President Donald Trump’s new communications director Anthony Scaramucci once tweeted that trying to “fight globalization is counterproductive.”
In March of 2016, after linking to articles about Chinese manufacturers moving jobs to South Carolina and Mexico, he said the “takeaway” from the articles should be, “Trying to fight globalization is counterproductive. Currencies settle the score & free trade fosters greater global econ stability”:
Trump’s former press secretary Sean Spicer, who came from the Republican National Committee and had worked for various GOP establishment entities, resigned on Friday after Scaramucci officially became the White House’s communications director. The New York Times‘ Mark Leibovich described Spicer as someone who, in the pre-Trump era, “represented a Washington [swamp creature] ‘type’ in good standing: an amiable plodder in his job as spokesman for the Republican National Committee and a stock character of the local ensemble.”
Scaramucci’s embrace of globalization may be why Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon, according to MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle, reportedly told Scaramucci this morning, “Over my dead body will you get this job!!”
Trump won the presidency, shocking the world and the legacy media, by running on a nationalist platform.
Trump’s win—in addition to other nationalist “political earthquakes”—has led those who had believed in globalization like a religion to reconsider their views, as Nikal Saval recently pointed out after attending this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos.
Scaramucci, who worked for former Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s failed presidential campaigns, had some choice words for Trump during the 2016 campaign season.
“He’s a hack politician. He’s probably going to make Elizabeth Warren his vice presidential nominee with comments like that. It’s anti-American, and it’s very, very divisive,” Scaramucci said on the Fox Business Network in 2015, according to Newsmax, while responding to Trump’s comments about hedge fund managers. ”I don’t like the way he talks about women, I don’t like the way he talks about our friend Megyn Kelly. And, you know what, the politicians don’t want to go at Trump because he’s got a big mouth and are afraid he’s going to light them up on Fox News and all these other places. But I’m not a politician. Bring it.”
He also reportedly said: “Bring it. You’re an inherited money dude from Queens County. Bring it, Donald.”
Scaramucci then wondered if Trump was a “Democratic plant” for Hillary Clinton’s campaign and demanded that Trump “stand here and prove otherwise.”
According to the Washington Examiner, “Scaramucci has donated to every single Democratic presidential nominee since 2000. More than generous, according to FEC filings, he gave Vice President Gore $1,000 and Kerry $3,000; He gave Sen. Hilary Clinton, $4,300 and President Obama, $4,600.”
But since supporting Trump in the general election, Scaramucci, unlike other anti-Trump Republicans who became full-throated “Never Trumpers,” has fiercely defended Trump. Scaramucci said on Friday that Trump frequently reminds him of his past remarks.
Joshua Green, the author of Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency, told MSNBC’s Katy Tur on Friday that Scaramucci is a “globalist” who has morphed into a “Trumpist.”
Earlier in the week on Charlie Rose’s show, Green said Bannon’s prescription for fighting unchecked globalization “is to tear down the global free-trade system, to close America’s borders, to deport people who are here illegally, and to curb legal immigration … as a way of privileging American citizens and reasserting … a cultural identity.” (emphasis added)
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