 So ladies and gentlemen, a warm welcome to all of you. So my name is Philippe, and I have the honor to moderate today's session. And I think it's a very important and timely session. And I'm delighted to welcome Anthony Scaramucci. Thank you for your pleasure. Anthony is a longstanding friend of the World Economic Forum. He has been here for quite a few times. And the question is, what is your current role? Your sins? This is my 10th year here. But it's my first year here with a food taster. I'll let you guys figure that out, OK? Was it good? I hope you appreciate it. And now here you are in a different role. You are by Friday at 2 o'clock, assistant to President Trump. And you will be in the office for public liaison. So welcome again. And even this is a good indication that you have some insights, some knowledge we do not have. So let me ask you to share some of your insights, some of your knowledge. What will be the first priority in the next 100 years? Where do you want to start, Philippe? You tell me. Yes. You pick the time. OK, let's really start on a very tough way. So we have listened to a speech from a Chinese president, which was remarkable and to be very honest. And you saw even some comments. Some have expected such direction, such contact, more from a US president. So and I think it's a very interesting context in this week. Today, the remarkable, maybe historic speech by the Chinese president talking about globalization, global trade, that we should not have any trade war because no one can win. And we are now curious what will be maybe the first step in terms of trade policy of the incoming administration. Well, I mean, I want to first start out by saying, unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to see the speech. But I think we have common cause. I think the Chinese and the Americans have common cause. And we have to have a very strong bilateral relationship. I also believe that the United States and the new administration does not want to have a trade war. What we would like to have is a process of free and fair trade. And I can give a lot of historical context to this. And I'll be brief. But if you go back to 1945, the United States made a strategic decision, the State Department, the Treasury, and the Truman Administration to do two central things to help the world. Number one, it was the Marshall plant. $13.7 billion spent outside the United States in infrastructure. That was done to fortify the Western democracies in Japan. But it was also to create a common market. Second piece, if you look at every single trade deal that the United States has prosecuted since 1945, these are asymmetrical trade deals to the United States. Why did we do that? We allowed goods and services to flow freely into the US. But we allowed our goods and services to be embargoed in other countries as we were trying to help these other countries improve their labor and living standards and create more prosperity in their middle classes. That process over the last 71 years has worked phenomenally well. The economic interdependence that that process has created has led to less global conflict. Yes, we've had some Cold War proxy fights. We've had the issue in Iraq and Afghanistan. But I'm talking about a global conflict. The last global conflict, thank God, was 71 years ago. And so the United States put together the footprint and foundation of the global trade agreements. We call these trade agreements free. But what they really are is they're free asymmetrically. And so all we're asking for, as Mr., as the president-elect and members of his economic team have looked at this, and I've studied it very carefully, all we're asking for now is to create more symmetry in these trade agreements. The deleterious effect of this macro plan over the last 71 years is that it's hollowed out American manufacturing, it's hurt the American middle class, and it's crippled the American working class. In the last 10 years, 8 million more Americans have gone from the working class to the working poor. And so we have to come up with policies, Philip, to change that. And so I respect China. I certainly respect the president of China. And we want to have a phenomenal relationship with the Chinese. But if the Chinese really believe in globalism and they really believe in the words of Lincoln, they have to reach now towards us and allow us to create this symmetry because the path to globalism for the world is through the American worker and the American middle class. Because if you can create rising wages and that part of the world, we still control 23.6% of the GDP. You can create more purchasing power and the virtuous circle of consumption that will lead to more global trade and it will lead to more global peace and more global prosperity. So at the end of the day, in this sort of paradoxical way, the president, President Trump, could be one of the last great hopes for globalism because he's focused on something that we have to fix internally through the United States in order to create a more burgeoning market. So thank you very much, Anthony. So then let's take it optimistic that we have heard today a statement in favor of globalization and maybe we can see something similar on the incoming speech on Friday. Well, listen, I expect this to be a historic speech. He's working very carefully on it. For people that don't know the president as well as I know him, he's a very meticulous guy. He put a lot of thought and process in the Republican convention last July. He's put his touch and his aesthetic touch and attention to detail in the inauguration ceremonies, including the actual ceremony and swearing in, but also the balls and things like that. And I know he's working super hard on this inauguration speech. And my guess is that it will be a historic speech. I think it will be very Reagan-esque in terms of how he's gonna talk. And I will take everyone in this room back 36 years to that very famous speech in 1981 where many people in the European community or the global community were concerned about Ronald Reagan. And then eight short years later, they realized that he was a man of peace. He was a man of compassion. He said what he said and he meant what he said and he prosecuted an agenda that led to a more peaceful world. And I predict the same thing will happen with President Trump. And so if you guys get a little bit upset about the tweeting or some of the things that he's saying, I wanna put your mind at ease that directionally, this is a super compassionate man. He's a generous man. He has wonderful children. He loves people. This is something that you certainly want in the head of state of the United States. To love people, Churchill once said about people that the best among us choose not to judge human frailty so harshly. And I've worked very, very closely with President Trump over the last nine months to help him obtain the presidency or candidate Trump. And he has the elements of a great leader. And so he's also an effective communicator. And he's not necessarily communicating in a way that the people in this community would love. But he is communicating very, very effectively to a very large group of the population in Europe and in the United States that are feeling a common struggle right now that maybe many of us here in this room do not feel. So Anthony allow me to ask a personal question and let's dig deeper what you just mentioned. Once I saw an interview. I'm five foot seven, five foot seven. Wow. I was once. I'm actually five foot eight I think but maybe five, nine on my license. But anyway, go ahead, I'm sorry. I read once in an interview that you changed from a skeptic at the beginning of the primaries to a supporter. So what motivated you to then? That's a really, really good question. So I was with, I was actually with two other candidates. So it's a quick story, but it's a funny story. I went to see now President-elect Trump but back in March of 2015, I can't remember the exact date but it was the day after the last appearance of the apprentice. So that season finale that morning I had a mid-morning meeting with Mr. Trump or the president-elect. And he said, hey, I'm running for president. We worked together on the Romney campaign. I'd like you to come work with me. And I said, okay, you're not running for president. And he said, no, no, no, I'm running for president. I said, well, first of all, you've got 19,000 square feet of living space up here in Trump Tower and there's probably five or 6,000 square feet of living space in the White House residence. I said, you're not gonna do that. And he said, no, no, no, I'm ready to do it. I've hired my campaign people. And then I said to him, well, I've got obligations to two other candidates. And so, and I explained to him why and what I love about him is that he said, you know what? I respect that. I respect the loyalty that you have. You certainly didn't think I was gonna run for president, but if I end up running and beating those two people, I would like you to join me. And so we shook hands on that. And so I think the reason why we have such a good relationship, I was very upfront about that and he admires loyal people. But what I was saying to you last night is that I was very confused by him, probably not getting all of the messaging, probably hearing some of the rhetoric and saying, oh geez, you know, what is he doing? And then I started going to these rallies. And what dawned on me, and my personal story may be different from the stories here in this room, but I'll tell you quickly. I grew up with two parents that never went to college. My dad was a blue collar worker. He started his career with a lunch pail. He eventually graduated to a desk job. But when I was at home in my childhood memories with my mom keeping a tight budget and making sure that, you know, and listen, we grew up in the middle class. I would never dishonor my dad by telling you I grew up poor. He worked too hard for me to ever even suggest that. So this is not a rags richest story by any means. This is a classic American middle class story. But what would happen to my father today if you fast forwarded 40 years, and I priced this out in 2015, my dad's 1975 wages would be down about 45% in real terms today in, say, 2015 wages. I haven't done it up until 2017, but I did it as an illustration for my economic team