Hi im Steve Clements and i have a couple of questions can the Republican Party survive President Trump and what will that party look like if you wins again lets get to the bottom line. For the past 4 years donald trump has been radically reshaping the Republican Party and his image and with his trump brand in the partys convention this week he decided to speak every night bucking the tradition where the candidate accepts the partys nomination on the last night usually lots of confetti and balloons at that crescendo hes also stuff the keynote speeches with family members branding the convention as a trump a vent and less of a Political Party of educate but what happens if youre a republican but you find his policies or his leadership or his character distasteful is trump really a conservative and under his leadership what does the Republican Party stand for joining me today is someone who worked directly with President Trump banker and Hedge Fund Manager anthony scar muchi was famously the White House Communications director for 11 days in 2070 anthony thanks so much for joining us you have hosted an extraordinary tweet which is rare for republican of your stature and you said a vote for joe biden could save the Republican Party how what are you communicating at this at this moment because it sounds as if this is a desperate call for help. Well it is in a lot of different layers and so attached to that tweet is a 10 minute speech that i gave last night which is thankfully getting picked up virally and c. N. N. Addressed that this morning and its 3 layers really it is the president s failed leadership style his lack of managerial skills his lack of what we would call executive quotient you know he cannot manage anything a result of which everything is in disarray you know the covert 1000 crisis has been a disaster for the economy and its also obviously been a health care collab and then the secondary thing is as it relates to leadership is the basis of character and listen i understand that were going to tell fibs and politicians tell lies and one of the more famous lies is from eisenhower when he said that the you 2 plane was a weather balloon and of course they had Francis Gary Powers they didnt think that he had survived the crash and it was very embarrassing for president height eisenhower so i understand that there are levels of mendacity in politics but the 22000 lies and the mischaracterization of everything is going on in the country and now we have Media Outlets and media pundits that are supporting these lies in this haze of dissent from ation if you will it is super dangerous for the republican it was stephen were no longer able to debate because we cant even agree on the facts and the president is contributing to that and then the the last piece which i think is the scariest piece is the demagoguery it is almost as if you a long had a baby with Charles Lindbergh that baby was raised by roy called roy cohn was the nanny and the baby is donald trump and hes going up to become the president of the United States in the early part of the 21st century of the american experiment and it is so dangerous because what it demagogues do they inspire people and instill. Fear and intimidation into the public and what we know from our lives in middle school the bully the bully is able to garner some level of a faction of friendships there will be people that sit at the lunch table with the bully that fear the bullys eye or they fear his intimidation and so theyre willing to work alongside the bully and so weve watched this hijacking of the Republican Party now stuart steve is a good friend of mine we worked together on the run the campaign he wrote a sensational book recently called this is all a lie talking about the 1000 the impact that the republicans have had for multiple decades that have led to this sort of nonsense that mr trump is now leading and so for me i need to speak out against that i have had an evolution over the last 4 years obviously i supported the president i can explain what i did right and i can also apologize for it but i can offer up a cautionary tale to the people that listen or view your pod casts and that is when you put your ego and pride into things your emotions go up in your intelligence goes down and you start making very bad decisions. And i did that and so i had a real ization that something was wrong i then got summarily fired by general kelly after making a mistake in the white house ive always said to people that that mistake was my fault it was certainly fireable i never blamed anybody for my firing in the great irony is that general kelly and i have developed a very close personal relationship so im not the only one out here its general matter its general kelly theres a ton of a lot less even yeah theres a well the laws they fall that have said ok anough but i feel you know i love my country i lived a very good part of the American Dream my dad was an aspirational middle class blue collar American Worker you know he worked a crane. In 42 years hes 85 years old today no education he built our family on very high hourly wages and im sitting here with you and you know live in a pretty nice you know style frankly anthony and im you know i was he was a separation in our country and its really just through you wrote a book i mean you thought about President Trump at one point you called in the blue collar president i remember when you and i met in january of 2017 this is after President Trumpet been elected before he was. You know inaugurated at davos and you told the story you helped us all understand it davus thousands of people listening to your words because you helped put him in the white house but at the same time you said look its going to take hes a different kind of person thats ever been here before and you sounded to me almost like family with him you helped bring him to be so i think for the purposes of looking