NEW YORK — Anthony Scaramucci is searching for a video on his phone. A clip that will set the record straight. I’m reading him a quotation from the only White House press conference he gave as President Donald Trump’s communications chief, a period in his life he calls, in his new book, “the 11-day fiasco.”
“I’ve seen this guy throw a dead spiral through a tire,” Scaramucci told a reporter from the briefing room podium, in 2017, when putting on some razzle dazzle in the early-ish days of Trump 1.0. “I’ve seen him at Madison Square Garden with a top coat on, he’s standing in the key and he’s hitting foul shots and swishing them. He sinks 3-foot putts.” (The official White House record was later corrected to “30-foot putts.”)
“I gotta show it to you,” he says, nine years later, while talking at a Manhattan members-only club. “Here we go.”
It’s a video of Trump, in 1992, at a baseball stadium in Buffalo, New York, for a charity event, wearing a notably un-Trumpian plaid shirt. (Scaramucci: “He’s not a fashionable guy.”) Girlfriend Marla Maples is in tow.
Then, history appears to vindicate “The Mooch.” Surrounded by NFL legends, the real estate mogul fires a football through the smallest of holes roughly 20 yards away: more or less, a dead spiral through a tire. The crowd goes nuts.
“I didn’t make it up,” says Scaramucci, who insists he was also at Madison Square Garden for the foul-shot-in-a-top-coat moment. “I don’t have the tape of that,” he adds, sadly.
“They always broke my balls about that,” he says, referencing the mockery he faced for the claims of Trump’s sporting prowess. “But you know what? I saw it.”
Chip Somodevilla via Getty Images
Scaramucci does concede, however, that the now infamous peroration was “a gigantic ass-kissing move.” Not that the fawning press conference impressed the big man, who for one day at least was not the center of attention. There was a new showman in town. “He didn’t like it,” Scaramucci says. “One-man show, one spotlight.”
“I shouldn’t have done that,” he says of the exercise in Trump flattery. “Add that to my mistakes, my man.”
Mistakes — his own, but mainly those made by political leaders over the last 30 years — are the centerpiece of his new book, “All The Wrong Moves: How Three Catastrophic Decisions Led to the Rise of Trump,” which attempts to outline “what came before Trump to make Trumpism possible,” and paints a grim picture of the threats to democracy today.
As anyone who has tracked his career over the last decade knows, the Anthony Scaramucci who simped for Trump in the White House for less than two weeks — said to be a modern-day record — and the one who wrote this damning book are appreciably different people.
Scaramucci was once a Trump acolyte who believed the TV personality-turned-insurgent politician was the answer to a malaise created by an out-of-touch bipartisan elite. In the book, he writes how Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, told Scaramucci that “I reminded him of his dad, Fred Trump.”
“I said whatever was on my mind; I was classic New York,” he writes of why Trump liked him. The brash Long Island hedge funder, who rocked up to Washington, D.C., in a riot of aviator shades and expensive threads, appeared well-suited to be Trump’s emissary on The Hill.
Now, he is one of the president’s fiercest critics. Scaramucci’s podcast, “The Rest Is History: U.S.”, co-hosted by the BBC’s Katty Kay, is a smash hit, especially in the U.K. Audiences attending an inaugural North America tour this month are likely to hear more unvarnished views on his former boss.
Bloomberg via Getty Images
Scaramucci, 62, who returned to Wall Street after his brief foray in the capital, sees the big mistakes that cleared the way for Trump through the prism of economics. The “money point of view” of history, he calls it.
Put simply, it started with President Bill Clinton’s embrace of trade with China that hurt American workers “deeply, quickly and permanently,” and continued when President George W. Bush cut taxes at the same time as he funded elongated wars in the Middle East. The last gateway to Trump was President Barack Obama bailing out Wall Street after the 2008 crash while main street faced ruin.
The result? Americans, whose wages were crushed while the “fat cats” got fatter, decided to “hire an orange wrecking ball.” Twice.
The book also details his own “catastrophically stupid decision” to work for Trump, first in the 2016 transition team and later as director of communications, as there were “things that he was doing that I morally equivocated on and overlooked.”
“Jeb Bush told me not to. Mitt Romney told me not to,” he says of the two senior Republicans he’d previously raised funds for. “George W. Bush told me not to.”
“But I smelled power, and I got my ego involved,” he adds.
Aside from that bombastic press conference, Scaramucci’s ill-fated 11 days as the president’s media gatekeeper included mopping up after Trump gave a bizarre address to the Boy Scouts of America, which included anecdotes about yacht parties involving “New York’s hottest people.”
