you to be the communications director to how just ten days into the job you were fired okay so so first of it was 11 days I mean don't get me out of the one day cuz it's nine point one percent of my federal career okay so no so it was 11 day 11 days and so what would actually happen was I was at the XM Bank and I was the chief strategy officer there and I got a call from Ivanka who asked to to meet with me and then she called her dad and her dad was off the so if you've ever been in the West Wing the Oval Office is in the back by the Rose Garden you may get there someday some of you or some of the Americans may get there and there's a there's a den and a little study the president's got this big 70 inch flat-screen TV in there so he's in there watching television with his DVR and I walked in and we had a conversation about things that he needed to change and so since it was a privileged conversation I can't go into too much detail about it but he asked me to take on that role and that was Thursday at 4:30 I said to the president you realize that there's gonna be more than one person on your team that doesn't want me to have that role and he said yeah I totally realized that he said but show up at 10 o'clock and you'll have the role those guys they spent the whole evening trying to prevent me from getting the role and at 10 o'clock the next morning in the Oval Office I was appointed the comms director and then the president turned to me and said okay I want you to do the press conference today so I said okay no problem when I walked back in the press-secretary area there was 30 people from the comms team there and they said okay we're here to brief you on the press conference that you're about to have and I said okay get out of the office I don't need the briefing because I didn't want to get clouded by whatever they were going to say they didn't know any of them and so I did the the press briefing and then I did the job that the president asked me to do and you mentioned a little bit of it but what did the president ask me to do is to find and identify who were perpetrating the biggest amount of leaks inside the administration and then to you know effectively remove a lot of those people and so you don't need to know a lot about Washington to know that the minute I was declared the hatchet man that my duration in Washington was going to be very short-lived because as soon as I was declared the hatchet man the knives got longer and longer as a result of some of my adversaries I told Steve Colbert who's the American late-night comedian that he asked me how long I was gonna last I said well I thought I was gonna beat a carton of milk you know I didn't think I was gonna get blown out of there before your milk got spoiled in the refrigerator but I didn't think I was in the last more than 30 or 60 days there was no there was no way given the magnitude of what had to happen that I thought that was gonna be possible and then talked us through the firing sorry it's a just 11 days later um well the firing was sort of weird because you know it was unclear up until that morning whether or not I was gonna be in the job or not in the job but I can tell you how I learned that I was gonna be in the job I don't want to go into the conversations because again those conversations are privileged but I will tell you how I learned that I was going to be in the job you get issued a white house like that phone which is a security encrypted phone so that your White House email and your cellular transmissions are more or less heavily encrypted relative to your regular phone and so when I landed I was in I went with the president on Friday to West Islip which is Long Island was where I he gave a speech on ms-13 the gangs and what we were doing to like stop the gang violence in America and so I stayed home over the weekend visited my family and so I took the seven o'clock the six o'clock shuttle back to Washington when I landed I went to turn the White House Batphone on and it wasn't working see ya and then I knew I was a dead man look at the phone I said oh man this is not gonna be a good day for me and so I will tell you this I got fired at 9:37 but it didn't come out until 2 o'clock in the afternoon see that so we had them we had the leakers on the run ok they were not gonna leak the information they started leaking again now it's a different sort of leaking than the one that was going on prior to that episode it's a different style of leaking but the biggest story of the day was my firing it didn't leak which I thought was sort of fun and ironic and when the the firing itself was because of the the journalists leaking and is that what you think he was well how many people in the room but just have a little participation when the oil how many people in the room think it was the journalists and the interview that got me fired raise your hands how many people think it was something else what do you think it was Chris well I think given that you just thought that it's probably not probably wasn't that but you know let me tell you something about Washington okay it's like the game of Thrones screenwriters got together with the Hunger Games screenwriters and then they met the house of cards guys and then they wrote the script if you follow what I'm saying but it wasn't that they trust me on that it wasn't that you if you do your research on it that was used as an excuse but that really wasn't it at the end of the day and and I owed this to general Kelley once he became chief of staff it was incumbent upon him to want to shape the staff to his liking and so he made the decision to fire me and as an American entrepreneur and as somebody that's run two companies and frankly started two companies I owed that to him I couldn't really even fight that actually because at the end of the day as a CEO if someone put me in a job and I thought I needed to replace a few people for personality reasons or other reasons you know when you're in a corporation or you're in a startup or even a political administration like that you sort of have to allow people to put their own imprimatur on the situation what became clear I just want to point one other thing out okay there was an Access Hollywood tape everybody remember that one okay so it wasn't that terrible of a thing the three curse words to the reporter who dishonestly recorded me wasn't that terrible for me wasn't a good thing I didn't say that it wasn't that terrible I'm sorry what what what became clear from our conversation upstairs were that either a your political views of diff very different to to president Trump's or your political views are quite similar but those surrounding president Trump have made him lean further to the right then then he would be if he was acting on his own that to me either says that he you what came out was that you very much suggested that it was those around him that had the most influence and he had a very little say himself despite being the president I didn't I well if he came across that way at dinner I didn't I didn't want it to come across that way what I want what I would prefer to have you think about it in the following context that in my mind and for the 20 years that I knew the president that he was primarily what