about what is actually going on in the society. The globalization, the effect of large labor supply, excess factory capacity has put a strain on working class families. We're working class families in the 1970s in the United States. When I was growing up, they were quite aspirational. My dad would yell at us and say, you know, do your schoolwork and go to a good college and then you'll rise in class. I think it's way more difficult today in those families to have that same conversation. If you look at the data, it's harder to move. There's harder class mobility. What I miss, Phillip, and what I was trying to share with you is that I started to insulate myself through my success. I had gone on to Harvard Law School, then I went to Goldman Sachs, then I built a successful asset management firm, sold that asset management firm, built another successful asset management firm, which I've actually just sold today. The press release will come out shortly. And I've insulated myself. I started hanging out with wealthy people. I started going to fancier restaurants, and I started to miss, and plus I subsidized my parents, my mom and dad are both driving in Mercedes. That's a sign of globalism, right? My point is, and they certainly weren't expecting that, right? But my point of bringing up this story is I was missing what Mr. Trump, the then candidate Trump was seeing. And so I went to my first rally with him after I signed on to the campaign, and I was back behind the Secret Service Security Wall, and I turned to Lou Eisenberg, who has now been named the, actually maybe hasn't been named yet, so I can't say that, but anyway, something coming out on Lou Eisenberg, you can call him, okay? But I said, listen, I'm gonna go outside, and I'm gonna go around the perimeter, and I'm gonna start asking people questions. And so I walked around the perimeter, and I said, hey, why are you here? Why are you here? And there was a common thread in that story. It wasn't, you know, race-baiting. It wasn't all the nonsensical rhetoric that you heard in the newspapers. It was, you know, there was a factory here. It closed down four years ago. I'm on some level of governmental dependency. I'm super worried about my children. He's here. He's promising to come up with some solutions and policy solutions to get jobs back in my neighborhood. And I started going through the crowd, and then I said, oh my God, these are the people I grew up with. And he got it, and I didn't. And so it's a little embarrassing to tell you that because I should have been more in tune with the pulse of the people I grew up with. And the great irony of this story is that a billionaire real estate developer living in a tower in New York City was in closer touch with the people that I grew up with than I was myself. And so that's why I became very highly convicted philosophically that he was gonna win. And I stayed in there with him through the very bumpy weeks and months and particularly some real hard bumps in October. At the end of the day, if you were driving around, Don Jr. and I, Donald Trump Jr. and I were driving around in Pennsylvania together. My dad's father was a coal miner and so I know Pennsylvania very well. And we're cruising through Pennsylvania and there was one Trump pent sign after the next on all of these lawns. I didn't see any Clinton cane signs. I'm not saying there weren't Clinton cane supporters. Clearly they were in the urban areas of Pennsylvania, but they weren't in the rural and farm and middle class areas. There may have been, but not that many. And we were driving around, we were looking at each other and we said, we got a good shot at the wind Pennsylvania. Now we were looking at that in August and September and saying, okay, if we execute this strategy, and let me tell you, there's only one very big negative about Mr. Trump for me. I don't know when the guy sleeps. Okay, it's like a total mister to me when he sleeps. So it keeps us up too. We have to try to outwork him and it's almost impossible to outwork him. And he left everything on the field. I can remember one night and one of the journalists will remember the exact day we're flying in the plane and he looks around and he says, you know, let's see if we can make one more stop in Michigan or one more stop in Wisconsin. And it's a little bit of a blur to me, but our logistics guy was making phone calls. I think it was a 1 a.m. stop in Michigan. We land the plane. There's 5,000 people in the hangar. Okay, we made the decision at 10.30 p.m. at 1 a.m. There were 5,000 people in the hangar. And this was like a democratic enclave in Michigan. This is what that film director saw. I can't remember his name because I don't watch his, what's his name, Michael Moore. Yeah, I don't really watch his movies, but you said he was a great man. I got him as, okay, I admire that. You know, I'm good friends with Oliver Stone. I think Oliver Stone is a great American. I have no problem with the battle of intellectual ideas and I have no problem with the battle of ideology. That's the hallmark of the First Amendment and that's the hallmark of a pluralistic society. But certain ideas seem to work better than others. And