Anthony Scaramucci on Trump, Wall Street and America’s Economic Anger

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We're already having fun with Anthony Scaramucci. He's the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge. He's the co-host of the podcast, The Rest of Politics. He also briefly served, okay, 10 days or 11 days?

There's a little debate there.

There's some serious debate here.

Your book says 11. You say 11.

You're hurting my feelings.

Okay.

I mean, I got fired on the 11th day. It's a big day for me.

Okay.

Don't chip me at a 9.1% of my federal career.

So it's 11?

Yeah.

And by the way, when Trump is trolling me on Twitter and calling me a total loser and all that type of stuff, he says 11. I think he should be the official scorer on that, don't you? If you start on the 21st and you work a full day on the 31st, count the days.

Yeah.

It's 11 days. You don't go 31 minus 21.

I did that. I said 11. I'm just telling you.

You guys work at Bloomberg. Tell the BBC, okay?

That's all I'm going to say.

No, no, the BBC is locked in at the 10-day mark. I actually went to them and tried to make a forcible statement. And they insist that I'm only there for 10 days. It hurts my feelings.

Your book is called All the Wrong Moves, and it really gets into why we saw the rise of Donald Trump. Was being in the White House for you a wrong move? Do you consider it a wrong move as you look back?

Well, I would say campaigning for Donald Trump. I was with Jeb Bush, Jeb dropping out of the race, and me accepting the offer from then-candidate Trump to go work for him. was a colossal mistake, probably the biggest mistake until I made the bigger mistake of going to work inside the White House. So I would say that they were graduating and exponentially bigger mistakes.

But didn't feel like a mistake at the time or did it?

Well, by 24 hours into it, it started to feel like a mistake because, you know, it was a crazy situation and there was heavy levels of dysfunctionality. And, you know, I'm taking you back nine years now, but Priebus and Bannon.

And They were not on your side. No, no.

They hated my guts.

Yeah. Yeah.

But you know, the funny thing about Breibus, he should just tell you that he hates your guts. You know, he doesn't have to like act like Richie Cunningham.

Well, you talk about being like, I'm out there in front and like, I lay it out.

No, I said, I'm a front stabber. I'm not a backstabber. You know, I'll tell you to your face. Come on. I'm a New Yorker. You guys are here in New York.

Listen, we all have visited the white house. We have a feel. We see it. We see the pictures. We see the president coming out and making, take us inside the white house. Your first day, your second day, and what that was like. And I understand under President Trump and his.

Administration, they were different. You have to remember, I had friends of mine that worked for President Clinton. I had a relationship with President Obama. So I had been out of the White House for 30 years. And in the Oval Office, the Roosevelt Room, I had been in the Navy mess. I had never been to the residence. So the first time I was in the residence was when I worked in the White House for President Trump. But it's a small place.

You know that.

It's not that big. The West Room... building isn't that big. The West Wing offices are not big. The Oval itself is not that big. Moreover, the President's study is probably smaller than anything that was at Trump Tower for Donald Trump. But it is a magisterial historic place, and it's very well preserved. And there's a White Historical Association, which I did get familiar with in that short period of time.

And the Truman Renovation, prior to the recent Trump renovations, was unbelievably necessary. People don't remember that, but the entire White House was gutted, and a steel frame was put in, and the place was rebuilt. And thank God for that, because it was really falling apart. But listen, I'll tell you a human story about the president, though, because I know I'm at odds with him, but this is a human story. First day I was with him, after I did my press conference, we were sitting in the Oval Office together alone. It was just the two of us.

And I laughed, and I said to him, you know, we're two New Yorkers. You're from Queens. I'm from Nassau County. can you believe you're behind the Resolute Desk and I'm sitting here? And he said something very human. He said, you know, first time I got here, I was very unnerved by it. I was sitting here saying, okay, I'm actually the president. And then the phone was ringing. He picked up the phone. It was White House protocol. And he said, Mr. President, you've got a head of state coming and you're going to meet Prime Minister Theresa May at the North Portico. And The president looked at me and said, I had no idea where the North portico was.

You know what I mean? He was, he was a very honest and very human moment, which you don't often see with the president.

You know, the, the last time you and I spoke was, I believe when your memoir came out 2018, it was called Trump, the blue collar president.

Yeah.

In that book, you wrote that I believe we have a real opportunity in a Trump presidency to change things dramatically for the good. We might never have a president again who can move intractable barriers and the way he does. It was a very complimentary portrait of the president. It was written after your time at the White House.

Yeah, I certainly didn't want to be that baby or play the victim after I got fired. I was very supportive of the president up until about August of 2019. That book, if you go back and read it, I think it stands the test of time. And it's a good corollary to this book, because what I explained in the book is that we have a crisis of wages for a very large group of people in the United States that we've sort of left a large group of people, blue collar workers, et cetera, out. You know, we have an economically aspirational society for many. And certainly for my blue collar family, we felt economically aspirational. But if you look at the data, there's about 20 to 25% of the people now that feel economically desperational. And so the

message of blue collar president was he has the ability to cross over. He could be a postpartisan president. He could be a, transformative president. He could help get deals done to bring that community back into the social contract of America, but that didn't happen. But he had the potential to do that.

What happened for you that changed your view on him? What was it?

Well, I mean, there was a number of different things, but the main one, I was on the Bill Moore show actually defending him. I thought I was defending him. Catherine Rampell, I don't know if you ever interviewed her, but she was on the show with me. She turned to me and said, well, what about the squad? And so for your listeners and viewers, what is the squad?

It's four women that are in the House of Representatives. They're pretty much hard left leaning. He said that they should go back to the countries they originally came from. Three of them are born in the United States. One is a naturalized citizen. That's American nativism. That's a form of racism. So Catherine asked me on a live television show, well, you're defending the president. What do you think of the remarks about the squad? I said, listen, I don't like them.

My Italian-American grandmother was told that. In the 1920s, it broke her heart. She used to talk about it to us in the 1960s and 70s. And I wish he wouldn't talk like that. That's a form of nativism. It's a form of racism. He's the American president. Well, Bill Maher said to me, he's going to attack you tomorrow.

I said, there's no way. I was defending him. He said, ah, you were seven for eight for him. You got to go 13 for 10. I said, he's not watching your show. He goes, what are you, an idiot? Stormy Daniels was on the show tonight. That was his first guest.

He was watching.

And so he was watching. And he started blasting me the next day. I'm a New Yorker. So I started blasting back. And then he blasted me again, and I blasted him. Then he started attacking my wife. And so he knew that Deirdre and I were going through a personal relationship crisis when I was in the White House.

We had a divorce paperwork put together. Thank God we reconciled our marriage because we love each other. But it was a bridge too far for me. He's capable of doing things that are way outside the standard deviation of what's normal or an American president. I had given him millions of dollars. I'd supported him. And you're going after my wife. You know, I've got a problem at home that I'm trying to repair. It's just a bridge too far for me. And I said, okay, this guy's not the type of leader that should be the president of the United States. And so I spoke out against him.

I was probably one of the first people that was an aide or an assistant to the president. There are many now, not just me, that try to tell people how dangerous he is. But that's what happened. That's the origin of me saying, hey, No mas. That's not cool.

What happened, though, to the contract, in your view, that Donald Trump made while on the campaign trail, certainly the first time around, in saying, I'm going to bring more of you people into the economy. I'm going to help those of you who feel like both Democrats and Republicans maybe have left you behind in some ways.

That was the blueprint for blue-collar presidency. So there were so many different things he could have done to do that.

But why didn't he? That's my question. I understand the promises that he made.

He's a distracted guy. He'll stay on a thing and then he moves to another thing very quickly. We're supposedly having infrastructure weak in the first term every week. It never materialized. I think the tax cuts that got put through in 2017, which the conservative, more traditional Republicans like Paul Ryan wanted those tax cuts and also the SALT deduction, which hurt places like New York and blue States. I think that hurt his, uh, standing with the Democrats, frankly.

And then if you remember, he said, S H I T whole countries. And as he was trying to put together the immigration package and these things started to unwind on him, uh, and you had traditional Republicans in there that were indifferent to that cause. If we're being honest to traditional Republicans in Trump one, probably protected the country and the world from the tariffs, bellicose of rhetoric against NATO, potential trade war with Canada. The guardrails, right? All those things were things that were likely to have had happened in Trump 1, had he had this level of personnel.