I would call a New York style Republican and so mostly are from New York so I'll sort of explain that where you have some social progressivism and you have some more Republican ideas about the free market I think that the president is still in many respects this is my fundamental belief he stole in many respects that way but I think one of the problems is is the way the communication is coming out of the White House and the way some of his strategist strategist you get what I'm saying okay portrayed him and portrayed himself is probably not super successful for the administration so I believe that there will be a pivot in the next six to twelve months where the president will do what he's very good at it'll start cutting a deal you saw him reach out to the left-leaning leaders in our country Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer he's done that twice now he cut a deal with them on the debt ceiling he's got the dreams Act immigration bargaining chip on the table with them right now and so I do think he pivots and where he has come across perhaps as more right he probably isn't really that way my guess is he'll pivot into the center here well let's look at an example he issued that executive order on transgender troops for example and just as you arrived one of the first things you asked me was well firstly my political view and secondly my my view on same-sex marriage and you also described yourself this evening as a LGBTQ activist how then can you tell me you guys some of you guys are surprised by that right because I supported trumpet but you know for the last ten years I've actually you know been a gay rights activist in New York in fact if you do your homework what you'd learn about me is I was part of that movement that got the four Republican senators in the state of New York to vote on marriage equality I also funded Chad Griffin from the Human Rights Campaign on the proposition 8 Supreme Court case that Ted Olson brought with David Boies so you had a right-leaning Solicitor General Republican minded and David Boies who had worked for Vice President Gore bring that case of the Supreme Court which led to marriage equality throughout the land I've also worked with Vice President Biden if you remember your American political history or at least current event history it was really Vice President Biden that came out and said that President Obama should support the gay rights movement and to go really far back you know President Obama was against gay marriage in 2008 and so what you should be comforted by your generation frankly has already litigated this issue I don't think people in your generation frankly care who marries who I certainly do not I have gay family members and you know I I said to Chris and some of his friends that the Declaration of Independance life liberty and the pursuit of happiness you know maybe that was written in a patriarchal time in our society but I think today it doesn't mean just for state straight people life liberty and the pursuit of happiness it means for everybody so so I'm the unabashed in my support of marriage equality as I have done for eleven years since I've started in that movement I wasn't saying that to question actually you're whether you're an LGBT activist or not but that is clearly one of the things that has become apparent and and that is just one of many examples in which your views or at least the actions that have come out from the Trump administration differ from president Trust why then a what did Trump see in you given these differences given that you are more liberal a seemingly okay so and secondly why let me take a job let me frame that for you think is important and I and I said this to you and you should really think about this because words actually do matter or not not just the curse words there are other words that actually matter sometimes it depends I would neighbor again but but you know what I tell people is that I'm socially inclusive and I'm fiscally responsible and so I'll explain that because if I tell people that I'm socially liberal in the United States they spent billions of dollars on getting half of the United States they hate the word liberal and if I tell people that I'm fiscally conservative well guess what billions of dollars have been spent on that word to get half of the United States hate the word conservative and so so for me the framework that I've always operated in in terms of my political ideology is that I'm socially inclusive and fiscally responsible so to answer your question I am a Republican I was you know born in the age of Reagan and Thatcher I went to college thirty three short years ago which you guys are in college now but you'll be blown away about how quickly that goes by and so my recommendation to you is that you're you're here living in a bus station you should live without fear I should do the things that you really want to do in your life but for me I got raised as a Republican I've worked in the Republican Party I supported one democrat and that was a law school classmate of mine Barack Obama and so in 2008 if you do your research on me I politically bundled for Barack Obama in 2008 raised the money gave him personal money because we knew each other in school and to this day even though my political leanings are different than his on some issues I still respect him as a person but I have been other than that one campaign I than a Republican so you may know this about me or not but I backed Governor Walker and then after I got Governor Walker I was with the Jeb Bush campaign so I so that was slow edit low-energy somebody lives there but when I said Jeb Bush most of the Americans heard low energy right so you have to you have to give the candidates from pretty pretty effective at making those sorts of comments right but but when I when I when I went with then candidate Trump it was because I'm a team playing Republican and I said consistently in the American media that I was going to back the eventual nominee and so here's what I would say to everybody in this room and it's a great line by the former mayor of New York mayor Koch once said if you believe in nine out of the twelve things that I'm saying you should vote for me if you believe in 12 out of the 12 things I'm saying you need a psychiatrist and the point being is that you're never going to find a politician that matches your five finger fingerprints it's not gonna happen if you find that person quit your day job and go work for that person he or she that I'm gonna tell you that we're in a very very complex society we've got very complex things going on right now domestically here in the UK domestically in the United States but also internationally and so I think it's gonna be very hard for people in this room to Fivefinger fingerprint to a politician identically so the president is a Republican leaning person he has set forth a process of deregulation in the country which is helping the business community you've mentioned the transgender thing the cheiron's gender thing was reversed by mattis you didn't see the president push back on that and so you know I think there's been a lot of social progress made and these are for some people very tough decisions for for me a decision like that