Anthony Scaramucci is asleep on a sofa when I arrive at his colonial-style villa on Long Island. In an election news cycle that would break just about anyone, the man who was fired by Donald Trump from his position as presidential communications director after just 10 days (a period of time now known in Washington as “a Scaramucci”) is exhausted.
As well he might be. In between loudly plotting revenge on his former boss and doing everything he can to prevent the “big baby” from winning the White House again, “the Mooch” is running his asset-management company (which courted ruin after entering into business with the disgraced entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried) and evangelizing on cryptocurrency.
Still, he bounces up, apologizes and puts on a suit, going into the bathroom — where even the paper hand towels are monogrammed — to fix his buoyant, mahogany-dyed hair and reappearing moments later as the loquacious Italian-American investment manager who, at 60, has become a master of reinvention.
In his latest role, this lifelong Republican is pitching himself as a pugilistic support act for the Democratic presidential nominee. “I’m going to vote for Biden, I’m going to advocate for Biden, I’m going to raise money for Biden. I’ve given money to the campaign and I’ll work for Biden,” he says. “I’m a patriot first, partisan second.”
Scaramucci thinks about 40 disenchanted former senior members of the Trump administration, including the former vice president Mike Pence but excluding the generals, will eventually volunteer to help the Biden campaign, or at least publicly denounce Trump together. Biden hasn’t approached them officially but Scaramucci thinks he will.
“The Biden campaign was reluctant to come to people like us because they don’t want to upset that progressive left,” he says. Now, he says, it is changing. “It’s all hands on deck.”
A second Trump term would be far more extreme than the first, he warns. In 2016 there was chaos, with unqualified or eccentric people brought in and fired with little compunction (Scaramucci included). Now it would be a march towards authoritarianism, he believes.
“I’m a patriot first, partisan second.”
“I don’t see him winning,” he says. “But by the way, if he wins, it’s going to be really bad for the country. He said he’s going after his enemies … They’re making lists of people they dislike and they’re going to use the legal system, the justice department and the FBI to go after these people.”
Scaramucci himself will be among the targets, he says. And he’s very aware that he put himself in that position.
Brought up in a hard-working, hardscrabble household on Long Island, he went to Tufts University and then Harvard, before making a fortune on Wall Street. He took the job at the White House in 2017 despite his misgivings about Trump because his “ego” took over.
“It was hubris,” he says. “I’m going to go from being an entrepreneur, being a business executive. I’m going to go work for the American president. Why? Because it fits my ego, it fits my narrative of life. But it’s a round peg in a square hole.”
His wife, Deidre, wasn’t impressed, especially when he missed the birth of their second child to travel with Trump on Air Force One. “She hates Trump almost as much as [his wife] Melania hates him,” Scaramucci says.
According to his latest book, From Wall Street to the White House and Back: The Scaramucci Guide to Unbreakable Resilience, which came out on May 21, Scaramucci wanted to impress his mum by working for the president. It didn’t go so well. He was sacked 10 days into the job after he phoned a reporter at The New Yorker and told them that Trump’s chief of staff, Reince Priebus, was a “paranoid schizophrenic” and that Steve Bannon, the president’s chief strategist, was “trying to suck [his] own c**k” by building his own brand on Trump’s coattails. The media, particularly the late-night shows, pounced.
“I got thrown out [of the White House] onto Pennsylvania Avenue on my ass, then rolled in margarita salt so the cuts and bruises stung as much as possible,” he writes in the book.
For two years afterwards, he defended his former boss on television, making the case that the Trump administration wasn’t as bad as the Democrats made out. Then, in 2019, he criticised Trump in an interview and the former president — who Scaramucci says demands absolute loyalty — turned against him.
Since then, Scaramucci has come out swinging, publicly denouncing Trump as a would-be authoritarian and an “orange wrecking ball” who wears “high-heeled shoes”. He also presents one podcast where he interviews people about books (he’s an obsessive reader whose new memoir-cum-self-help tome quotes everyone from Marcus Aurelius to Winston Churchill), as well as co-hosting a second one, The Rest Is Politics: US, with the BBC’s Katty Kay.
The rest of the time, he is back on Wall Street, running his asset management firm, with varying degrees of success. In 2021, he started working with Bankman-Fried, an investor once known as the “poster boy for crypto”, to whom he sold a 30 percent stake in his company. By 2022, he realized the financial health of FTX, Bankman-Fried’s company, “was about as good as Donald J Trump’s actual health”.
In March, Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in jail for defrauding customers and investors.
Scaramucci made a huge early bet on cryptocurrency. In 2022, when its value started falling dramatically, the New York Post published a collage showing a pouting Mooch sitting on a sinking boat filled with bitcoin. He had it printed out and hung it on his wall.
Late last year, when crypto investments recovered, the newspaper published a new version of the picture: Scaramucci sailing merrily through a sea of bitcoin with the name of his firm emblazoned on the sail. For now, he’s reinvented himself again.
“When you are a high-profile person, you fail ingloriously, you fail infamously,” he says. “Then there’s a story about how you pick yourself up, or not. My attitude is: stay in the game.”
Louise Callaghan is the multi-award-winning Middle East correspondent for The Sunday Times. She lives in Istanbul and reports from Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia
