Now former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci has finished off whatever is left of his credibility, blowing it all in a baseless attack on Breitbart News and White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon as well as ripping President Donald Trump in an appearance on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday.
Perhaps more importantly than his personal attacks on the president and on Bannon, however, was his efforts to now steer the president to “move away” from the campaign promises that won him the election and toward “establishment senators” he thinks Trump needs to “curry favor with.”
Scaramucci, who lost his job as White House communications director after a profanity-laced rant against former chief of staff Reince Priebus and Bannon in an interview with The New Yorker, blasted what he called “Bannonbart” while being interviewed by George Stephanopoulos on Sunday morning. Scaramucci’s termination came after just 11 days on the job, an embarrassment to those who pushed to bring him in and something that hurt the president and his credibility.
What a difference a few weeks makes. Now, as the Scaramucci show is well outside the White House, he’s running to leftist ex-Clinton staffers like Stephanopoulos instead of conservatives like Breitbart—and in doing so he is bashing Trump, Bannon, Breitbart, conservatives, and anti-establishment forces while calling for the president to embrace the “establishment senators” and career politicians in Washington by walking away from his campaign promises that he was previously telling everyone he wanted to see fulfilled. The tune he is singing now is in almost every way exactly the opposite of what he was saying just a few weeks ago, during the beginning of his brief tenure as White House communication director.
Scaramucci began his Sunday interview with the ex-Bill Clinton White House aide turned ABC News host by bashing President Trump’s statement in response to the unrest in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday. He also praised the Democratic operative turned television host afterward for “fairness.”
“I wouldn’t have recommended that statement,” Scaramucci said, bashing President Trump’s decisions on Saturday. “I think he needed to be much harsher as it related to the white supremacists as it related to that. I applaud General McMaster for calling it out for what it is, it is actually terrorism. Whether it’s domestic or international terrorism, with the moral authority of the presidency you have to call that stuff out.”
What President Trump said on Saturday was he condemned both sides—white supremacists and the antifa left—for violence and hatred.
“We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence, on many sides,” Trump said in a televised statement. “On many sides. It’s been going on for a long time in our country. Not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama. This has been going on for a long, long time.”
He also condemned what happened via Twitter, as did First Lady Melania Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.
And in case that was not enough, a White House spokesperson added in an extra statement more information.
“The President said very strongly in his statement yesterday that he condemns all forms of violence, bigotry, and hatred,” the White House spokesperson said Sunday morning, per a White House pool report. “Of course that includes white supremacists, KKK, Neo-Nazi, and all extremist groups. He called for national unity and bringing all Americans together.”
But, of course, what President Trump and his team decided to do was not enough for Scaramucci, who blamed the president for condemning the Charlottesville events the way he did because Trump likes “doing the opposite of what the media thinks he’s going to do.”
“I think he’s also of the impression that there’s hatred on all sides,” Scaramucci said. “But I disagree with it. Here’s the thing: Whether I was the White House communications director or not, I don’t think you’re going to change the president. The president is going to do what he wants to do how he wants to do it. But I think it’s important for the people around him, George, to give him direct advice, to be blunt with him. I think he respects bluntness and I think he respects candor. And I certainly would have never suggested him doing that.”
Scaramucci then threw in with globalist influences in the White House, attacking conservatives in there as “maybe reluctant to tell him the truth.”
“I think maybe Ivanka [Trump] would do that [tell Trump what Scaramucci believes is the truth],” Scaramucci said. “You saw her Tweet this morning. Maybe Jared [Kushner] would do that. But you’ve also got this sort of Bannon-bart influence in there which I think is a snag on the president. If he really wants to execute that legislative agenda that I think is so promising for the American people—the lower middle class people and the middle class people—then he has to sort of move away from that sort of Bannon-bart nonsense.”
Stephanopoulos, again an ex-Clinton aide, followed up: “You mean Breitbart and Steve Bannon?”
In his reply, Scaramucci called for Trump to change who he is, abandon his principles, and hope that people who absolutely despise him in the political class in Washington will all of a sudden start working with him.
“Yeah, that whole thing is nonsensical,” Scaramucci said. “It’s not serving the president’s interests. He’s got to move more into the mainstream. He’s got to be more into where the moderates are and the independents are, George, that love the president. If he does that, he will have a very successful legislative (sic) that he’ll be able to execute. If he doesn’t do that, you’re going to see this inertia and you’re going to see this resistance from more of the establishment senators that he needs to curry favor with.”