as a no-brainer but for some people in our society there are tough decisions and so what I don't like about what's going on right now is that we have major major polarization at a time when we need major major collaboration and so we got to fix that and you know I can tell you I can't speak for Great Britain but I would imagine sort of the same thing going on here but we have to fix that in the United States because it's still twenty three point six percent of the GDP of the world it has the most powerful military by a factor of ten you could take the next military spending of the next ten leading nations you don't add up to the United States and so we've got to make that organism that political organism worked better than it is right now do you do you look back on your tenure as director communications as a success or as a failure and both personally and for the Trump administration um well getting fired sucks okay let's just put it that way okay I mean you you know that's not the first time we've been fired if you asked me I can tell you my first time I get fired it was also not fun but again you have to understand that like if you're asked to do a job like that for the president United States some of you probably file sports if you're in baseball and you get hired as a manager guess why you're the day you got hired is a day that you're planning your firing and so the job that I got hired into and the specific role that I was given above and beyond being the communications director was going to lead to my eventual departure so was it too abrupt for my liking absolutely but here's something that I will tell you about life there can be no whining in life I'm not a whiner I got fired I took it like a man or a woman and I walked out of there I said why not I get myself in trouble because you got that taped on but my my my my point is is that like in sports and politics there are winners and losers and when you're on the losing side of something the worst thing that you can do is crawl into a hole now I will make an observation for everybody in this room that reasonably effective communicator have an interesting background I grew up on a blue-collar family and yet I got myself into Tufts and Harvard Law School and I we were talking about student loan crisis you know I says I had a fund that myself and then I ended up at Goldman I built a couple of businesses but in Washington the opportunity now is the politics of personality disruption so if you're effective the opposing side needs to mash you into a two dimensional caricature to dehumanize you so that your voice can't be heard and so if you allow that to happen to you then I'll speak to every student in this room under no circumstances can you allow that to happen to you in life and so if you were gonna get some advice for me to take away tonight the three pieces of advice that I'd give everybody in this room is number one shouldn't really care what other people think of you I'll live to your true self number two if you get caught in a situation like me the only time that it's over is when you make the decision to quit it's not when somebody else declares it being over and the third thing is if you're not having fun because again you're only here visiting if you're not having fun then don't do it and I can tell you that and it was 11 days I had a blast I was I never I had a great time I was on Air Force One three times I'm hanging out in the Oval Office with the president you can tell I'm a pretty upfront guy so you could imagine that there were colorful conversations between me and the President of the United States we're both new yorkers and so you know we're both prone to some drama and i probably and so you know it was it was an interesting period of time and i wouldn't change it for anything in other words if you told me right now i'd have to go back into that situation and have the humiliating experience of being fired like that what i do it and the answer is yes thousand percent sigh meeow okay looking at president Trump's communication strategies so is there a strategy firstly is the entire communication space thank you is the entire communications based just reactive of his Twitter well you know here's something I will tell you that I'd found is that when the president feels like he's being well defended I think his tweets are more focused on public policy and they're more focused on like reaching over the top of the mainstream media and the United States and going directly to the American people when the president doesn't feel that he's being super ly well defended then you get like conversations about Micah's facelift and things like that so you know if it were up to me I would recommend more on policy and more on substance and more on the prosecution of his legislative agenda and less on that other stuff so but but I do think that hope Hicks who replace me is a terrific person Sarah Huckabee one of the first things that I did was named her the press secretary I think she does a very good job for the President on television she's the first mom in that position she's got three young children at home I'll tell you a quick story about management because I think it's important to you if you ever go to run a company so at 10:30 the bomb hits that I'm the communications director at 10:13 Sean Spicer quits thank thank God he quit because I was going to fire him but I mean quit and so you know and by the way anyway never by the way I never I never called him Melissa McCarthy okay that was like a false I never called him I called him liar spice from the Spice Girls okay every Spice Girls got a nickname and so I gave him one too okay so he was liar spice he wasn't melissa mccarthy but but when he when he left he had the very big office on that side of the west wing and then the communications director has a small office so Shan at that time was de facto communications director and press secretary Sarah came to me she's a very gracious person from the south and she said mr. scanner Moochie I said call me Anthony mr. scaramouche is my my dad she said well I want to give you the big office and so if you know the West Wing the offices are very small but the press secretary's office is as large as the chief of staff's office because you know they designed it that way Teddy Roosevelt designed it that way so that when the press was in there and they did a press gaggle they could fit the press in that office and I said to Sarah Sarah you're the press secretary even though I have seniority over you you're gonna be in the press secretary's office number one I'm a traditionalist and number two you've earned the the job moreover I'm an entrepreneur I could run my business off of my cell phone inside of a phone booth I don't need a big office and so it's a learning lesson for people in this room that when you're managing a company one of the things that you should always think about is not care so much who gets the credit because you can sort of get anywhere you want in life as long as you don't care who gets the credit or who gets the position you know control your own ego you mentioned Sean Spicer why was he so opposed to you why was it that instant that he well it was a combination of factors I think him and rights were very