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I compared it to the second debate in 2016.

I don't if you guys remember that, but we had the Access Hollywood tape hit on October 7.

That was a Friday.

The following Wednesday, we flew to Saint Louis for a debate.

And he handled himself quite well in that second debate, if you remember it or not.

But it put him back in the game.

I thought he was going to be like that yesterday.

He was not like that yesterday.

He was slightly unhinged.

ANJALEE KHEMLANI: Attacking the judge, attacking the attorney general.

ANTHONY SCARAMUCCI: Correct.

Now, having said that, despite my disagreements with the president, my differences with him on executive management skills, how he handled the presidency, the insurrection, happy to talk about all of that, I think what's happening to him here in New York is unfair.

And I think 76% of the Republicans who have been polled say that, that this feels politically contrived.

And let me just make two quick points.

Look at the law that he's being prosecuted on.

This is typically a law that protects smaller individuals, smaller businesses from large corporations.

And that's not the case here.

He is a fairly large entity in his own right, the Trump Organization.

And they're saying he exaggerated his financial statements.

I'm going to ask this rhetorically.

What other real estate developers in the city of New York have done that?

None of them?

And so he's going to be the only one that they're selectively prosecuting?

ANJALEE KHEMLANI: Go ahead.

ANTHONY SCARAMUCCI: There have been a few.

But this is a very high profile scalp for them.

And so my point is I think this is helping him, weirdly, in the polls because his base feels like this is, to quote him, "a witch hunt."

Now, the other two cases I think he's got serious problems.

If you study those cases and you look at what Jack Smith is saying about him, there is a potential situation where it unfolds that he did something with those top secret documents.

Even if he showed them to his friends, that's obviously a felony.

But what if he did something more nefarious than that?

And again, I'm not accusing him of it.

I'm just saying what if because this is a big problem.

You will lose your base.

I don't think the MAGA crowd, as much as they love him and he thinks he can shoot people on Fifth Avenue, they'll stay with him, if you're selling secrets of the United States to our adversaries, I think most people are going to have a problem with that.

And I think most independents will have a problem with that.

But the problem is the president, President Biden, I mean, guys, come on.

Just observationally, he's 80 years old, not 80 years young.

And I think it's a mistake to stay in that game.

And he's done a decent job.

And you may disagree with me if you're a Republican.

I'm more of a moderate.

I think he's done a decent job.

But to stay on and to return to the presidency at age 82, I think it's a mistake.

And so we'll see.

He'll likely do it because this is what people do when they have power.

We're not designed for power.

Does everybody understand that?

The minute you get the power, if you don't have a grounding wire in your personality, you get a little crazy.

And these people hang on.

I mean, Chuck Grassley, I think he's like George Washington's grandfather or something like that.

He's been there forever.

He's not going anywhere.

He wants to run for re-election at 96.

The other woman from California, I felt terrible for her, Senator Feinstein.

I mean, they're willing her in and out of places in the wheelchair.

She dies in office.

Come on, guys.

We got to be better than this.

We have to call this out for what it is.

ANJALEE KHEMLANI: So outside of the age concerns, what are some of the other things?

What do you feel about Trump's run this time?

Do you feel like he has something new to offer, maybe an economic plan or something thing like that that could benefit him outside of just having that MAGA crowd?

ANTHONY SCARAMUCCI: OK.

Remember, the number one thing you need to run for the presidency and win the presidency, the number one thing is name recognition.

Number one thing.

Remember, this is a popularity contest in the United States.

It's not a hiring decision.

Secondarily, we're focused on it because a lot of you are in finance and studying the markets, and so we're focused on the political situation, but the average American is coming home from work tired.

If they vote, they show up, they look at the names, they say, oh, I recognize that name, and they vote for that name.

And so he is well ahead of his peer group for a lot of different reasons.

And he has a, like him or dislike him, he has a galvanizing personality.

OK. People are like, yeah, I want that.

I want that red meat.

I saw something on the campaign that I think is worth sharing with you.

