HIt was a flame that burned twice as bright and half the time. Anthony Scaramucci’s tenure at the Donald Trump White House lasted only 11 days, which may be some kind of record. But it was a blinding incandescent cameo that removed the scales from his eyes.
Many officials fired by Trump have sought what could be considered a moral decontamination, a purge of the soul, ostensibly turning against them. But few have done so with the ferocity of the man nicknamed “The Mooch”, who in the space of a half-hour FaceTime interview calls the President of the United States “very crazy”, “low life”, “full-blown racist “,” son of a bitch “,” maniacally narcissistic “and” out of his rocker “.
Scaramucci is as New York as skyscrapers, subways, and Sinatra. I knew Trump from the Big Apple. “When you were sitting in the room with him 10 years ago, he is an arrogant, engrossed but funny person and a narrator and sometimes very shameless and charming, and you would enjoy his personality, frankly, and he had a good sense of humor, “he says. Scaramucci, at his home in Southampton, Long Island, wears a Superman T-shirt and the cable news is played on a large wall-mounted television.
“Now you will find him more fragile, defensive and self-exclaiming when he is just throwing these long sentences. He’s having a conversation with himself and it’s a rationalization of who he is and what he’s doing, and he’s trying to explain to everyone that he knows everything, he has it all figured out, and that’s a great tragedy in itself because nobody has it all. discovered “.
Scaramucci, a Harvard Law School graduate and former Goldman Sachs banker, founded the global hedge fund SkyBridge Capital in 2005. Three years ago, next week, on July 21, 2017, Trump hired him as director of communications, despite objections from the press secretary. Sean Spicer, who resigned in protest, and Chief of Staff Reince Priebus.
Maureen Dowd, columnist for the New York Times, opined that Trump had found an ideal courtier: “A wealthy brother from Manhattan with a wolfish smile and an ingenious hairstyle that will say anything and change any position. An extraordinary developer and master marketer who doesn’t mind pushing a bad product, and probably sees it as more fun. ”
This wolf from Wall Street delivered an inaugural press conference with confidence and arrogance, culminating in an aerial kiss to the White House press corps. His new boss was not impressed.
Scaramucci says: “In my 11 days, the great irony was that some people said that my press conference was well run and well executed, but Trump was not in love with it, indicating that he would end up having a problem with him because he did not it is one to allow anyone else in that scenario.
“A cabinet official told me that there are two things that, if he tells you, you know you are in trouble: one, you are becoming more famous than I am; or two, you are getting too much attention. That’s like your near-death experience. He said to [FBI Director James] Comey, you’re getting more famous than I am, and then, a week later, he was fired. “
But during that brief period in the west wing, Scaramucci took a close look at the most powerful man in the world. “My observation was, OK, he is not listening, and good leadership requires delegation and listening, and he is too defensive and insecure to really get input,” he says.
“I discovered that when I was reporting it, I had to put photos of him in the briefing. When I put the photos in, it was a good sign, and when I didn’t put the photos, you couldn’t get him to focus on that.
Here is the bad news, however. Even if you could get him to focus on that, he wouldn’t listen to you anyway because he’s so maniacally narcissistic. He wants to freeze everyone around him and then he wants to continue and win the presidency anyway in this nihilistic rampage and show everyone: “Look, I eliminated everyone with napalm and didn’t need any of them.” That is total narcissism. “
Scaramucci was fired on July 31, 2017 after giving an impromptu interview to New Yorker magazine and making derogatory statements about White House officials, including Priebus and chief strategist Steve Bannon, who have already left.
“I was puzzled by the dismissal, but listen, this is not the first time I have been fired, I am a bit rogue, I am an entrepreneur,” recalls Scaramucci. “I made a mistake. I did something wrong. I am responsible for my mistakes.”
If he hadn’t been fired, wouldn’t he have resigned now, as the Trump administration staggered from disaster to disgrace? “I don’t want to pretend what I would have done because I would tell you this as a warning story about the ego. When you have your ego involved in something, you do things that are irrational and your emotions increase and your intelligence decreases.
“I was completely invested in getting rid of Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus. I would like to think that I would have stayed in principle during the Charlottesville situation [when Trump drew equivalence between white nationalists and anti-fascists] because that was a week after I left. I thought that was ridiculous.
“Even if I didn’t stick with it in principle, let’s say I was in a moral misconception seen in many of these people working for President Trump or trying to justify themselves through cognitive distance, ‘If I wasn’t here, it would be worse.” and all the things they say to themselves: they would have fired me anyway.
