‘The Mooch’ is the Wall Street bro who lasted 11 days as the White House comms director. Now he’s back as a podcast pundit, helping Kamala Harris get her head around crypto - and warning America about his old boss.
Donald Trump’s former White House communications director knows exactly what he would say to his old boss should their paths cross again. “I would say, ‘You are a piece of s***. You’re lucky you have secret service protection, because I’d smash the f∗∗∗ing caps right out of your mouth. You are a piece of shit.’” The Anthony Scaramucci who tells me this is actually much milder mannered than the version I last met in 2018. Back then he was chiefly famous for being Trump’s friend, “the Mooch”, who had helped get him elected but then lasted just 11 days in the White House. During his brief tenure in charge of presidential comms, a job for which he had no qualifications or experience, Scaramucci phoned a New Yorker reporter, called the president’s chief of staff a “f∗∗∗ing paranoid schizophrenic”, and declared, “I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own c**k.” He failed to realise the reporter was taping the call until the recording aired on CNN.
To this day Scaramucci maintains this wasn’t even what got him fired, which says something about the chaos of Trump’s early months in office. The colourful profanity made the Mooch a household name and national joke; he went back to his old job on Wall Street and didn’t fall out with the president. The following year we met in his hedge fund office where I found him in finance bro overdrive, showing off wildly and still cheerleading for Trump.
I’d barely sat down before he flashed a wad of $100 bills in my face and we spent a riot of a day high-tailing around Manhattan in his chauffeur-driven SUV. You might have thought he’d never risk talking to a journalist again, but seldom has anyone appeared to enjoy being interviewed more. “I’m a funky character, right?”
The Mooch I meet last month at a hotel in Cardiff is an altogether different character. Measured, sober-minded, self-deprecating, he appears to have walked in not off the set of The Wolf of Wall Street but The West Wing. With the exception of what he tells me he would like to say to Trump, this Mooch sounds practically statesmanlike.
Partly this is down to him starring in a hit British podcast, The Rest Is Politics: US, a spin-off to Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart’s The Rest Is Politics. Co-presented with Katty Kay, a veteran BBC correspondent in Washington, and only launched in April, it’s now the world’s fastest-growing political podcast, averaging three million monthly downloads. I can’t have been the only listener who was taken aback by the political acuity he delivers every episode. Apparently even Campbell was. “Alastair had a different impression of who I actually am. He thought I was just a Wall Street bro.” If rebranding the Mooch as a highbrow political heavyweight hadn’t been his intention when joining the podcast (he says not, but I wonder), he looks very pleased when I say it has worked.
Some of his new gravitas will also be down to having done “a lot of work on myself” after leaving the White House, and a lot more after severing ties with Trump — publicly, spectacularly, irrevocably — in 2019. A moral “reckoning” under the guidance of a life coach now makes Scaramucci an authority on the psychology not just of Trump but of senior Republicans campaigning for him.
But most of the gravitas is down to what’s at stake in America on Tuesday (Wednesday NZ time). “It is incredible,” the 60-year-old marvels softly, “but one of the people running for the most important job in the world is a fascist. He’s talking about non-white immigrants the way the National Socialists talked about Jews. He’s dehumanising them. So anybody that is standing with him is supporting a racist Nazi.”
A lot of people Scaramucci knows will vote for Trump. “And I understand. I think the hard left has done a disastrous job for the Democratic Party. The wokeism, the nonsense about all this sort of bullshit that the traditional American family doesn’t like. But still” — he looks ashen — “youare supporting a full-blown racist fascist.”
Scaramucci himself comes from a working-class family, and reminds me of this roughly every five minutes. “You know I grew up in a blue-collar neighbourhood, right?”
He was raised on Long Island, the son of second-generation Italian immigrants, his father a crane operator paid by the hour. He and his older brother, David, were the first to go to university. After studying economics at Tufts and law at Harvard, Scaramucci joined Goldman Sachs in 1989, founded his own investment fund seven years later, sold it for a fortune in 2001 and then founded another, SkyBridge Capital, which he still runs. Fiercely proud of his origins, frantically ambitious and fabulously rich, he has lived, he’s fond of saying, “the America dream”.
He first met Trump on Wall Street in the mid-Nineties, and they used to go to Yankee baseball games and charity events together. “Look, everyone thought he was a little jerky and a little bit of an obnoxious prick. But he was charming. Back then he didn’t care about transgender or homosexuality, he was a moderate New Yorker.”
A political moderate himself, Scaramucci was a fundraiser on Barack Obama’s 2008 election campaign and then swapped sides to work for the Republican Mitt Romney’s in 2012, and endorsed first Scott Walker then Jeb Bush in the 2016 Republican primaries. When Trump defeated both and invited him to join his campaign finance committee, he thought the candidate was a joke.
“But I also saw something in Trump that I genuinely liked and was genuinely willing to support. Trump saw the transformation of America’s blue-collar aspiration to blue-collar economic desperation. And I’d missed it. You know why? Because I was hanging out in the salons of the wealthy. I was getting the confirmed biases of Davos, the confirmed biases of Wall Street, and that does not reflect well on me. But Trump saw it.”
He didn’t fail to see Trump’s unsuitability for office. The compulsive lying and misogyny were brazen. He watched his boss glaze over with boredom minutes into a Middle East briefing on Air Force One, and had to invoke the movie plotline of Lawrence of Arabia to get him to pay attention. Howdid he square all this with himself?
“By moral equivocation.” He told himself he was helping Trump “for the greater good, in the service of these economically disenfranchised people”. In reality his own ego and ambition were by then completely out of control. “I have a chance to work for the American president in the White House? The temptation of that to my ego was overpowering. And when you put your ego and your pride into your decision-making, you make catastrophic decisions.”
His wife, Deidre, was so appalled when he took the job she filed for divorce. Scaramucci was on a plane with the president when she gave birth to their second child.
Getting fired in July 2017 was the best thing that happened to him. It saved his marriage, for a start, and “I think it’s made me a better husband and father, and more psychologically minded as a human being,” he says. Still, “I didn’t want to be a pussy.
So I said, OK, there’s a lot of shit he’s doing that I don’t necessarily like. But I’m still going to support him.”
That changed in 2019 when Trump tweeted that four non-white Congresswomen, three of whom were born in America, should “go back” to the countries “from which they came”. Scaramucci called this repellent on national TV and Trump went for him on Twitter, calling him “a mental wreck” and a “highly unstable nut job”. It has been war ever since.
Scaramucci campaigned hard for Biden in 2020, helped Kamala Harris prepare for September’s presidential debate and joined her media team on the night. Last month, when asked at a CNN town hall in Pennsylvania, Kamala Harris publicly echoed his belief that Trump is a fascist.
He advises her team on cryptocurrency policy and supports her tirelessly — to the disgust of many in his own party. “I’ve had death threats. I’ve had people get into my face in situations. But I don’t think of it as disloyal. You have to be a patriot. You know what I say to those people? ‘You’re disloyal. You know he’s an evil guy. You know he’s a dangerous person.’ "
Does anyone on Trump’s team sincerely believe he is an honourable force for good? “The answer is obviously no. It’s ‘I’m going to hold my nose and I’m going to support him because it’s better for me.’ Many people have argued this about me, ‘You knew he was an asshole in 2016 and you supported him.’ And I will plead to that. But after eight years of documented information about Trump, there is no defence.” When he watches JD Vance, who once called Trump “America’s Hitler” and is now his running mate, “I see a more clever version of me. I’m watching a brutal train crash unfold for JD Vance.”
Moral equivocation has disastrous personal consequences, Scaramucci warns. “My wife was, like, ‘You’re unrecognisable.’
I was feasting on egocentrism, and it eats at you. And there are many Republicans right now that know what they’re doing is wrong.”
They may delude themselves, he adds, that Trump is their friend. “You’re never his friend. If you think that you are his friend then you don’t understand the relationship. You’re in a transaction with Donald Trump. You’re an object in his field of vision. You’re not a person to Donald Trump.”
Revenge, however, for Trump is highly personal. “For him everything is about ego, money, attention, aggrandisement — but it’s also about burn. ‘You won’t let me into certain country clubs? You’ve shrifted me, as a result of which I’m going to burn you. I’m going to be your president to shove my personality up your ass.’”
Scaramucci never worried that Trump would really try to jail Hillary Clinton. “He’s a different guy now. He’s meaner. He will go hard.” He worries in particular for General Mark Milley, a former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. Trump has threatened televised military treason tribunals for his enemies. “If you were fearful of that, wouldn’t you equivocate and get in line? That’s why he’s doing it.”
I wonder if Scaramucci has made plans to leave the country if Trump wins. “I’m not going anywhere. I’ll be a dissident force, and I will do the best I can to explain to people what he’s doing and how un-American it is. And to the extent that I get persecuted for that,” he shrugs, “that’s part of life.”