I think there's a lot of scientific evidence that suggests that. But Michael Moore saw it. He saw exactly what we saw in Michigan. And I'll make one last point on this. If somebody's willing to wait in the rain for eight hours outside an arena, and it's the middle of October and it's quite cold, do you think they're not gonna show up on November the 8th to cast a vote for that person? Because many people in the media said, oh, well, he's got big rallies, but these people are not gonna show up for him. That was clearly not true. Talking about his voters, I think it was a quote by Peter Thielen. He mentioned once that maybe the mistake by the general public was that they tried to take Donald Trump literally, but his voters taking him symbolic. So what does it mean? Yeah, I think Peter, maybe Peter or Kellyanne Conway said that exact. I don't remember who specifically said it. I thought it was very interesting because I think that the point that they're trying to make is that he's a counter punching sort of a person. He doesn't, I've never really seen him throw the first punch, but boy, if you're hitting him, he likes to punch back hard. And I think what his constituents base liked about him or still likes about him is that he comes right up over the top of the mainstream media and delivers messaging to them, either through social media or through his own speeches or whatever it might be. But there's something that he's doing that I think has a European community upset. So I'm gonna take two minutes and try to explain it. So what happens with him, you and I are having a one-on-one intimate conversation and you're letting me do most of the talking, which I do appreciate. And it's an intimate conversation, but we have a lot of people out here that are watching. But let's say we were alone in the bar together and I said something to you off the cuff. You say, okay, that's an appropriate thing for me to say in that situation. But let's say now I'm saying that exact thing in front of millions of people, you would then say, okay, well, geez, that's not appropriate. You have to be more measured and you have to be more diplomatic in your response. And I think the genius of the candidate, the genius of President-elect Trump, is that he's made a decision in the age of social media, in the age of micro media, where each of us actually have our own little media platform, whether it's our Facebook page or our Twitter feed or whatever it might be, that he is going to connect to people in that level of intimacy in a way that's way more public than what I just described between you and I, Phillip. And so he's doing that. And so he's meeting with a European journalist and they're asking him opinion of something. And he's pretty open about what his opinion is. And I think I can interpret it for you guys if you want, but I can more or less say that he has a tremendous amount of respect for Chancellor Angela Merkel, tremendous amount of respect for her. He has a tremendous amount of respect for President Putin and whatever the issues are that he has to deal with in his own country. And when they asked him about the immigration issue, he basically said, well, that could have been a mistake and maybe I can give you a more third derivative intellectual analysis of it. But what he's all he's basically saying is when you hear that he has an issue with the immigration, the bandwidth goes way over here to racism. He's the least racist person that I've ever met. And if you don't believe me, ask Martin Luther King III that was in his office yesterday. If you don't believe him, ask Jim Brown, the legendary NFL Hall of Fame football player that grew up in my hometown in Hacett, New York, who said yesterday that Donald Trump is gonna end up being the quarterback of the urban renewal of the inner cities of the United States. So what is happening to European journalists, American journalists, is he's saying things that are cuffed and it's setting off alarm bells and people are lighting matches to their own hair and setting their hair on fire and they're running around in rooms like this all crazy and they really don't need to do that. This is a great leader. This is a guy that can galvanize people, bring people together. He has an enormous amount of respect for these other leaders. I'll make a prediction here right here in this room. He'll have a phenomenal relationship with one of my former law school classmates, President Barack Obama. He'll have a phenomenal relationship with him. I know the president a very long time. I know Mr. Trump or President-elect Trump a very long time. Two years from now they'll be on the golf course, playing golf together, trying to help each other because they have that nature in their personality. Even though they may be different politically and they may have different policy ideas, this is the type of gregarious nature that President-elect Trump has that you will start to see once he's in office. So talking about again the question literally and symbolic. So beginning of this week there was some interviews published from President-elect Trump. He made some very pronounced statements in terms of the European Union and the NATO. So some in the region are a little bit worrying. So if it's not literally to take but symbolic. So what is symbolic in terms of the European Union and the NATO? Okay, can I start with NATO first or NATO? That was good. You say NATO, I say NATO. Okay, I mean. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. All right, I knew you would do it. As long as we mean the same, that's good. I knew you were gonna laugh at that. That's why I said, all right. Look, at the end of the day, here's what I think he was trying to say. And if I'm wrong, believe me, my cell phone will be ringing and he'll correct me. He's a great media coach. Trust me, he watches you on television and he'll tell you what he likes about you and what he doesn't like about you. But here's what I would say about his comments. NATO, and I don't know the exact date, was it 48 or 49 whenever the charter and the treaty was embarked upon was designed to fortify the Western European democracies against the specter of a communist threat. At the end of the day, whether you like the policies or you didn't like the policies, George Kennan, in the mid-40s, he sent a cable back to the State Department when he was an under ambassador to Avril Hammond and he said, listen, we have to have a policy of containment in place to reject global communism. And so NATO was an offspring of that policy of containment. And it was done sovereign nation to sovereign nation in unification against an other sovereign nation or a potential union of sovereign nations. You can argue whether it was successful or not. I think it was resoundingly successful. Today, the world is dramatically different than the world we lived in before. The former Soviet Union is separate countries and the largest of those countries, Russia, we have now in the G8. Now we have sanctions on Russia right now and we may have some disagreements with Russia, but at the end of the day, all the president-elect is saying there, let's try to find common cause, let's try to find a way to get along better. He's saying about NATO that if you look at today, 2017, the way NATO is currently architected, maybe we need to focus less on the combating communism and more on potentially rejecting radical Islamic terrorism. And so when he uses the word obsolete and everybody runs around and says, oh, he's gonna bust up NATO, that's not what he's saying. When he says, hey, wait a minute, there's a two or 3% per GDP per country for dispense expenditure and a lot of guys are not paying their bills, well, he's a real estate developer. What do you think he's gonna do? He's gonna go to those countries and say, hey, you sign this thing, you owe the money, start paying up. I don't understand why people would be upset by that. If anything, as an attacks paying American, I'm sort of happy about that. Why not live up to your obligation to that treaty? Secondarily, why not sit down with our North American Treaty Alliance members and reorganize and recharter? Many of us here have renovated our homes. We've certainly changed our wardrobe since the 1940s. We have to think about changing that treaty to front face the 21st and 22nd century. Let's talk about the European Union. What you're hearing there is he's calling for the breakup of the European Union. I don't hear that. What I heard was someone asked him a question about Brexit and he said, you know, my political sense is that they will vote for a Brexit. He wasn't saying they got a Brexit or what, but he said they're probably gonna vote for a Brexit. Why? Because when centralized bureaucracies lose touch with the common struggle, there's a disruption, okay? Let's take it really far back, ladies and gentlemen. Let's go back to Solon, who is the original founder of Athenian democracy. What happened there? It wasn't based on Jeffersonian or Lincoln's principles of freedom and ideology. It was based on the economic struggle that was happening in Athens. And so what did Solon make a decision to do? He empowered the lower classes with more representative rights in that city state. And he formed a demo, so a democracy of the people. If you don't wanna focus on that and you wanna focus on central bureaucrats and you wanna focus on this is better for you and I know what's best for you relative to what you know what's best, it's not gonna work. If you have a pluralistic society, you have to represent those people. And so all the candidate was saying at that time is, maybe people in Brussels don't know exactly the right policies that should be put in place in Manchester in the United Kingdom. And so now he's saying, listen, get it right. You wanna have an economic union and you wanna have a secure safe continent in Europe. I understand European history. You fought from Charlemagne to Napoleon. It wasn't until von Metternich put those principles in place that you started to dial back the fighting. Then you had a rise in nationalism that ultimately led to World War I. And so when you are learning your European history or you're sitting in eighth grade social studies, we know that the word nationalism, the next derivative of it is militarism. But I don't think that's what President-elect Trump is talking