opposed to me this is another learning lesson from that experience if you are a political donor which I was you could find the amounts of money that I gave to the president in his campaign and his pack online so I won't go into that but it was a significant sum of money I also gave a significant sum of money to the RNC I did media appearances with the president that if you total the media appearances it was over 100 million dollar of media by meaning if I we had to buy that advertising time on MSNBC or fox or these other affiliates it would have cost about a hundred million dollars and then I went out and bundled for the president so I was a triple threat in terms of the campaign but this is an axiomatic fact of American politics when you are a donor there are two jobs available to you if you're a political outsider the two jobs that are available to you are the ambassadorship or you can be on one of these councils you can be on the president's foreign intelligence advisory board you can be on its import export council you can be on the competitive Council like Steve Schwarzman is with Jamie Dimon but what you can't be you can't be inside the president's inner circle and one of his political operatives as an assistant to the president because that's a huge threat to the permanent political class inside of Washington and so when the president gave me my first job which was the OPL directorship both rights and Shaun worked in that game of thrones like manner and that house of cards like matter to block that position on me and so it was seven months later when I got in and then they said oh geez you know he got in despite our efforts time for me to go Reince wasn't as smart as Sean so said the truth looking at the US political system as a whole what gives you more power money or public office it's really good questions so it really depends so if it depends on what you want to do as an example if President Clinton was here tonight and you said mr. president because I've asked him this direct question have you done more good for the world being president or did you do more good for the world in your foundation the president would say as president because with a stroke of a pen through executive privileges and sort of discretionary spending of the president you know you can wave billions of dollars around the world george w bush doesn't get hardly any credit for this but bono gives him credit for he single-handedly waived several billion dollars into the continent of Africa in the mid-2000s which led to a direct reduction in malaria mortalities and so he doesn't get a lot of credit from that from the left-leaning press but the lead singer for you to give them credit for that there's many people in these African communities that give him credit for that and so it depends on what you want to do if you want to organize the political system and you want to influence a lot of politicians money will make a very big difference for you but I don't think there's anything more powerful in our country than being the president United States in terms of what your discretionary powers are and the influence that you can have in the society so I would go with public office looking at that a bit more what role should private wealth plan politics whether through direct representation or interest groups I mean so this is the biggest debate in our country now so after the citizens united Supreme Court decision which basically the Supreme Court ruled that money was a form of freedom of speech and freedom of expression in the democracy you were able to give an unlimited amount of money to a political action committee to wield your influence many poor allistic democracies were sited against that they've opted for some kind of campaign finance reform or some kind of medium ground where there's a flat playing field no matter how much money is involved I have taken the position and so far I've been proven right and maybe long-term I'll be proven wrong but I have taken the position I actually wrote an op-ed about this when the Citizens United case came out that the ideas in America would matter way more than the money because what's happened now is that we've dematerialization studio or a radio studio today you can take out your phone which is a television studio in a radio studio and you can broadcast live on Facebook you can broadcast live on Twitter I firmly believe that the president President Trump without the tool of Twitter likely would have not won the election I think that the that tool was a very effective campaign device for him the president was outspent by Secretary Clinton I used to know the numbers exactly but I think she outspent us 1.7 times what we had versus what she had and she had more personnel than us by two point four times and so she she out personnel Duss and she outspent us and yet we still won the election so so it's not clear to me that the money is as important as the ideas now you made the point at dinner which I'll reference is that it may matter more in a local election like a congressional seat or a Senate race or perhaps a gubernatorial seat and I will see two on that I do think it matters more there and so it doesn't seem like at least this is my opinion that the duopoly in America which is basically the Democrats and the Republicans want to give up the citizen united thing any time soon in fact President Obama who was against it and you may remember this was against it actually formed a political action committee in 2012 and he was criticized for doing it and he said well hold on a second I have no choice but to do it because the other side is arming up in this way I have to commend our MUP as well and so I think that's where the parties are right now so I think it doesn't really matter what I think it's probably not going to change my final question before we open up to the audience what's next for you do you are you going to pursue a role in politics a further role in politics I'm going to pursue a 12-day role that's gonna be my my god I'm gonna look for something that lasts 12 days no like it'll be like the 12 days of course you know the the funny thing about this is like it's now a unit of time people say like I just went on vacation for a scaramouche you know like 11 days but try to get a 12-day role no I I said I'm gonna I'm an entrepreneur I'm a business person I'm probably gonna start up another company I'm looking at right now the student loan space of interested to hear the take here in the United Kingdom but we have a student loan crisis in the United States there's 1.4 trillion dollars of student loans outstanding each student has something like 40 pretty much similar to what goes on in the UK it's forty to sixty thousand dollars worth of student loans outstanding they're having a hard time repaying those loans and there might be some business ideas around that to help solve that problem so I'm looking at that I'll probably get more active and more involved in television in some respects I think that there's an opportunity and again this is not to say that I'm a centrist because I don't think of myself as a centrist but I do think that there's an opportunity to create space for more collaboration and I do believe that the generation of men and women