The Trump 2 personnel in Trump won, you would see that. But the Republicans also prevented some of the stuff that we're talking about in terms of bringing those people back into the integration of the economy.

You talk Republicans. A lot of the Republicans are the personnel that are allowing things to happen. And I think it's fair to say.

They're not traditional Republicans, though. The Republicans of Mitt Romney and John McCain and the Republicans of Adam Kissinger and Paul Ryan and General John Kelly, they're long gone from the party. This was a— you want to talk about a decapitation— You know, we have a decapitation strike in Iran, but the first decapitation strike for Donald Trump was removing senior Republican establishment leadership from the Republican Party. This was an M & A, and he installed MAGA and the Heritage Foundation.

They call themselves Republicans, but they're not the Republicans I grew up with.

I guess my question, we only have a minute. We're going to come back and talk some more, Anthony. But, like, who are these Americans? Who are these leaders that I think it's safe to say, and we've done a lot of reporting about... you know, various individuals who are in this administration and the money that they're making based on policies.

And it's, it's, it just feels like we didn't, we didn't drain the swamp.

Well, you know, let me tell you under Donald Trump.

Is not 30 seconds.

And we're going to bring you back on.

On, under Donald Trump. It's not a swamp. It is a gold plated hot tub.

Okay.

I mean, when you think about it, it's very high level, open-faced, shameless activity. to self-enriched people. And I think it's disgusting. And I do think they'll be held accountable, though. I don't think they can get away with it. I mean, he can pardon his family members and pardon himself, but there's a whole big atomic blast there.

We're going to come back with Anthony Scaramucci, founder and managing partner of Skybridge. His book, All the Wrong Moves, How Three Catastrophic Decisions Led to the Rise of Trump. We'll get into that and also the way forward. We might even squeeze in a little talk about markets, maybe even some crypto. We're coming back on Bloomberg Business Week Daily.

You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Tim Stenevek on Bloomberg Radio.

I want to get right back to Anthony Scaramucci.

He joins us now.

He's founder and managing partner of Skybridge. He's the host of the podcast, The Rest Is Politics. course, former White House communications director to his new book, All the Wrong Moves, How Three Catastrophic Decisions Led to the Rise of Trump. You know, it's interesting. We were talking about your previous book, your memoir, Trump, the Blue Collar President. And I know as preparing for this, after reading this, I did go back and look at that book. And you're right. There's a lot of connection to what you talk about growing up on Long Island, your working class background. And And then you get into more detail in the first part of your book here, the catastrophic, what you call the three catastrophic decisions that led to the rise of Trump.

I want to talk about some of those decisions now. Let's talk a little bit about China and the World Trade Organization, because you say a lot of it comes from that.

Well, OK, so you have to step back and you have to see where America was at that time. The Berlin Wall has fallen down. Francis Fukuyama said the end of history. We put budgetary guardrails together between Bush one and Clinton. that are leading America to a budget surplus. Everybody knows we printed a $ 200- plus billion surplus at the end of 2000, but now we're in November of 1999.

China wants permanent status in the World Trade Organization. American business leaders want to give it to them. We see at that time, and I write the first chapter, I got this wrong. I saw a Chinese market opening. I saw an opportunity for us to sell goods and services to 1.3 billion people, as did the Fortune 100 CEOs.

As did Wall Street.

You're not the only one who got this wrong.

I'm just going to say, I was at the Wall Street Journal and kind of the lead up to it. We actually, you know, created a show, the Asian Wall Street Journal over in Hong Kong. Everybody was clamoring to push open. Everybody wanted access to that market. I mean, I don't think there was any way to stop that.

But that market didn't open. That market didn't open, and that's what we got wrong.

But I think the concept was that people thought, okay, if we have a presence, if you have the Western presence and all these multinational companies over in China, they will change. I think they really thought the government was going to change.

I write all about that in the book. There was one person.

And that was the belief.

