Anthony Scaramucci knows Donald Trump better than most. The former financier moved in a similar social scene to Trump in New York before either man entered politics. He later joined Trump’s campaign during the 2016 presidential election, and after Trump’s victory, was appointed to the transition team to prepare for power. Scaramucci later became the director of communications in Trump’s White House for just ten days before being fired for criticising his colleagues in an interview he thought was off-the-record.
Now, Scaramucci is an open critic of his former boss, as well as a host on the Rest is Politics: US podcast. He spoke to our US Correspondent Freddie Hayward about the election and what a victorious Trump would do in power.
Freddie Hayward: What do you think will happen on election day?
Anthony Scaramucci: I think it’s too close to call. Anybody that tells you they know is wrong. I’m surprised that it’s this close. I’m surprised that given the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff [Gen. Mark A. Milley] called Trump a fascist and his White House chief of staff [Gen. John Kelly] called him a fascist it’s this close. This tells you where the cultural split is in the country and so it’s hard for me to understand why Harris is not beating his brains in. Having said that, I like three things about her campaign.
Number one, when she started, it looked like there was only one option for her to become the president: to win the Blue Wall, which is Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. But since then, she’s now probably tied in North Carolina. She’s probably tied in Pennsylvania. She’s up in Michigan and up in Wisconsin, and she’s probably down a little bit in Nevada. She has a seven-state play, as opposed to before, where it was a much narrower window. The other thing you have to remember is she’s relying on the women’s vote. Black women go to the polls with a 90 per cent turnout. White women go to the polls. Who doesn’t go to the polls? Black men and younger white men. So the second thing that I like is that she’s relying on people that consistently vote. Whereas Trump is relying on people who have never voted or don’t really vote.
And then the third thing is she has $1.5bn. I like that for several reasons, Freddie. Number one, she can spend that in the seven swing-states. But let me tell you something I’ve learned in politics: if Freddie Hayward goes onto a website “Scaramucci for dogcatcher” and gives me $1, it means he’s showing up to vote for me. The magnitude of the money that she’s raised, a lot of it, believe it or not, is in small donations. And so that’s a good sign for her, because those people actually show up and vote. But right now they have to define her, they have to defend her, and they have to attack him. Define, defend and attack.
I like their campaign better than the 2016 Clinton campaign. Remember I was on the Trump campaign in 2016. The Clinton campaign was nowhere; Harris is everywhere.
Is the Democrats’ strategy similar to 2016, in that the campaign is relying on Trump’s downsides instead of their own agenda?
People have criticised Harris for not giving this full-throated Obama-like vision of where she wants to take the country. So, yes, that point is somewhat justified. But talking objectively, she started on 21 July. She didn’t start on 1 June. She didn’t start on 1 January. She’s got to go from 21 July to consolidating the party, getting the delegates, preparing for the convention, preparing for the debate. She has to merge her team with Biden’s election team and then she ultimately brings in some Obama people to help her run the campaign. So it’s as if she’s doing an M&A transaction at the same time as running for president. So yeah, I would say that those criticisms are all founded. But the flip side of it is they didn’t really give her a lot of runway to define herself.
But she’s present. Hillary wasn’t present. She didn’t go to Wisconsin. She went one time to Pennsylvania. I’m not exactly sure what she was doing during that campaign. We couldn’t find her anywhere. The Harris team is present. Obama’s out there with her. I did some door knocking for Harris – I was with the Democratic Black Caucus in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. They’re going to turn out and vote for her.
It seems to me that it’s so close in part because the country is so polarized. But it also seems that Harris’s message is the worst one to counter Trump’s appeal. She spends all her time quoting Goldman Sachs and saying that she’s got Nobel laureates supporting her. She is saying the establishment back me, therefore you should trust me, even though, for eight years now, people have shown they are pissed off with the establishment. What do you think?
Let me push back for a second. I see that argument. But she’s got a narrow window to try to make a compelling case, and when they look at the focus groups, she’s going for the people in the middle. If you were sitting in a campaign meeting, they would say: our people are going to vote for us, his people are going to vote for him, and there’s a sliver of people who were former Republicans that really disdain Trump, and can we win those people over to us. They think that the way to do that is with the help of people like Liz Cheney and people like myself. Now that may be the wrong approach. Maybe there’ll be three or four per cent of the populace that are upset about that and won’t vote for her, but they’ve made the decision that those people have nowhere to go, and they hate Trump, and so they’ll show up for her. Now again, we won’t know whether that will work until after the election.
There’s one thing that a lot of people are not focused on, which I do think is a game-changer for the Trump campaign. We had Cambridge Analytica in 2016. This was a data assembly system where we were able to go onto Facebook and identify the marginal voter or the undecided voter, and then we could drop love-bombs on them. That worked. This was eight years ago, so Facebook was a little bit more influential than it is today. Now Cambridge Analytica has been dismantled. Nobody has that skill set anymore. Over the last eight years, the power of social media has become more diffuse. And so Trump doesn’t have that tool, which was very effective for him.
How well do you know Trump? How much time you spent with him?