Scaramucci’s attacks on the president’s handling of Charlottesville—and his attacks on Bannon and Breitbart News—ironically come just a few weeks after he was praising Breitbart News and Bannon publicly. Scaramucci, in a Breitbart News Saturday interview, said he had not yet then met with then-Homeland Security Secretary and now White House chief of staff Gen. John Kelly—Kelly reportedly never met Scaramucci before he fired him—but that he was supportive of building a wall on the border.
Scaramucci also during his Breitbart News Saturday interview–his first when he was White House communications director–that Trump is “on missile lock to keep” the campaign promise of building a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico, and said he would come back on the show the following Saturday to discuss it more in depth. He did not end up coming back on the program because between the two shows was his profanity-laced New Yorker interview that led to his termination a few days later.
But, during this first interview, Scaramucci praised Bannon and his efforts to push forward President Trump’s agenda and campaign promises—a completely different tune from what he is singing now. Back then, he was not calling for Trump to change his views and ways so as to appease “establishment senators” like he is doing now. He was pushing for Trump to move forward with his campaign promises on Bannon’s office wall in the White House.
“We have a list of campaign promises that are up on Steve Bannon’s wall, and we’re going right through those campaign promises so that we can tell the American people that we are citizen politicians or citizen public servants, we’re not career politicians or establishment players that just want to sit in Washington and milk the system,” Scaramucci said then. “What we want to do is ‘here are the things that we promised you’ and like good business people we’re going to deliver on these promises and try to make the system better. The wall is at the top of the list for the president so I can assure you that it’s going to get done.”
He was glowing in his praise of Breitbart News, too, in fact so much so that he actually asked me to send my resume to the White House to his desk to join his team–a team that did not end up coming to fruition given his very short tenure in the position.
“Did you send your job application form in yet, Matt?” Scaramucci opened his first interview as White House communications director by asking me on Breitbart News Saturday on SiriusXM Patriot Channel 125. “I was looking for it yesterday when I started. I didn’t see it. Do you need my email so I can get your resume over here?”
“Anthony, I’m honored, maybe we can talk about that later?” I replied, while joking with Scaramucci on the air.
“In all seriousness, I think one of the things that Breitbart has done is you’ve captured the spirit of what is actually going on in this country where there is a large group of people for whatever reason—we can go over all of them—have been disaffected from the economic franchise,” Scaramucci said in response after that.
When asked about fake news and how he planned to combat it later during his Breitbart News Saturday interview, Scaramucci again praised Breitbart News—a completely different viewpoint than he is now pushing.
“The good news is we have diagnosed the problem and you have also been a great help in terms of exposure and I do appreciate what you did for me so I want to thank you publicly in front of your listeners,” Scaramucci said, referencing how he himself was previously a victim of fake news from CNN that led to a retraction, apology, and resignation of three CNN editorial staffers. “But here’s what I would say to you, and I had this conversation with the president and I hope he doesn’t mind me sharing it with your listeners: What we have to do is we have to refine the message. We have enough outlets, whether it’s Breitbart, the president’s social media feed, all of the different apparatus that we have where people will allow us to deliver our message to the American people unfiltered.”
But all of that is very different from what he is now saying about Bannon and Breitbart. In fact, Scaramucci was asked directly on Sunday by Stephanopoulos if “Steve Bannon needs to go,” and he replied: “I think the president knows what he’s going to do with Steve Bannon.”
“Which is what?” Stephanopoulos followed up.
“Well, let’s leave it up to the president,” Scaramucci responded. “It’s his decision. But at the end of the day, I think the president has a very good idea of who the leakers are inside the White House. I think the president has a good idea of the people who are undermining his agenda who are serving their own interests.”
“Do they include Steve Bannon?” Stephanopoulos pressed again.
“Well, yeah, I mean look—we’re not on a phone call, a taped phone call, so we’re on live television so I would prefer to let the president make the decisions that the president needs to make,” Scaramucci said.
At that point, Stephanopoulos played audio of Scaramucci’s profanity-laced rant against Priebus and Bannon and the New Yorker and shifted the focus of the interview onto whether Scaramucci believed he deserved to be fired.
Incredulously, Scaramucci said he believes he did not deserve to be fired. “Do I think I deserved to be fired? Obviously I wish they would have given me a bar of soap and told me to go wash my mouth out in the bathroom and move on,” he said. “I don’t necessarily think—it was going to be very hard for me to stay in the job given the fact that Gen. Kelly took over. I respect Gen. Kelly. So, my feeling about the whole thing is that what happened was sort of meant to happen.”
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