that are sitting in this room right now I've sort of gotten a raw deal from the baby boomers which I happen to be a member of I think the political class in the West the baby boomers they were handed a baton from the greatest generation that fought the Second World War and they've sort of squandered the treasure of the West we've over promised people we've deficit spent into oblivion we're prosecuting wars that we don't really have a sound strategy for properly exiting from and so unfortunately you guys are going to inherit this and I'm hoping that you inherit it without the polarity and the extremists that we've experienced in my generation and so I'm hoping to be a part of that in some way shape or form going forward maybe that'll last longer than 12 days I don't know what to say great thank you so much thank you we're now gonna open up to the audience if you have a question raise your hand nice and high and wait into a microphone come see so let's start with you in the red yeah just wait for a microphone to come mr. mooch thank you so much for being here we're also thrilled so both your rise in your fall within the White House coincided with really big power shifts with the chief of staff so when you first came in you reported directly to the president over the chief of staff which is not a typical reporting structure okay so you're pretty smart you go to Oxford right so why do you think that was right well obviously he went bye-bye but the whole point to of your of your exit as well was the chief of staff coming in and taking power back so my question is is a prerequisite to a functioning White House a chief of staff who has all the authority and all the reporting prisms yes I think it depends on the president it depends on the chief of staff I mean there's a great book Chris Whipple just wrote a great book called the gatekeepers and he he goes back to the chief of staff position in the United States was actually created by General Eisenhower when he became president he took his former chief of staff from the Army and moved him into that position because he thought he needed to organize and institutionalize it if you know your presidential history John Kennedy did not have a chief of staff for a couple of years so he tried to disavow it and it turned out that because the government was getting bigger and much more complex that you needed that sort of filter if you will to the president so it really depends on the personalities I think general Kelley is an American patriot I have a lot of respect for him I am NOT sore him at all for firing me however and this is not me giving him advice through YouTube or anything like that but I do think that there's like a whole jar of sugar cookies that the chief of staff can give out to people and if general Kelley was slightly more political I think he could be very helpful to the President on his legislative agenda and so one of the hallmarks of his success in life is that he was a a political four-star general but in many ways what you find about that chief of staff position if you understand the history of it you were also operating with some level political interest that's on-site with the president and so I don't think it's about the power structure as much as it's about the personalities and the deployment of the personalities so you think that though it would have been sustainable for you to continue to report directly to the president as well as having oh me personally no I would have very gladly subordinated myself to general Kelly I would have had no no problem doing that didn't didn't give me a chance to do that by the way but but there it was reported in the press that I had a conversation with general Kelly were said well I have to report directly to the president and he said to me no you're fired that did not happen that was fake news he fired me before I could say anything actually so I mean that's just the fact but but but the truth of the matter is you're asking a really good question and there has to be order but there also has to be a little bit of a political element to that job as well because you got a job to do you've got to prosecute the president's legislative agenda in and and time is you know it were like in Episode four Star Wars remember the scene where Han Solo and Luke Skywalker and the garbage compactor is closing the walls are closing in now because you're gonna run up against the congressional elections in 2018 thanks so much thank you for that question yeah let's go to you the very back the blue yeah are you hi um so to quote the famous CS lewis who once said about jesus he was either a liar or lunatic or lord not to compare trump to jesus but i think i think i think trump could be one of three things he could either be a liar who says what he thinks appeals to his base just to get a left in he's either a lunatic someone who's sociopathic and incapable of behaving in a normal fashion or he's a genius and managed to manipulate the american political system taking himself elected and almost out of nowhere of those three choices which one do you think he is thank you am I am I allowed to choose none of the above or or I got to go with one of those look look here's the thing that you probably intuitively know that and that's a really cool quote I've got to look that up now and try to memorize it but but at the end of the day the world is not that absolute and it is not that specific and neither are you you're a complex organism and you don't have to read Damien from Hermann Hesse or Siddhartha to recognize how complex you are that there's good parts of you and there are bad parts of you and there are good parts and bad parts of all of us so so what I would say about the president is that you have to accept that he's a political genius if you don't like him that's fine but you have to look at the zero to the American presidency in 19 months he started on June 16th of 2015 19 short months later he's the American president so you can't say that there wasn't some level of political skill and instinct and some level of genius in terms of his judgment and his skillset and his campaign style now you may not agree with any of it but you have to say okay here's the guy that had no Secretary Clinton had 40 years where the name recognition built up by herself and President Clinton she was in the public life for 40 years and this was an American business person that 13 months short months later became the American president so we have to yield to him that he had some level of political genius again you may not like his form of genius he's definitely not a sociopath and so you guys will snicker at that because of the way the media portrays him but I have been in the room you know the Hamilton musical where you're in the room where it happens and let me tell you something about the president he is way more contemplative he is way more thoughtful he's way more of a person that doesn't want to put American troops in harm's way or bring about Wars then you would think and even if his Twitter feed is cantankerous or is filled with some bellicosity in terms of the rhetoric he's definitely not that way I have seen that up close and personal and what was the first one but a liar okay right well I want you to raise