So I'll share it.

We landed in Albuquerque, New Mexico in May of 2016.

And I saw something on the Trump campaign that I did not see when I was working for Governor Bush.

You want to know what that was?

People, ladies and gentlemen.

OK. We were getting 5 or 10 people in New Hampshire for Jeb.

He had 9,000 people show up at the Albuquerque Civic Center.

And he had 6,000 people in the overflow on the flat screens outside.

When I walked in there, I said to a couple of my friends, I need to meet these people.

Why are they here?

And I took my security pin off.

I walked in the crowd.

And I asked one gentleman.

And I'll give you the composite.

I said, why are you here?

He said, well, I lost my job.

You think you're in New Mexico.

Well, New New Mexico, that would be Mexico because that's where my job went.

And guys, we lost 65,000 factories in the United States since the signing of NAFTA.

And here was a youngish person in his early 40s.

He had a job in.

The factory moved.

He was now working at Lowe's.

And he was delivering pizza for Domino's at night.

And he had two kids at home.

And he was like, listen, I need help.

We turned people like my dad, who was a blue collar guy-- we turned aspirational working class blue collar families into economically desperational working class blue collar families in 35 years.

We have to address that .

They're going to vote for Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, AOC.

They're going to vote for the people that they think represent them and are the avatar for their anger.

Now, four years into the presidency, the president didn't do anything to solve their problems or come up with any policies that would have benefited them.

But they like him because he is sticking a finger in the eye of Wall Street, the media.

I happen to be both of those.

So it really sucks for me.

Both my eyes are getting gouged out.

OK. Hollywood.

What about the medical establishment?

OK.

These people don't want to take the vaccine.

They don't want to be a part of the system because they feel that the system has left them out.

We have to re-engage those people.

And so I think he is a poor candidate this time for the Republicans.

Just look at the polling.

But it doesn't matter what I think.

He's going to win the nomination if things stay exactly the way they are right now.

If something changes or he drops out, which I still think there's a possibility of that.

He looks extremely tired, very frustrated.

He's got 91 more indictments that he has to handle here.

It's going to be very time consuming.

The poll numbers, his internal poll numbers, suggest that if he gets convicted of something, it's going to hurt him with the independents.

So he may.

But he's the only person against Joe Biden right now where I think Joe Biden can beat him.

And I know he's ahead of him in some of the swing states right now.

But a year from now, you guys know a year from now is a very long time in politics.

Just think about October 7, Access Hollywood tape exposure.

November the 8, one month and one day later, he goes on to win the presidency.

ANJALEE KHEMLANI: Speaking of people in court, I have to go to the other person you know that recently was in court, and that's Sam Bankman-Fried.

You tied together with his business in previous years literally just before a lot of this came out.

And I wonder-- ANTHONY SCARAMUCCI: I'm literally, like, I've got like nine lives.

ANJALEE KHEMLANI: You really know how to pick em, Anthony.

ANTHONY SCARAMUCCI: Well, you see, the thing about the media-- no offense.

But the media, you know the story, if it bleeds, it leads.

And so I've had two reasonably good disasters.

And that's going to be the focus.

But I've also had a pretty good, interesting life.

ANJALEE KHEMLANI: I was going to say, you're a famous-- [INTERPOSING VOICES] ANTHONY SCARAMUCCI: But I've done reasonably well in business.

And I'm having probably the best year that we've had since we started SkyBridge this year after having a very difficult year last year.

And so what's the message there?

There's young people in this audience.

You got to hang in there, no matter what is happening to you or what people are telling you.

They have written my financial obituary six or seven times.

They definitely wrote my political obituary.

That one's probably going to stick.

OK. ANJALEE KHEMLANI: I was going to ask, are you looking for a repeat?

ANTHONY SCARAMUCCI: No, the only thing I'm running for re-election in my marriage.

OK. That's the only thing I'm extremely focused on right now.

But the truth be told, I've had some hard hits.