The latest polls have Harris trailing at 45% to Trump’s 47%, but Scaramucci believes Trump will lose. “Kamala is going to win the election.” What makes him so sure? “The pollers don’t want to be embarrassed by Trump. They were embarrassed by him in 2016. They were embarrassed by him in 2020. CNN will say, ‘OK, she’s polling 54-48, so we’ll take three points off of her and add them to Donald Trump, because we’ve under-polled him for the last eight years.’ "
His podcast co-presenter doesn’t share his confidence. Katty Kay has closer links to the Democratic Party and has been sounding less optimistic about Harris for weeks. The pair’s on-air chemistry is occasionally flirty — “I think she’s cute,” he says, then panics, “Don’t put that in the story. My wife will cut my dick off” — but what’s most striking is his deference to her authority. When I tell him it’s one of the reasons I listen, he looks thrilled. “OK, good. These women journalists get big-footed by big-mouth men all the time. And she’s an incredibly gifted person.”
Deference is not a quality traditionally associated with Scaramucci, or any Wall Street financier. “Well, those guys have to appear a certain way,” he agrees. “But you know what? That destroys your kids. I had my comeuppance in politics, and I think that made me more human to my kids.” He has three from his first marriage, two from his second, and says he warns them about the perils of self-aggrandisement.
This isn’t to say the old Mooch has vanished entirely. He still shows me a clip of crisp sterling banknotes in his pocket — “When you grow up like me, you don’t know what the hell’s going to happen. You always have to have cash on you!” — and his neediness is still evident when he adds, “But you do love the honesty, right?”
When I ask about helping Harris prep for the debate, he pulls up his notes on his phone to prove it was his idea for her to make fun of the dwindling audiences at Trump rallies. “I told them, if you hit him there, he’s going to go off like a bottle rocket.”
The New Yorker reporter Ryan Lizza, who gave the tape of Scaramucci’s infamous call from the White House to CNN, lost his own job five months later in a #MeToo scandal. “See what he did to me?” His expression is gleeful. “You see how karma is a bitch? Very dishonest, duplicitous guy.” Seconds later the new Scaramucci offers magnanimously, “I don’t like commenting on it” — but he was the one who brought it up.
I’d be sorry to see the back of all his old alpha bombast and needy ego, though, for it’s irresistibly charismatic. It also, I say tentatively, has overtones of Trump. By his own account, their relationship was no less transactional on his side than he claims all Trump’s are. Critics accuse him of using Trump to make himself famous. If patriotism motivates his Damascene attacks, they ask, how come he only turned against his former boss after he was mean about him on Twitter? Freud had a phrase, “the narcissism of small differences”, to explain why the deepest hatreds often exist between people who appear to be very similar.
“The showmanship and the promotion?
“I do see that,” he concedes. “But I don’t see myself with the malevolence that he has. And I’d never do anything to a woman to impugn their personality or predate them.”
Most unlike Trump, Scaramucci has mastered the art of admitting he was wrong. “I’ve had two glaring mistakes. One was Donald Trump, the other was Sam.” This is the entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried, in whose cryptocurrency exchange Scaramucci invested US$10 million ($16.7m) and persuaded many friends to jump on board before it was exposed as a scandalous fraud for which Bankman-Fried was jailed in March for 25 years. A huge bitcoin enthusiast, Scaramucci sold him a 30% stake in his company only two months before it all went wrong.
Having been seduced by one sociopathic liar, how did he fall for another? “If you look at 500 relationships that I’ve had in a very successful career, can you pick out even five that have been a disaster? The problem with me is I’m so high profile that any mistake I make, I’m going to get ripped.”
Investors are getting every penny back, and once the bankruptcy process is complete he plans to visit Bankman-Fried in prison. “I think Sam was psychologically damaged and didn’t have the right moral rectitude. But I have a soft spot for Sam, I like him.” He’s a bit miffed that no one reports how well his business is still doing in bitcoin. “I made a mistake being an investor of Sam’s — but I also got the bitcoin thing very right.” He flashes a self-deprecating grin. “By the way, that won’t be the last mistake. Trust me, there’ll be more.”
He hopes his prediction for the election result won’t be the next. “If he wins, we have to accept it. That’s part of the American democracy.” He doesn’t expect Trump to concede if he loses, and nor does anyone he knows. “I don’t think he’s going to pull the triggers to create a civil war. He’s a convicted felon out on bail. And he’s afraid of jail.”
On November 26 Trump will be sentenced for 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. “So if he gets out on the microphone and says, ‘I want you to kill everybody, I want to have a violent civil war in the country because I lost the election,’ he’s going to jail. As a result of which I think he would hold back on the fomenting of violence.” The most remarkable thing about this opinion is that it counts as contrarian.
If Trump doesn’t concede, couldn’t he contest the result in the courts until after his sentencing — and then incite violence? “That’s the centre of the bell curve view, sure. I don’t think that, but most people I know think that is what will happen.”
Seriously? “Yeah. I’m the contrarian. And I could be wrong. I’ve been wrong about so many things, so we could add that to the list. If you had said to me in 2016 that this is where we would be, I would have never guessed that.”
Written by: Decca Aitkenhead
© The Times of London