your hand in the room if you're not a liar raise your hand in the room okay so I stand case closed on that one let's go to the next question I didn't hear someone said something light in the air yeah let's go to you and the gray hi thanks for like this yeah and you just give what I want to ask as someone with I guess experience in sort of communication side of things I want to ask what I think everyone in the world wanted to know during the campaign how did Trump's campaign not sink when there were so many things that would have sunk anyone else's campaign be it to do with his tax returns or leaked audio tapes or allegations and court cases Trump University what should have derailed any candidate didn't yeah from your perspective no experience this is you know kind of your your profession how did not sink okay so that's like a really good question and I'm sure that they'll be presidential historians that right about that or campaign historians are right about that for 100 years so I can give you a field observation but I also want to be very very honest and I told Chris this earlier and some of the Americans may know the answer to this but how many times did Secretary Clinton go to the state of Wisconsin during the campaign okay so somebody said zero so the first answer to your question is Secretary Clinton had she deployed herself differently in the campaign she won the popular vote by I think three and a half or four percent but there were certain mission-critical states that she needed to win to secure the electoral college vote and so I just submit this to you and again this is hindsight now this is 20/20 hindsight so I'm not trying to be smart out late about this but you had the state of Wisconsin that had a sitting Speaker of the House who was a Republican and you had a governor in West that was winning in a blue state he won the red the blue state of Wisconsin three times he wanted the first time then he had a recount and then he won re-election and so I don't know who her political operatives were I don't know who the geniuses were on our side that said hey you don't have to go to Wisconsin its bluer than blue you don't have to worry about it but the president and then the candidate went sixteen times so Wisconsin and so that's the biggest thing I just again okay now on the separate category which i think is very seminal and somebody will write about this from a historical perspective that there is a desperation in our society and I'll make a confession to everybody in this room I grew up in a blue-collar family and so my dad ran a crane you ran a payloader and they graduated to like weighing trucks and then they eventually gave him an inside desk job as he got older but I priced my father's wages his 1975 wages priced in 2015 through no fault of his own we're down 40 percent so that's through automated automation robotics a surplus of labor all kinds of things disrupted my non educated blue-collar dad from being able to afford the middle-class lifestyle that I grew up in but I'm gonna make a confession to you guys I insulated myself from that world I went to Tufts and my parents thought that Tufts was spelled T ough s they had no clue okay and then I went to Harvard Law School then I went into Goldman Sachs and I started my ascent up the spire of economic elitism and I moved classes and became financially independent and then I started hanging out with people who were very rich and the collective bias of those people informed my opinion of what was going on in the society and I can tell you that a seminal moment for me was May 23rd 2016 we were flying on Trump Force One to Los Angeles and we were making a campaign stop in Albuquerque New Mexico and we landed in Albuquerque New Mexico the candidate got off the plane and and we headed Secret Service Caravan to the Albuquerque Civic Center there were 9,000 people waiting for him in the Civic Center there were 7,000 people waiting outside now you know I was one of the campaign aides so I had a Secret Service Day pin on that meant if there was a commotion they wouldn't shoot at me thank God right but I took it off I put it in my pocket when I crossed the security perimeter and I went into the crowd and I started asking questions they said you know where are you from why are you here can you tell me why you're here and one gentleman said to me well I'm here because I just lost my job the factory just closed down my dad worked in that factory for 33 years I worked there for 12 the United States lost seventy thousand factories since the signing of NAFTA again you could agree with NAFTA or dip the groove that I'm just giving you the numbers and so this Albuquerque family the father now deceased 33 years in the factory the son 12 years in the factory is out of a job he's at the Loews which is a Home Improvement Center and he's delivering Domino's pizza at night so he's got two jobs and he's on a EBT card which is a form of social welfare and he said that um economically desperate I cannot raise my children in this current economic environment now I'm making a confession and you guys are recording this you know 28 years having departed Harvard Law School I was at a touch I actually missed what was going on in the middle class the working class family that I grew up in was an aspirational working class family my dad was like you're gonna go to school you're gonna go to law school you're gonna start a business and you two will share in part of the American dream that family was desperation 'el so we win in 40 years from aspirational to desperation all and I'm gonna tell you guys something I didn't see it it took a billionaire living in a tower on Fifth Avenue next to the Tiffany's store to show it to me but Bernie Sanders saw it and I told Chris to some of his colleagues that there were 17 or 18 people in the campaign there were only two candidates that saw it was Bernie Sanders and Donald J Trump and so when he went up against the establishment candidate Secretary Clinton again I don't dislike her and you could never find me saying anything bad about her on YouTube I always argued policy I never said anything mean spirited about her but why the American people gave him a pass his voters is that they were desperate for change they really have felt that the way maybe some of the people here in Great Britain feel that the operational community in the EU is out of touch with the local worker many people in the United States have felt that Washington is actually out of touch with their economic situation and so they gave him a pass on everything because they viewed him as not being a politician and they viewed well somebody that could throw a bomb in here and blow this thing up that's gonna be good for me and my family and so that's what I think happened but I'm gonna tell you what if she went to Wisconsin not she if Secretary Clinton went to Wisconsin two three or four times she may have beaten him it may have been that simple of an equation I know it's a long-winded answer but I think it's very important to you to understand that even though I grew up in a family that derived its roots from a blue-collar neighborhood I too missed what was going on in the society thank you [Applause] you stand up so my context is that I sort