Anthony Scaramucci - "I simply got seduced by the power"
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Who is Anthony Scaramucci and what is his background before entering politics?
Anthony Scaramucci, welcome back to the show. It's good to be back. Thanks for having me. Anthony, you're co-host of the Restless Politics US. You're one of the more informed commentators on Donald Trump because you were, of course, White House Director of Communications for eleven days at the start of the first Trump administration. But now you've written a book about how to fix America. It's called All the Wrong Moves, How Three Catastrophic Decisions and Years of Show Politics Led to Trump and and how we find a way out and it's a fascinating rom through the story of America. I think the problem you diagnose is essentially the death of the American dream. And I suppose you have a unique perspective here because you are in a way the embodiment of that dream.
You went from a blue collar background uh to as you say yourself sitting at the World Economic Forum at Davos. What was your background growing up? I you know, I thought
I had a
great
upbringing. You know, I I grew up in a middle class neighborhood by American standards, my My parents never went to college, so you know, they had working class jobs. My dad was a crane operator, but he had very high wages and you know, it was like sort of as I describe in the book, a light blue, not a full blue collar wage. Um that was a skilled job back in the seventies and eighties and he got well paid for it. My mom was a makeup artist. I mean we were tight Once in a while from a budget perspective, but not overly tight.
How did Scaramucci’s blue‑collar upbringing shape his view of the American Dream?
I would never I would never want to dishonor My dad's work ethic. or my mother's work ethic for that matter by telling you I grew up poor. I didn't grow up poor. Um, but they were aspirational blue collar people. They thought if you know, they they told us, hey, do a good job in school, uh, get to a good professional school, you get a great white collar job and you'll move classes and and we believed that and certain certainly I lived that. Um but you're right. That trajectory in the United States today. While it's doable. It's frankly gotten a lot harder. It's not it's not as easy to do that as it once was. And it has to do with wages, the affordability crisis in the country, inflation. You know, we've lost twenty eight percent of the US dollars value since January of two thousand twenty, according to Trueflation dot com.
And so this type of stuff makes it much harder for people to break out.
Okay, so that bargain is broken. And and the book I suppose explains um how the conditions arose for America to buy into Donald Trump. Let's acknowledge first that you bought into Donald Trump too. Why did you buy into him initially?
Well, initially I didn't. I was with Jeb Bush in his campaign when he knocked Jeb out of the race. I uh made the misfortunate or the unfortunate mistake to go work for Donald Trump. I I um I still regret that by the way, so I'll I'll I'll say that to you. But when I was on the campaign Uh the president or at least the candidate at that time was talking to working class Americans. Many of these people were very similarly situated economically to the people I grew up with, and I looked at what he was doing And I was quite impressed. I was like, okay, there's been a vacuum of advocacy for these people over the last twenty five or so years. Uh the Democrats used to hold these people uh in the palm, you know, they they they had these people covered.
You know, well the uh their grandparents would have voted for Lyndon Johnson or their great grandparents for FDR, but for some reason the Democratic Party left these people uh and that vacuum of advocacy was filled by Donald Trump. And so this is one of those interesting things about life Um I would like to say that I saw it. Uh it doesn't reflect well on me that I didn't, but we took aspirational middle class families, working class families, and turned them into economically desperational families in about thirty five years. Trump Trump did see that. He did advocate on their behalf and then they were inclined to vote for him. Now it was a narrow election in two thousand and sixteen.
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