Because I looked through tons of interviews, tons of Wall Street Journal articles and research for the book. There was one person who said it's not going to work. And I give her a lot of credit for that. That was Nancy Pelosi. And she got on C-SPAN. There was more than one C-SPAN speech. She was warning about it's a one-party system. We're taking a leap that they're going to open their system politically. They had just had the Tiananmen Square crisis in 1989, and they had a lot of anti-libertarian crackdowns in the country. And so we got it wrong because we were projecting what we wanted them to do based on our perspective and our pride in our own system. Now, I think China should be in the World Trade Organization, if you read the book, and

I think we should have globalism, and I believe in the David Ricardo principles of global trade, seeking the lowest cost provider. However, when China is coming in as an emerging market, like El Salvador, Dominican Republic, and they get to the size of the U.K., or the size of Germany, they needed to be treated like Germany or the UK, and they weren't. And they were clipping off 11%, 10% growth, had their market closed, flooded our markets. We benefited, lower costs, goods and services, and things like that.

Every American, yeah.

But we lost a lot of our manufacturing, and we flatlined our wages for a very large group of people. And we have to accept that. And China was part of it. It wasn't the whole story. but it was a big enough symbolic part of it that it weighs heavy on those people.

You also talk about President Obama, the bailout of Wall Street. You also talk about George W., the war without, like, so we didn't pay for it, basically, without raising taxes. There were a lot of things at play. I feel like, Anthony, as you lay it out, and we talk about it a lot, and we are, you know, capitalism, this is what we report on all the time, that greed, in many ways, too much money in politics... Too much concerns about, you know, the bottom line, which is why we pushed everything offshore. Like that in many ways ultimately led to kind of where we are.

I think so. But I think under President Clinton's leadership, we put guardrails on the Congress. We had budgetary constraints. You know, Al Gore was cautioning about a reaction in the Gulf after the 9-11 crisis. I mean, you may remember this George Soros, I mean, he's a pariah to the conservatives, but He wrote an op-ed in the New York Times in November of 2001 to be careful. Don't overreact and play into Osama bin Laden's hands. If you go to the dark web or you read Lawrence Wright's book about 9-11, Osama bin Laden said, I'm going to hit America in the homeland. They're going to overreact and come to my land and spill their blood, spill their treasure.

They will pull their civil liberties. And we did that with the Patriot Act. And we ended up spending $ 8 trillion on those two wars. And I'll just point out, we cut taxes in May, April of 2001. We went to war in October in Afghanistan. We cut taxes again in 03, early part of 03, at war in Iraq in March. And that blew a hole in the system.

And so just hear me out because I threaded these things. Stagnant wages. Now you have this inflationary induction of deficit spending. And guys, you know this, but the U.S. dollar has lost 28% of its value since December of 2019. And so that's a huge problem for wage earners. And then the last piece, oh, by the way, let's just bail out the fat cats. There's nothing in the allocation for poor or middle-class families or people that need credit card relief or rental relief. People say, hey, there's a two-tiered system.

It's not fair. That's how you got Occupy Wall Street.

My husband said we should have just paid everybody's mortgages off and we would have solved the problem.

It's not about paying their mortgages off as much as about apportioning an assonation. If you're going to bail one group out without bailing the other group out, you're going to make that group feel that it was unfair and you're going to engender the Tea Party movement and you're going to engender Occupy Wall Street.

We only have a minute left. You have to come back. I just want to end on your note about why you think we have hope right now, and your view of what you call the solution here, just very briefly.

Just in 30 seconds, the country's neurally plastic. We got ourselves out of the Civil War. We got ourselves out of the Depression. Every 80 years, we sort of dunk ourselves. We're at that turning point now, and there's a lot of incredibly smart people that are now fully engaged. We have to reform elements of our government to make it function better, and I think we're going to get people that are not focused on left-wing And right-leaning policies, but more about what's right or wrong for the country. You know, sort of the Mike Bloomberg technocratic way of running things.

And I'm hopeful for that. I can see people on the horizon. And the book is a template to explain what happened and to say we can totally fix this. It's resolvable, including the deficit. But here's how we have to start thinking.

Yes or no, would you go back to politics? No.

It's not for me. You've got to lie when you're in politics. I don't feel like it. I've got a great life. I get to talk to you guys on an afternoon and don't have.

To worry about it.

We'll come back soon. We'd love to continue this conversation. Good to be here with you guys. Anthony Scaramucci, founder and managing partner of Skybridge. His book, All the Wrong Moods. Check it out, folks.

It is out.

This is Rupert.

Trying to get me divorced, girl.

Anthony Scaramucci on Trump, Wall Street and America’s Economic Anger

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