of went to my undergrad in the States Middlebury College in Vermont so we can't leave Vermont without being a bleeding-heart liberal which is what I sort of am my question really is more of a personal question to you I really struggled to sort of understand sort of like your political transition in the sense that going from Obama to sort of supporting Jeb Bush to Trump I I'm not entirely sure what that was was it the office was it the fact that he was president and the power of the President or was there some sort of like personal charisma with Trump that you that spoke specifically to you okay so so that's a really good question so what I would say is the anomaly and my political support is actually President Obama that if you went back to like me in college there where I am today the only deviation I made from the Republican Party was President Obama because there was a personal relationship there and we knew each other in law school and so I looked at Perth and I into this day you know I have a very good relationship with President Obama and I respect him as a person there were things that he did politically that I disagreed with and so I went back to my Republican roots after you know supporting him the first time as it relates to President Trump I sort of said it I was with two other candidates prior to the president but I view myself as a team player played played athletic sports my whole life and I thought it was important to stay with the party and stay with the team and so I've known the president for a long time I can't tell you that we were friends 20 years ago but I did make his acquaintance 20 years ago we worked together on the Romney campaign in 2012 and even though I didn't support him on the first two two waves I did make a commitment to him and to the Republican Party that I was going to support the eventual nominee had it been Ted Cruz I would have supported him so and again but I like the president so I'm not I'm not somebody sitting here in this room telling you that I just like the president I do think and I said this from the pres podium which was sort of a lot of fun by the way I mean it's not as you guys are a lot better looking than American journalists I can tell you that but what I was sitting up there and I took 46 minutes of questions and I said what I really believe that that that there's a spread between what he's really like as a person and how he's perceived by the media and also he's doing some damage to himself in terms of the way he's he's positioning himself he's a he's a he's a he's a guy that you would be if you got to know him you would have a different opinion of him and I would submit this to you that most of these people and I could say this about Secretary Clinton if you're a Republican Republicans spent billions of dollars mashing her into a two-dimensional cartoon character she's nothing like that and neither is he and so what I would say is you've got to be very very careful about the way you're getting information from the media and the way you're collecting your own biases you know I just admitted to you guys at 28 years of trying to get up the economic Mountain I closed myself off from a large part of the society and I didn't really see what was going on so so I'm not here as an apologist for the president I can tell you things that he's doing that you know I wish he could do better and I can tell you things that he's doing that I like but in general he's a way better person then most people perceive them to be you don't like the answer I got that but that's one but you're from Middlebury Vermont so it's all right there's a lot of a lot of Bernie Sanders support up there yeah yes I don't know I might have to pick up people are you the guys the almost jumping off the seats or that you're picking the answer in the coin guy Thank You mr. scary Moochie you've told us you mooch will you and I are getting close thanks the moocher said you told us to be brave tonight seeing that we in university so I'm going to be brave you said that you didn't just like the president you said you loved the president I don't even think you said it once I think you said about 10 times maybe once a day all right so hold on I said the times I said I love the president actually matched the number of days I was in office how about that because I count that I said it 11 times keep going that's true for me it's it's it's it's difficult to comprehend now you could love a man you to the world appears very much a bigot to build a wall to lead to mass deportations to exit the climate Accord you spoke about how your generation has given our generation a broken society a broken planet how is it that you can now say you love this person and then ciamis the entire evening and create distance between yourself and the Trump administration to me I'm not wrong [Music] that was very good good job I'm really not here to charm you you know I'm here to talk to you from my you from my heart and so you can like what I'm saying or just like what I'm saying and then I'll leave it up to your intelligence to form your own opinion I'm not here to charm you and I'm not here to bring any distance between me and the Trump administration I declared my feelings for the president and you have to understand so where'd you grow up where you from from South Africa okay so in the Italian neighborhood that I grew up in on Long Island we use the word love a lot okay I also did this from the podium I got roundly ridiculed for that okay but that's like a gesture like see you guys later not that big of a deal to a guy like me I'm very comfortable in my own skin so I've told a lot of people that I love them you and I would have to do a lot more courting after that question for me to fall in love with you but in general well I'm sort of not either but that that but that that idiom was used by me in a very natural way and if obviously it got immediately contorted by the press and all that other stuff I didn't say the society was broken that's not what I said I said that there was a mantle about the society is far from broken if you look at the amount of wealth that's been created in this society and you look at the billions of people that have moved from subsistence levels into some standard of living globally the society is far from broken there's an economic miracle taking place on the world and there is a world if we get the right policies of economic abundance for everybody so the societies far from broken what I said was that opportunities have been squandered by the body politic in the West when they were handed a baton from the greatest generation that had to collaborate more because they had common cause versus the Cold War and they had common cause versus common enemies now there's no existential threat to the West or the United States and we've broken up into pieces and started fighting moreover if you really know your history and since you go to Oxford I'm assuming you do there is a specter there's a specter of nationalism that's taking place right now and that typically happens after you've had a mortality of living memory of war you can just go to barber Tuckman's book the guns of August and you can see that that happened in August of 1914 and it's happening right now because