But you don't go from where I was as a kid growing up, OK. Tracy can identify this because she grew up in a similar neighborhood like me.

You don't go from there where nobody in the family is educated, everybody's got a blue collar job, you end up figuring out a way to go from Tufts to Harvard to Goldman, and then out of Goldman into two reasonably successful businesses, you don't get there without taking risk.

Oh, by the way, when you take risk, you induct failure.

You can't look at the game and say, you know what, I'm going to go 10 for 10 in this game.

I'm going to get some things wrong.

If you're a high profile person, you're going to get nailed.

And they're going to publish some really bad stuff about you.

Last year, the "New York Post" had me in a boat sinking with a load of Bitcoins on them.

I think Bitcoin was at 16,500.

It said the SS Mooch.

They made me look like Tyrion Lannister.

OK.

So I was like a little-- it was horrific.

It was total horrific character.

My kids over the weekend made a t-shirt of this picture and presented it to me today when Bitcoin hit 35,000.

My point is you got to hang in there.

If you're going to listen to the naysayers or you're going to really care what other people think about you, you're making a very big mistake.

Focus on your dreams and how you're going to execute your dreams.

ANJALEE KHEMLANI: Which we're close to end of time.

ANTHONY SCARAMUCCI: Thank you.

Thank you.

ANJALEE KHEMLANI: We're close to end of time.

So I do want to get your thoughts on where crypto goes from here.

I've heard some commentary that the Sam Bankman-Fried issue is just a very US-centric issue and crypto has kind of moved on.

Do you think the industry is recovering from that?

ANTHONY SCARAMUCCI: OK.

So I got to spend 30 seconds on him.

ANJALEE KHEMLANI: More.

Yeah, go.

ANTHONY SCARAMUCCI: OK.

I know we're running out of time.

And then I'll answer that because you-- so I liked Sam.

I want to be very, very clear on that.

Did Sam commit a fraud?

Yes, he did.

OK.

I'm not in the Michael Lewis category or my very good friend Kevin O'Leary category.

I saw what he did first hand.

And he committed a crime.

And he committed fraud.

And he's going to go to jail for a very long time.

But I'm not going to revise history, ladies and gentlemen, and pretend I didn't like him, didn't know him, got to know his family.

Mike Novogratz said last week on the eve of his conviction that he liked him as a person.

He thought he was a nice guy.

He was a nerdy, introverted, nice human being.

But he did something very malevolent.

And I'm just going to say to you the reason I talk about it is I don't want to be that guy that runs from things when you make a mistake.

I want to be the guy that can talk to my clients or my family or the journalist or whoever very honestly about it.

And here's the mistake that we made.

And you should really think about this as an investor.

There was some groupthink.

We had venture capitalists and sovereign wealth funds and billionaires that lost money.

I'm not going to mention their names.

They get so mad at me when I mention their names because they're all hiding from it, trying to pretend it didn't happen to them.

But it did happen to them.

So there was some groupthink.

The second thing that happened is there were four people that controlled the money at FTX.

Alameda.

And if you want to commit a financial crime, you tighten the circle.

You have three or four people running it together.

Go back to the Madoff crime.

It was him, his brother, his assistant, and an accountant.

Several billion dollar crime.

They got it to go for 30 years.

Sam was doing that.

And I would encourage you when you're doing due diligence on a private company or a hedge fund, what are the checks and balances in the system?

How many keys got to get turned before money gets released somewhere?

And you want to go with the people that are very formal about that.

50 or so different people have to look at something at SkyBridge before something goes out the door.

There's always going to be a person of conscience when you have a lot of people looking at it, not just three or four.

You asked about crypto.

We're running out of time.

It's going up.

You'd be very foolish not to own Bitcoin.

I'll leave it at that.

We've got three seconds to go.

All right.

ANJALEE KHEMLANI: Thank you, Anthony.

ANTHONY SCARAMUCCI: We're out of time.

ANJALEE KHEMLANI: Pleasure to have you.