“At the Jamboree, Trump speaks for twenty-nine minutes and says almost nothing that’s not completely insane,” Scaramucci writes in the book.
In person, he recalls the horror of standing backstage listening to Trump “lacing his speech with impromptu sexual innuendo to 12-year-old boys,” and senior White House aide Kellyanne Conway explaining this was his problem to deal with.
“And I was like, ’I’m not cleaning that up. I’m giving that to [new press secretary] Sarah [Huckabee Sanders], man. That’s a big elephant shit right there.”
The Boy Scouts speech in West Virginia was the same day his wife — who was in the process of divorcing him — was giving birth to their son in New York, and there was no way of getting back in time. “I mean, it was a really bad day for me,” he reflects.
“Now, some people push back,” he continues. “Oh, you know, you turned [working for Trump] into a great podcast and you did this, did that. It sucked! I’m not gonna sugarcoat it.”
He patched up his marriage and rebuilt his business. But the public humiliation — “getting ripped up by all the late-night comedians” and being “lit up by the fucking ‘Saturday Night Live’ … calling me human cocaine” — still seems to sting.
He says his downfall came not, as many think, after being caught off-guard in an interview with The New Yorker and saying, among other things, that “I’m not [Trump chief strategist] Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own cock.” In fact, the president was apparently amused by “one of the funniest fucking things ever said from the fucking White House.”
“You think Trump really gave a shit?” he asks now of the Bannon jibe.
The end, he writes, was fueled by something less profanity-strewn: telling Trump he couldn’t veto the Russia sanctions bill over election interference that Republicans had passed. In any case, after mere days, Scaramucci was fired from the White House by Trump’s new chief of staff, John Kelly. He had “bombed so cataclysmically,” he writes.
Scaramucci initially stayed loyal to Trump. But, by 2019, he recognized Trump “wasn’t ever going to be a blue-collar president. He was exploiting the suffering of the people for his own narcissistic and malevolent ends,” he writes in the book.
Given how Trump expects loyalty, blowback to Scaramucci’s decision to be publicly critical of the president was perhaps inevitable. He’s had that. But Scaramucci points out that Trump “attacked me first,” and then “went after my wife on Twitter, which really caused the fight.” He says MAGA World people, who he was still close to, told Trump he “went over the line with me.”
“By the way, let me tell you something,” he says now. “If Donald Trump attacks your wife, you better back your fucking wife up, OK?”
Trump, he says, is “a low, low artist.”
“I believe that he’ll probably get hit with a tsunami of complaints, which could potentially knock him out of business.”
– Anthony Scaramucci on the midterms
Despite the feud and his conversion to Never Trumpism, some people are “still mad at me that I went to work for Donald Trump, even though I had my comeuppance.”
“There is a group of people in this country that I will be forever tarred and feathered and tattooed. And then there’s another group of people like, ‘Hey, man, the fucking guy made a mistake. He was honest about it, and he tried to pull us out of it.’”
Does he feel guilty about enabling Trump? “I do feel guilty about it, but I feel like I was exonerated,” he says, countering that he helped President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to try to stop him. “I feel that I did my duty. And if you’re really being honest, it is the failure of the Democratic Party that he exists, right?”
In the book, Scaramucci argues the second Trump administration’s goal is to have “no effective restraint on the presidency — a kind of ‘soft’ dictatorship” similar to strongman leaders such as Victor Orbán in Hungary and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
“Democracy has been overcome elsewhere. There’s no magical, existential reason that democracy isn’t being overcome here,” he writes. He also says in the book that “we’ll have to be ready for the next Trump” if we survive this one, and tells me the word from the rubber-chicken dinner fundraising circuit is that Vice President JD Vance and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) are lining themselves up to be his successor, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio may sit 2028 out.
His suggested cure involves codifying many of the “norms” that have failed to constrain Trump, and he advocates for a future president who has the “willpower, guts, and political smarts to drive a stake through” the heart of the Trump playbook. He doesn’t know who that is yet. Also: the Republican Party has to die. “The GOP already has. It’s time for the funeral,” he writes.
In person, he says he doesn’t want to be entirely cynical. He reaches for a suitably Scaramuccian analogy to suggest the president’s current unpopularity, fueled by the Iran war, could mean the midterms are fatal for Trump, vanquishing any fears that he’ll cling to power after 2028 — a kind of Forever Trump, where he refuses to leave the White House despite term limits, which Scaramucci raises as a possibility in the book.
The political cycle means Americans are “stuck with the guy for four years.” But at the end of year two, a “customer complaint aisle” opens: “I believe that he’ll probably get hit with a tsunami of complaints, which could potentially knock him out of business.”