there's no political leaders that remember the Second World War and so the Catalonians want to break from Spain Great Britain wants to leave the EU the Scots want to leave the UK the Greeks want to leave the EU we're fighting over the Spratly Islands in in in Asia and there's a systemic rise of nationalism with a lack of historical context all of which is frankly not being addressed properly by your political leaders so so I'm open about that I'm part of that failed community I didn't I didn't say that I got it right and these people got it wrong I said to you I'm part of the baby-boomer political class and I can tell my other fellow baby-boomers in this room that are not involved in politics shame on you because it's through your indifference that we've gotten this level of extremists and this level of polarity now you mentioned you mentioned the environment and so let's talk about the environment for a second because I think this is important the Paris Accord is a symbolic thing now if you asked me point-blank what do I think of the environment I've always answered that very honestly I think that 60% of what's happening is probably human derived and it's probably from carbon admission and changes that we've made through our industrialization to the Earth's atmosphere but geologically is probably 40 percent being done from where we are right now and the position of the Earth from the Sun and so it's a combination of those two things but if anybody in this room thinks that the Paris Accord is going to solve that it doesn't do that because it changes the centigrade tabulation by 0.3% people are rapidly cheating inside the Accord and so if you want to use the symbolism of being in the Accord is like you're standing on the right side of the environment that's okay but it's I'm way bigger problem than just staying in or being outside of the Paris Accord so I'm not trying to charm your brother okay I'm trying to talk to you in a very straight very plain way okay and by the way your country didn't do so well for about 50 60 years okay in terms of apartheid and all the nonsense and what I didn't do so long apartheid in South Africa and seeing as I do study at Oxford and I do know my history was supported by Ronald Reagan and the Reagan Reagan in fact in fact since we're in York since 1960 a mirror in your age they're trying to score political points with your fellow students and I respect that it doesn't really have anything to do with me anymore thing yeah that's okay nice question let's go to your original thank you mooch you mentioned that Donald Trump is a genius but is he more intelligent than Rex Tillerson do I really have to answer that one I was doing really great till the South Africans showed up do I have to answer that one I don't know making a joke you don't have to be that upset I'm making sure I don't know if he is or isn't but here's what I would here's what I would wish okay for us okay the Democrats that personality differences I mean I'm telling you they do okay we have to get into the specific ones but where I applaud the Democrats in my society they go lockstep with each other okay and they hang tough with each other the Republicans are shooting at each other okay myself included by the way because when shots are coming in at me I'm shooting abandon or Priebus they're shooting at me the the president me Bannen Priebus we should probably dial it down he mentioned Ronald Reagan's all mentioned as well the 11th commandment that Ronald Reagan said about the Republican Party is thou shalt not say anything bad about a fellow Republican and so we haven't lived to that we I'm sorry and then he did about Gerald Ford yeah well that's the hypocrisy of politics but but but but I mean that's what happens right that's why someone's calling personal liar everyone in the rooms lying so what do you want me to do it's hypocrisy of politics and people but but at the end of the day I don't know if he's smarter than him or not but I wish we would dial back the rhetoric against each other I really do wish that I think we have time for one more so let's go to yeah you yeah you yeah you just went out no no this is the other that one sorry yeah thank you earlier tonight you made an excellent point about how we need more collaboration and less division in politics but you've also been describing yourself as very much a team player Republican do you not think it's that kind of blind devotion the attitude of my party right or wrong that's caused that division in the first place okay so again this is just I'm not trying to parse this I just trying to explain like and we were talking about this before I came down to this beautiful hall it's like if the president could have made a move to go for education reform so he comes out of the blocks January 21st education is still one of the last vestiges of bipartisanship and so he could have made a move to get a small win on the table with some kind of legislative agenda item related to a bipartisan commitment to evening and making more fair the public education system in our society and that would have been a step towards more bipartisanship and more community up on the hill and so when when you say that I'm blindly devoted I elected to take a job to serve the president United States he's the commander-in-chief and so therefore I feel this way that I had to subordinate myself publicly to the agenda of the administration that's not to say that in a private room or in a private setting that I wasn't giving my viewpoint on things like the transgender situation in the military or than I wasn't giving my viewpoint on where I thought we needed to be with the Democrats in terms of securing some help from the Democrats a lot of you are not from the United States but I can tell you that if you want real tax reform in the United States you need a bipartisan coalition to get that done we have never done that without a bipartisan coalition so the tax the taxes came into place in 1913 the income taxes they were reformed one time in the mid 50's by the Eisenhower administration and then it took Ronald Reagan in his second term after winning 49 states to get the 1986 tax reform pass he had to do it with a coalition of Democrats so so oh yeah and I'm not trying to split the baby here I'm just trying to say to you I'm a team player but I believe that my team if you're asking me my honest opinion my team should stand for more collaboration we we have no choice the system was set up by the original documents and the founding fathers and mothers of the country to make sure that you'd never got a full loaf you Reagan said and I know he's come here he said he would go for 80% of something as opposed to a hundred percent I think we've made mistakes doing that on both sides so that was the point I was trying to make thank you thank you great thank you so much Anthony joining us please join me in thanking Anthony you

Channel: OxfordUnion

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Keywords: Oxford, Union, Oxford Union, Oxford Union Society, debate, debating, The Oxford Union, Oxford University, Anthony Scaramucci, Donald Trump, politician, press

Id: _W-H-jCMTH0

Length: 63min 31sec (3811 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 31 2017