Trump was right about Anthony Scaramucci

The most revealing part of Anthony Scaramucci’s new book can be found in a chapter titled “Trump and Me”. It relays the time in 2017 when our author found himself abruptly promoted to White House communications director, despite the fact that he had no experience. He ran with it because, like so many of Donald Trump’s staff, he couldn’t quite believe his luck. “Nothing in this chapter reflects well on me,” he writes accurately. Trump liked him, and Scaramucci fell so in thrall to his new boss that he stayed by his side even while his wife was in hospital giving birth. “You’re an idiot,” Trump had told him, “because you’re a Wall Street guy.” He hired him anyway, but ultimately Scaramucci didn’t fit because he was “telling the truth to the American people. Everyone is upset about that.” Also this: “You’re talking in complete sentences. Trump’s gonna fu**ing fire you!” He did, just 11 days after appointing him, following an outburst by Scaramucci against senior White House staff members, one of whom he called a “paranoid schizophrenic”. The Trump administration, he believes, “has dedicated itself to replacing the rule of law with their own kind of rule by whim, personal gain and negative emotions.” Scaramucci reacted, like almost all of Trump’s former aides, by becoming even more of a vocal critic of him. He’s a pundit now, and co-hosts The Rest Is Politics: US podcast, where he discusses “years of shitshow politics” with an authority typical of former “Wall Street guys”. But while All the Wrong Moves gets its punches in early – Trump he proclaims an “imbecile” – his book isn’t about the President at all. Rather, it offers a whistle-stop overview of how America got here in the first place. This is history on fast-forward. On one page, for example, he writes, “In 1809, Abraham Lincoln is born” and then, just a few pages (but a full century) later, this: “… But then came the Great Depression”. At times, he can hardly keep up with his own pace, writing “I’ve already mentioned” and “I said before” occasionally within the same paragraph. This is not really a guide to a better future at all, more an appeal that someone, somewhere might offer one (Photo: Albin Lohr-Jones/Bloomberg) His central thesis – which he titles the “Money Point of View of History”, a phrase clunky enough to leave bruises – is that money is the root of this current evil. America became obsessed with trade and commerce, and in its monomaniacal drive for both, ordinary working people got left behind. And so here we are today, with a President raking in billions in cryptocurrency while the average American can’t afford petrol for their cars. The portrait he paints is bleak. Chapters are called things like “The First Catastrophic Decision”, “Collapse” and “Fallout”, and such is his miserablist momentum that it comes as a shock when he suddenly turns optimistic before running out of pages, with the chapter “How We Have Hope” – another phrase that could give phrases a bad name. He wants the Republican Party demolished, the Democratic Party “turned inside out” in order to protect the democratic process and help the working class, and offers tips on how to do so via bullet points. This is a curious book. Punchy and breezy, certainly, but also frustratingly lite. After endless podcast-levels of opinion, he concludes not by underlining his Brave New World vision but rather by doubting himself. “Let’s say the ideas for major changes that I put forth aren’t the right ideas. Okay, maybe somebody else will have some better ones.” Not so much bang, then, as whimper. And so this is not really a guide to a better future at all, more an appeal that someone, somewhere might offer one. Anyone? Please?