back and understanding your evolution what didnt you see what didnt we see at the core because i think your message at that time was that in his core he was really good and that this was going to be good for the nation. Well remember i mean this is an expression you never put into people with god is left out but sometimes what we try to do is try to idealize the people around us and so that was one of my mistakes but when you when i met in davos and in naples florida prior to that and what i wrote in the blue collar president by the way the president did not like my book because it was very balanced it talked about him going after the press and how he shouldnt be doing that in the press is not the end of the people but what i was trying to imply to you what i was trying to say to the people in davos is that weve had a fracture in the social contract in the west something happened our political establishment the political circularity of the elite focused on corporate interests or they focused on social issues but they stopped focusing on the dilemma of blue collar families and so what happened is globalism took power of there were a lot of advantages to globalism by the big believer David Ricardo see the theory of global trade and i am what you would classically call a free trading person but we left out a large swath of the country in what i was trying to say to you and the people at davos rightly or wrongly the president identified that and so i went on 71 Campaign Stops with him and i was moved by it and youre also a product of your upbringing so when youre standing in a rino and someones coming up to you that looks like your dad and talks like your dad and is out of work and youre in mexico or new mexico excuse me and the gentleman is saying well you know youre not in new mexico new mexico is mexico remove 65000 jobs since im sorry 65000 factories since the nafta deal was signed 25 to 30 years ago and theres a sadness to this week we converted a very large group of americans from aspirational working class families to desperation a one stephen and so what i was trying to impart to you and my best hopes and dreams for President Trump was that he was going to be a post partisan transformative leader it was going to be. Rate the logjam in washington and he was going to be less tribal and more unifying as a leader and i got that wrong and what i what i missed was his insecurity i know that sounds strange are saying well what hes insecure how can he be insecure hes the president United States but hes actually a very insecure guy and so he doesnt like experts he said he was going to hire the best people he doesnt like the best people when hes in a room with people that he feels are smarter than him he steamrolls them he is smarter than generals he is smarter than the epidemiologist his uncle was at mit so therefore hes a smart person in the room and this sort of nonsense has turned the presidency into a one man broadway show want to make this quick point its october 2019 there are 2 cabinet officials that have come to visit me its guy theyre sitting on the couch in my office they are former cabinet officials and they remark its going to be a disaster if we have a crisis well what do you guys mean well listen he cant manage you know Everybody Knows in our Business School or the pentagon you can have 6 reports the president has no reports every morning it is a billiard game the cue ball smashing into the balls everything is flying around people are scared of them they dont want to get fired they dont want to get tweeted that they dont want to be ashamed or a 1000000 you millionaire by the president like many of us have frankly myself included and so what happens is the entire symphony the entire orchestra of the executive branch has been paralyzed by the conductor and so these 2 gentlemen leave and they say look lets pray that theres no crisis before we can get out of this thing and i thought the crisis team was going to be the soul may strike in january i turn on the t. V. I said oh my god this is going to be the crisis it wasnt but it turned out the covert 1000. 00 situation was a crisis and they couldnt handle it. Going to lie about it he was going to curve the truth he was going to be able to mobilize the resources necessary to solve the problem and look at our death rates ok forget about the cases here is talking about testing all in us or per capita death rates are among the highest in the world and were one of the richest smartest countries in the civilization but were being run by the wrong leader so theres a multi layered thing going on here that we have to speak out about and hopefully reach the people that i grew up with and said ok come on i know youre angry i understand the populism i understand the rise of this nativism but were better than this is a group of people thats been my messaging steve so anthony what do you think is happening in the country he has still very solid support with his base as you mentioned weve had over 170000 people die but that does not seem to have dented a lot of a support and when you look at the polling numbers of joe biden versus donald trump people still think hes handling the economy better well im in touch with the resistance leaders in the Republican Party you know i call the republicans that are with the president 50 she republicans you know theres a Resistance Group or republicans that im in touch with and were trying to meld de resistance against the nonsense that were sitting but youre identifying something that is very true about the country theres a great culture war going on in the country others a very large group of people approximately 70 percent of the country is white it is still a christian nation and theres a culture war and so the president is preying on those people he is suggesting those people frankly that hes the last white man standing from a darker group of people coming up over the