“It may not have been 15 or 20 days because my personality is not adequate for that of President Trump. I am an entrepreneur. I am an independent thinker. He doesn’t like iconoclastic or independent thinking, so I don’t think it would have lasted long. But listen, the universe and the good Lord work in very strange ways: he saved my butt.
“As I said to Trump when we were still friends, after I was fired, he called me and asked how I was doing, and I said, ‘Relax, you’ve made me as famous as Melania and Ivanka and I didn’t have to. sleep with you or be your daughter, so I will be totally fine, you will never have to worry about me. I know how to roll with the punches. “
But Scaramucci compares what happened after being the character of Tim Robbins in the movie The Shawshank Redemption, escaping from prison by throwing himself through a sewer pipe and eventually spit out.
“If you’ve never experienced being on the front page of a tabloid when your personal life is being destroyed and you’re being disfigured as a human being and a lot of lies are being told about you, and then they’re lighting you up … that’s The Shawshank Redemption, because you have to go through that pipe of humiliation and shame and you are being disfigured.
“There are people who don’t even know who is forming a negative opinion of you based on these pieces of information without really getting the full context or texture of their personality. You learn to live with him and you also learn to use your sense of humor and your ground wires in life to just keep going.
“I don’t think about it much today, but I’ll say this: it made me a better person. It made me more psychologically aware. I fired Trump in August 2019; I was loyal to him for two years after my departure. Someone said to me, ‘Well, you turned on Trump. He’s the same guy he was in 2015, so why did you criticize him? You are doing exactly the same.
“I looked at the person and said, ‘Well, he may be the same guy, but I’m not the same guy. I’m a different person today than I was in 2015 or 2017. I think I have a lot more psychological awareness and a much deeper understanding of what’s going on, and remember, we are products of our environment.
“We grow in a certain context, with certain prejudices and prejudices, and sometimes shocking experiences are needed to wake him up about the realities of other people and what they are dealing with.”
Scaramucci, who is of Italian descent, decided to speak when Trump attacked four Democratic congressmen of color known as “the Squad” and suggested that they should “return” to their countries, even though they are all Americans.
“I said ‘OK, that’s enough for me and I can’t be affiliated with this anymore’, I’m not going to deny my personal integrity and my life story to support this man. I am not going to make the mistakes that these other people are making: “Well, he is a Republican, they are judges, they are political.” No, the guy sucks and he’s racist and he’s an American nativist. “
As a result, Scaramucci, who participated in a recent BBC Three documentary, Trump in Tweets, ended up in a Twitter fight with the president who got out of control. “Once he attacked my wife, I took off my gloves because you cannot attack my family members or my wife. He knew that my wife and I were having marital problems in 2017 and he still chased her in the presidential Twitter feed, so he has little life. Once he did that, then I started to gut him. “
Trump’s online bullying had consequences in the real world. Scaramucci says: “I had people take pictures of my front door, saying that they were going to go through the front door and hurt my family. I had a patrol car outside my house because the threat seemed legitimate and the FBI was working on it. But that is the America we live in now. If you have a political opinion in America now, you have to have that kind of nonsense. “
As documented by the BBC show, Trump’s ability to arm Twitter aided him with the White House in 2016, but, Scaramucci believes, will lead to defeat in November. “You are receiving his total impetuousness and his madness and his cruelty, and I think it is very bad. History will reflect it badly and it will be its ruin.
“It will be destroyed. It is not even close to how bad it is going to be destroyed. Their ardent support is weakening, and by November, more than 200,000 people will be killed by the coronavirus. This is not 2016, where it is an unknown entity and you have this very polarizing figure, Hillary Clinton. He also has guys like me who are Republicans who are going to work to strip 3 to 5% of Republicans. “
Having voted for Trump in 2016, Scaramucci will vote for his opponent, Joe Biden, in November 2020 and believes that the long national nightmare will soon end. “I always tell people that 120 days is, like 500 years in Trump World, but he is on a downward trajectory and he is doing something, because I know the son of a bitch well, he is doing something that I find fascinating. Subconsciously it is detonating itself.
“He is doing things every day that are literally unraveling his political career and that is the hidden secret, the most vulnerable part of a narcissist. They have a very self-destructive streak in their personalities. Now he has his hand on the detonator car.
Trump in Tweets from BBC Three Now Available on BBC iPlayer in the UK