I mean, listen, for two decades, I was a smaller figure in New York, he was a bigger figure in New York, but we were operating in the same circles. We were in the Met or the Yankee’s owner box. We went to charity fundraisers together. Trump and I did two fundraisers for Mitt Romney in his apartment back in 2012. I had a relationship with him because I worked for CNBC, the American Business Channel, while Trump was at NBC, doing the Apprentice and so I went to the Apprentice parties. How well do I know? I don’t really know him. I’m not going to lie to you. Anybody that tells you they’re friends with Donald Trump is misjudging the relationship. He has no friends. You might interact with him, but he’s so transactional that you’re actually not his friend. He’ll run you over with a car. He can be very charming up close. Being very empirical, very objective, there’s a good Trump and there’s a bad Trump. The good Trump is quite conversational. The bad Trump is when he wants to be the most powerful person in the world and doesn’t understand why the presidency doesn’t have more power. The bad Trump is when he’s praising Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Putin, you know?
This is the problem with Trump. This is why he has such strong support. Because there’s a culture war going on in the country. There’s a populist narrative in the country that many people support. People feel left out of the system, and they want the system to be broken down.
But when you ask: do I know Trump? I mean, I did 71 stops with him on the campaign. I did work in the White House. It was brief, but I was also on the executive transition team. I was one of 16 people. I sat in lots of meetings with him. He would call me blindly and ask my opinion of things while we were campaigning.
Would you agree with his former chief of staff John Kelly that he’s a fascist?
He’s definitely a fascist. But define what a fascist is. He speaks about non-white immigrants in the United States in a dehumanising way. He talks about these people the way the National Socialists talked about the Jews in the 1930s.
When somebody says to the Fox News host, “I am going to engage the American military to go after my political adversaries,” and then the Fox News host says, “You’re kidding about that, right?” And he says: “No, no, I’m very serious about that.” Is that fascism? When somebody says that they’re going to deport 15 million people, and [they’re] going to [use] armoured vehicles with SWAT teams and have concentration camps. Is that fascism? I mean, you gotta listen to his words, not mine.
My issue is: should an American presidential candidate have an enemies list? I’m on the list. He says he’s going to go after every person on his enemies list. He’s going to have treason tribunals, and he would like Mark Milley put in an electric chair. Those are his words. They’re not my words. Go look them up. I’m not making this up. So is that fascism? It feels like fascism to me.
Do you think Elon Musk will get a job if Trump wins?
I think so, sure, absolutely. Trump is a star-f**ker. Elon Musk is one of the richest people in the world, if not the richest. By the way, I like Elon. I don’t have a problem with Elon. He’s an entrepreneur. I think he’s misguided with Trump. Everyone gets burned with Trump. It’s a merry-go-round. First of all, everyone comes in disliking him. Kellyanne Conway, Mike Pompeo, Anthony Scaramucci, John Kelly. Then we try to like him, and then we find out that it’s impossible to like him, and we go back to disliking him. And so JD Vance hated him at first. He called him Hitler. Now he’s working with him and pretending to like him. But before it’s over, he’s going to f**king hate him. It’s just the way it works. It’s the Trump rotisserie.
What do you think Trump’s state of mind will be after the election if he wins?
Let me tell you the two ways it could go. On the positive side, he’s a huge name-dropper and status-seeker. So he may go for big names in his administration, the biggest names he can get. And those would be people like [former house speaker] Kevin McCarthy. It would be some business executives like [billionaire hedge fund manager and Trump donor] John Paulson and [hedge fund manager and Trump donor] Scott Bessent. If he goes in that direction, you could be in a scenario where he really just wants to go play golf. He wanted to win for vengeance and so he lets other people run the government.
That’s one way he could go. The more malicious way that he could go is that he uses [the far-right blueprint for power created by think-tank the Heritage Foundation, known as] Project 2025 and he uses the alt-right conservative minions that are associated with that. He tries to fire 50,000 people in the government. He tries to go after and demolish the institutions that create the checks and balances in the system. And then he tries to figure out a way to stay in power, saying that his election in 2020 was stolen from him, and so he has the right to run again. And then he uses his lackeys on the Supreme Court and some of the people in the government to try to manipulate the laws. He’s got huge, broad swaths of immunity now after it was widened by the Supreme Court [in June]. For example, what Richard Nixon did in the 1970s would be fine under the new immunity ruling.
Again, I’m an objective person. I’m not saying Trump’s going full Nazi the day after he gets elected. He could do that, but because I know his personality I think he could also go in this other direction. We’ll have to see what happens if he loses. There’s a group of people that says that he’s going to foment an insurrection and cause an American civil war. I don’t think that that’s going to happen. I do know Trump well enough [to know] that he wants to avoid jail. I don’t think at age 78 he’s going to get up there and say, “Attack the Capitol, shoot left-leaning people in your neighbourhood, let’s arm ourselves, I need to take power.”
Because on 26 November he will be sentenced in New York for 34 felonies. Now I predict that if he wins the election, they’ll suspend his sentence. They’re not going to put him in jail as he’s going to be the president. If he loses the election and he goes calmly and peacefully again, I believe they’re not going to put him in jail. They’ll suspend his sentence. I don’t see members of the American government putting a former president in jail. If he goes for the fomenting of an insurrection and civil war and violence and gun shooting in the streets option, he’s going to jail. And I think he knows that and I think he’s been told that. I don’t think he will go full ballistic.
Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
[See also: The spectre of American fascism]
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