about. He's talking more about self-determination. He's the least military. He will have a re-fortified structure for the national security of the United States because he recognizes that we will get greater peace through strength. But what he's not looking for is a rise of militarism. If anything, he's the exact opposite. I can remember after somebody was attacking him about being itchy to potentially push the nuclear button, he looked at me, he says, my God, I've got grandchildren and I've got children I love. I would be the last person that would wanna do that. So I see him very differently than maybe you guys see him. But I think over the next four years, my bet is there's an arbitrage spread between the way you see him and the way I see him. And my prediction is that that's gonna close. And you're gonna start seeing him more the way I see him because I spend a lot of time with him. So on the European Union, you want it, and I understand why you want it, because you want peace in Europe and we want it. But I think that the European leadership and the European elites, the bureaucrats, had better pay much closer attention to the working class families and to the middle class. I can tell you the Trump administration is gonna do that. That's gonna be one of my principal focuses. And if we do that, you will close the income divide. If we do that, people will feel better about themselves. If we do that, there's a laborer that's uneducated like my dad, who will start thinking aspirationally about his children the way my father was thinking about me and my brother and sister. So if we have the translation from literally to symbolic in terms of NATO, does the statement that NATO's obsolete mean at the end that it's more or less a call for radical reform of the contract of the treaty? Yeah, I think it's a call for let's look at this. Here's something you should think about. He's an entrepreneur, so he's gonna take things in a couple of different categories. Category number one, wow, this thing really works. Okay, how can I make it better? It's working really well, but you know what? We could add these two things to it and it'll work even better. Well, this thing is not working so well. But you know what? We should leave the structure in place because the structure is good and now we have to put more layers into it and make it work better. And then the third thing, and this is super important, the third thing, because this is what upsets all the journalists in this room and a lot of the people, frankly. The third thing is, wow, this really isn't working. But we've always had it this way. And everybody, the natural tendency for human beings is to accept the status quo because the status quo is least disruptive and it's least painful because it creates the least amount of anxiety. But this thing over here is really not working. And what do entrepreneurs do to that? They shatter that, they break that. Steve Jobs, he takes a phone and turns it into a computer. They disrupt it. And so what you're thinking about and what your anxiety is about the shattering of things that are not working have some faith and some confidence that there's very smart people looking at it but not super smart. Not people that think that they're smarter than everybody else. Just people that are looking at it and saying, hey, you know what? We're gonna try to make this better. And so in the case of NATO, it's probably, and again, I don't wanna speak on behalf of the administration because I think that's unfair with 72 hours ago and this is a international audience. I'll say it personally. My guess is that NATO is in category number two where it's working, it has worked beautifully. But there are things about it that possibly need to be changed and there are possibly one or two things in there that the president-elect's own words are obsolete. Does that not make sense? Yes, it makes sense. So that means for the next four years that we can expect to some extent that someone's saying very symbolic but we will always have someone who is translating to some extent into concrete. No, no. And we've got a lot of, because you know, it's the world economic form. We've got a lot of translators in here. It's okay to have a presidential one. They are all in the box, but that's more literally, but coming back to the question, you are then part of this team to be some kind of interpreter as a role as assistant to President Trump as well as in the Office for Public Liaison because you know, the question will come up quite often I assume. And so because it's a different wording than the so-called classical political establishment has had in the past. I think it's very interesting. I understand talking about your voters and his strategy. That was one major part of the success to have a different language, different understanding. But at the same time, we would like to know what does it mean in the translation for the action. So, but it was a purpose to some extent to have you here today. You used the time efficiently and the need was really great to have you here. No, thank you. As an ambassador, future interpreter, it was really nice to have you here. Thank you very much. Thank you.