transom and descending on their culture and destroying america and thats what demagogues do if you study demagoguery they always shoot through a light through a prism that creates this hey geographic germany long ago and america. Long ago and people cling to it and they and they like it they i they like the ideas around secondarily there were 15 years where even though the president has had 4 or 5 bankruptcies and he even though hes under investigation for potential financial fraud in the state of the or in the city of new york the apprentice show for 15 years projected him as a very wise very competent business person the great irony there is that he cant fire anybody has a conflict avoidance style to his personality thats why hes always overcompensating with the blustering and the bullying and so you have this impression and that impression has been made stephen not in the last 3 years but it was made over the 15 years prior so i theres no surprise that hes hes hes scoring better than joe biden i tell my wall street friends well you do know if you trace the markets back a 120 years the democrats have a better run with the markets and the republicans im not expose saying that should be attributed to them necessarily or not but theres great irony to that but the republicans are always going to be perceived rightly or wrongly to be better for business and so i can see that but the people of the United States know that there is something wrong right now and the question is are they going to accept somebody who is trying to divide their country they have a country whose 1st name is united are they going to accept somebody whos trying to divide their country so that they can win a culture war or are they going to accept something as more like them which is what i think is quintessentially american which is kinder theres a tenderness to it theres an empathic news to it and thats the Vice President i dont agree with the Vice President on everything on a lifelong republican but what i do agree with the Vice President on is the moral standing of his leadership and the capability set that he has to have the selfconfidence to bring in a whole series of experts to help us dig out of the problems that we have all but thats why the president has support has also got me. Media outlets inside the United States that chant a rhythm of this sort of propaganda youve got media pundits from 8 oclock to 11 oclock at night that are literally meant to all figure skaters theyre doing gymnastics and theyre doing a piro ads to try to explain the president s nonsense i said the other day that they theyre trying to make you believe that hes playing 4 dimensional chess but hes sitting there and hes eating the chess pieces i mean this is just total nonsense with what is going on so what we have to do is we have to go into certain areas of the country which im going to be doing quickly west concent michigan and pennsylvania and the primarily white ethnic areas and thats what i represent that im a blue collar kid at the end of the day and to go to los areas im an explain to those people the systemic danger a President Trump thats why im doing speeches on my social media thats why im that thank you for bringing me on your show and thats why i will be pursuant to the pandemic of course in those areas explaining to these people the danger of President Trump and ill leave you with this thought when has the bully won. And one of our hollywood movies ok this is ridiculous that this guy is going as far as he is going where we need to reject trump ism we need to retract demagoguery and we need to restore the confidence of blue collar americans that they can have an awesome aspirational opportunity in our country and theres been malpractise on both sides we have to figure that out we have to focus on policies that are not necessarily left or right the policies that are right or wrong for those people and then the anger will die down and people will get renewed theyll be a social contract renewal stephen if we can pursue that right you know how how does somebody go through that process of leaving the safety of being inside the trump tent to taking the risk of now challenging it i just made a decision was after the squad frankly after he went after the squad last year i said ok this is enough im not going to disavow my personal history my personal integrity what they did to my family when they arrived in america they told my grandmother to go back to the country she originally came from this is a racist native a stroke thats classically disgusting in america and my grandmother produced 3 children one was my mom 2 sons served in world war 2 my uncle anthony im named after was wounded at Normandy Beach hes got the purple heart from the United States should my grandmother im going back to the country that she originally came from that so that was a bridge too far for me i denounced it the president went to attack me no problem because thats what demagogues do you cant be 7 to 8 for a demagogue you got to be 13 for 10 so many yorker when hes attacking me you think im like these guys in the congress i went right after him and they did what he classically does he started attacking my wife i mean who does that i mean who does that ok and let me tell you i know each other a little bit the while Clint Ted Cruz do you do i act like ted cruz i mean are you kidding me. Youre not going after my wife or my family was entering to do that in the mop ok so i said thats it and i took the gloves off and im ready and i think we can punch him through the ropes i think he is universally disliked hes arguably one of the most hated people in our civilization globally and i think at the end of the day hes universally disliked we just have to convince that 40 ish percent of the people wait a minute you can be able of your life theres really not that big of a culture war underage obeid in presidency youre going to be ok tr