Trump team was expecting a 'bloodbath' if Biden dropped out. Hear how their stance has changed

A quote great Wake-Up call. That is what one Trump campaign insider says they're experiencing now that Vice President Harris is a likely Democratic nominee. That same Trump insider telling my next guest, quote, it's going to be harder what we could have gotten in earned media. We will have to now pay for. And another warning of Harris quote we underestimate her cultural appeal and her power at our peril. OutFront now, Marc Caputo, the national political reporter at the bulwark who broke this story. And, Mark, all of this is your brand new reporting. So, I mean, just how look, ten days ago or two weeks ago, anybody talking about this potential switch on the Democratic side? They thought that Harris they didn't want Harris. They wanted anybody. But Harris. And that was the same thinking in the Trump campaign. Now it's Harris and you see the energy and you see the surge in the polls. And all those elites got it completely wrong. How much did this take Trump's campaign off guard? I think not the switching out the switcheroo of Biden and Harris or Biden with Harris, but the blowing up of Kamala Harris, you know, being a Miami resident, I think in terms of hurricanes. And this looks like a tropical storm that found the right patch of warm water in the Gulf of Mexico and rapidly intensified into a hurricane. And what the Trump campaign is realizing is, okay, we have to batten down the hatches and we need to execute a new game plan and do it rather flawlessly, because they are in a real tough fight now. And they weren't just, what, six, seven, eight days ago? I've lost track of the days at this point, but the reality is, is Kamala Harris poses a much greater threat and challenge to Donald Trump than Joe Biden did. And Donald Trump's campaign knows that. And and Donald Trump, it appears, knows that I mean, you're reporting is that they, her her appeal, her cultural appeal specifically is something that he can see and that your sources are telling you that the campaign, if they do not get that, will underestimate it at their peril. Those are the words. Those are the words. As has been said before, politics is downstream of culture. And one of the interesting things about Donald Trump, and a key to understanding his appeal and resilience in the electorate, is that Donald Trump was a cultural figure before he was a political one. Kamala Harris is a little different. She is a political figure and she is on the cusp of becoming. If not, is now a cultural figure. My 16 year old daughter, for instance, who could not give a hoot about politics, suddenly knows all of these facts about Kamala Harris through tick Tock. Yeah, and that says something. She's breaking through to the other side, and that is crucial. You also talk about the Trump campaign, if it Biden was replaced. Back to my original point about how they got it wrong and the Democratic side got it wrong, too, about Harris, right. The Trump side thought it would be a bloodbath, an open primary. That's really what they counted on. Well, I wouldn't say they counted on, but that's what they expected. I mean, they heard the conversation coming out of Democrats, out of Biden senior advisers has leaked to others in the media who basically said, look, they don't believe that Kamala Harris could win. And so the Trump campaign heard that. They also noted, look, in 2020, Kamala Harris ran a pretty terrible campaign and did a bad job as a candidate. Now we are early in the process. Tony from Brazil, who is the top pollster and strategic adviser for Donald Trump, issued a memo. And by the way, he issued a memo because he sort of had to saying, look, Kamala Harris is going to gain steam, gain momentum over the next few days, but is eventually going to settle out. That's the Trump campaign's position. But they do acknowledge that she is serious, and they do privately acknowledge that they sort of underestimated her. I don't think they're going to be doing that going forward. Yeah, that's going to be fascinating. All right. Thank you so much, Mark. With all that new reporting. Donald Trump finds himself in unfamiliar territory tonight fighting for attention. For four days now, President Biden's historic decision to step out of the 2024 race and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris has all but erase Trump's dominance over the news cycle. Or, as political campaigns see it, his dominance over free media. It's an advantage that the Harris campaign has been using until they are up and running with ads of their own. And it's an advantage that, as The New York Times points out tonight, Trump has long enjoyed. My source on this tonight is Trump's former white House communications director, who knows all too well about his place in the headlines. Anthony Scaramucci, who is also the author of From Wall Street to the white House and back. And it's good to have you here tonight. I want to talk to you about, you know, Trump being pushed out of the headlines of the news cycle. But I do want to get your state your response first on Trump's statement tonight, backing out of the general election debate until after the Democratic nominee is official, even though the DNC is before the next scheduled debate. Vice President Harris just responded to the campaign statement saying, quote, what happened to any time, any place that's of course, a reference to Chris Savino, who is one of the co-chairs of Trump's campaign, who had on business cards printed out any time, anywhere, any place when it talked about debating President Biden. do you think he is trying to back out? Totally, no, but I think it's apropos to this segment. I mean, he wants attention, so he knows if he puts that out there, the mainstream media is going to talk about it, and they're going to be thrilled when maybe he's going to pull out of the debate. There's no possible way he could pull out of the debate. Okay. You know, half of his base are misogynist. And how is he going to pull out of the debates, going to be able to, you know, say to them, hey, guys, I'm really sorry I couldn't debate the first woman African American Indian presidential candidate. There's just no possible way he's going to be able to do that. So he will debater. But he is searching for how to combat her. He hasn't been able to figure that out yet. He's also trying to figure out how to get his name back in the news and on the top half of the broadsheet newspaper. So you think this is just him trying to get the struggling, right? Yeah. Attention. Yeah. No question. Yeah. There's 100% take it to the bank. He will debate her. Will it end up on ABC news? I'm not sure. Could they pick a more neutral venue in his mind? It probably won't be on Fox news may not be on ABC news, but 100%, those two campaigns are going to agree on a venue and they're going to have at least one debate, possibly two. So when I hear, you know, I talked to Pete Buttigieg the other night, he was, you know, not appearing as transportation secretary, but but just as a member of the Democratic Party. And he said that he thinks Trump is actually scared to debate Harris and that it wouldn't ultimately potentially come to fruition because he would know, you know, really how to combat her on the debate stage. And he has struggled with that on the campaign trail. And you saw him in Charlotte, North Carolina yesterday kind of trying out different nicknames for her, different lines of attack, but nothing really one sustained message like he's been successful with with his opponents in the past. So I would say that Secretary Buttigieg is right. He's probably afraid to debate her, but that's not going to stop him from debating her. He knows his, electoral, his base as well as anybody he knows. He will never be able to survive the attacks that he wasn't capable of debating or. And there's no excuse that he can come up with that can prevent that from happening. But where are you know, Pete Buttigieg is correct. And I think this is true about the whole situation, is that the entire demography of the country has changed. And so President Trump, I mean, you can call her nasty. I guess you can say things like, she's dumb as a rock. All that's going to do is cause the women of this generation and very frustrated, angry men to line up and vote against them. This is not 2016, Caitlyn. 20.2 million baby boomers have died since that election. 40 million Generation Xers have arrived ready to vote, and 63% of those are Democrats. So his team knows that. They know the data he sitting there trying to figure out how to attacker, but he's never going to get away with the attacks that he put on Secretary Clinton eight years ago. So it'll be interesting to see what happens. But yeah, he is in the Bermuda Triangle right now of inattention, and it's really bothering him. But I'm sure he's happy that you and I are talking about him tonight and the possibility that he may or not may not debate Vice President Harris, which, of course, he's going to.