Earlier this week, looking for insight into the chaos of Helsinki and its aftermath, I called Anthony Scaramucci. The Mooch may have only endured 10 days in the viper pit known as the West Wing—11 days by his count—before getting fired by the then-new chief of staff, John Kelly, but that’s a lesson he’ll never forget. His short tenure gave him a unique perspective into the Trumpian whirlwind, regarding which he has since adopted the mantle of a battle-tested elder statesman. “You gotta worry a little bit about the country when I’m, like, the total voice of reason, right?” he told me at the start of our conversation. “That’s gotta be scary, right?”
It’s been a year since the Mooch’s abrupt departure. He spoke to me on his cell phone, outside the Madison Avenue office of his hedge fund, SkyBridge Capital, where he has returned after the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS ) blocked its sale to HNA, the enormous Chinese insurance company. The negation of the sale, which would have netted Scaramucci around $100 million, meant that a humbled Mooch would have to subsequently return to work full-time in order to help his company regain its momentum, and possibly position it for another enticing exit. Meanwhile, the Mooch has tried to remain politically relevant from inside the private sector, often embracing the president’s two favorite mediums: cable news and Twitter.
During our conversation, Scaramucci was forthcoming with his diagnoses about Trumpworld, often in his distinctly ribald variety of the Queen’s English. About Helsinki’s failures, Scaramucci was characteristically animated. “His lack of preparation cost him at his press conference,” he told me. “The President told me that he had a great behind-the-scenes meeting with President Putin. My only issue is that he needed to be more prepared for the press conference. When he’s prepared he’s like Michael Jordan.” Scaramucci also questioned the president’s subsequent poorly choreographed backtracking. “He tried to walk it back, but he’s like Jim Carrey in Liar Liar; Donald Trump is Donald Trump starring in the movie Apology Apology.” On Thursday afternoon, Trump announced that he plans to invite Vladimir Putin to Washington. (The White House did not respond to my request for comment.)
Scaramucci may have an occasional proclivity for vulgarity, but he also expressed confidence when it came to his former boss’s political fortunes. Trump’s “not going anywhere,” he said. “The mirage—or the Democratic fantasy—that he’s leaving is not happening.” He then offered up an “axiomatic observation” about Trump. “When you think it’s over, it’s not over,” he said. “O.K.? So it’s never over, O.K.? . . . Anybody that says Trump cannot recover doesn’t remember the John McCain thing"—a reference to Trump’s chilling degradation of McCain’s five and a half years years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam—“where, [Trump said], ‘I like my heroes uncaptured, not captured.‘” The Mooch continued: “I can give you 40 [times] that people told me, ‘It is over,’ and it’s not over. The people who think it’s over are going to be shocked when he gets re-elected.”
According to Scaramucci, Trump’s key priority, post-Helsinki, must be to fix his staffing issues in the West Wing. By that, he means—no surprise—that Kelly has to go, in large part because it’s clear to the Mooch, and to everyone else, that Kelly detests Trump and is as happy as not to see him fail, or is unwilling to work with Trump in such a way that the president can overcome his own worst instincts. (As my colleague Gabriel Sherman reported earlier this week, Kelly telephoned people on Capitol Hill to encourage them to publicly articulate their dissent with the president over his behavior at the summit.) Scaramucci keyed in on one particular example—Trump’s commentary that he didn’t want to prepare for the summit with Putin, because he had effectively been preparing for it his entire life. Scaramucci contended that a genuinely concerned chief of staff would have surreptitiously found a way to prepare the leader of the free world without making it feel like any work at all, thus mitigating the chance of embarrassment. “The reason why the Putin situation didn’t work out super well, or didn’t work out as planned, is due to a lack of preparation,” he said.
In the weeks before the “Surrender Summit,” Mooch said that Kelly should have done what Bannon and Kellyanne Conway did during the campaign, after Trump said he didn’t want to prepare for the debates with Hillary Clinton. “They sat down for lunch with him,” he said. “And they did a long lunch in lieu of debate prep, but there was like a hidden debate prep in the lunch. His staff has to know his personality. He probably doesn’t want to prep for a debate with Hillary Clinton or a summit meeting with Putin. But your staff is supposed to say, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s great. You’re having lunch with me tomorrow, and here’s what we’re gonna say about our intelligence situation when you get onstage. This is my recommendation.’” Scaramucci said it’s the job of the White House staff, and in particular the chief of staff, to figure out a way to do what’s right for a president—even if the president would prefer not to do something.
In the boutique market of Trump influencers, Scaramucci has maintained a dominant position on account of his seemingly umbilical connection to Trump’s id, and for his self-recognized ability to provide rather Trumpian management-consulting services. For instance, Scaramucci told me forcefully that Trump can still “reposition” himself in a few ways. “He needs staff that he trusts, and likes him,” he continued. “It’s a little bit of a Yogi Berra-ism, he needs to be with the people who “like* him, not the people who “like” him but don’t like him. So he would be better served by finding people to work for him that like him.” (Scaramucci noted that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, National Security Adviser John Bolton, new deputy chief of staff, Bill Shine, and National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow all fit this description.) He said Trump “can smell it” when people like him and when they don’t. “You gotta get people on your staff that like you,” he said. “That will make you like them, or trust them more.”
He said that after Trump assembles a group that serves him well, his team has to get to him early in the morning, when he is still in the residence “in his boxers,” on the phone, and lay out for him “the 15 things that I’m doing for you today” that “will calm him down,” and he won’t go off on an early-morning tweetstorm that can throw the whole agenda. Then, the Mooch continued, Trump’s “like, ‘O.K., I’m gonna have a good day, and these guys have got their shit together, and they’re doing stuff for me,’ and all of a sudden, his tweeting becomes more strategic and less damaging.” He said Trump has to get rid of what he calls the “November 9th people” that glommed on to Trump after he won the election. He said if Trump does “these things,” he’s going to “fix the problem,” because “whether you like this guy or don’t like this guy,” he’s got “great instincts.”
Like his former boss, the Mooch seems invigorated by media attention, good or bad. His West Wing flameout only elevated his profile. He’s a regular as a cable-news talking head. He wrote a sane and rational opinion column in the Financial Times. He’s writing a book about the lessons he learned working for Trump. He was rumored to be shopping a television show with Michael Avenatti, the ubiquitous attorney for Stormy Daniels. While we’re talking, a friend greets him on the street. He’s going to follow up with an e-mail. “Your little Italian friend—I’m actually like a quasi-celebrity now at this point,” he said. A couple people wave at him. “It’s fucking ridiculous, right?” Another guy walks by him and calls him “a fucking asshole.” He continued, “Look at him. I’ve got people waving. This guy’s nuts. He’s getting his phone out now. Let’s see what he’s gonna do now. Maybe he’s gonna come back and try to punch me or something. People are fucking crazy, but what the hell? I mean, you know—what the hell? So far, I haven’t been kicked out of a restaurant, though, so that’s good.”
