Trump, the Blue-Collar President: what’s in Anthony Scaramucci’s book?

The man who lasted only 10 days as White House communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, is publishing a memoir entitled Trump, the Blue-Collar President in which he denounces former White House advisor Steve Bannon as a hypocrite and a weirdo, while hailing the president for his intellect.

Since leaving the White House in July 2017, Scaramucci, a New York native and Harvard business school graduate widely known as “the Mooch”, “has resumed work on Wall Street, appeared frequently on television and travelled the country staging politics-themed town halls”, says The Guardian.

Now he has joined the list of former Trump aides to pen tell-all accounts of their time in the White House. “I’m a front stabber,” he told Forbes ahead of the book’s publication later this month. “If you’re a front stabber, you’re going to live happier and longer.”

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Scaramucci on Trump

In the book Scaramucci praises Trump for having “an intellect that is uniquely suited to the presidency”.

“He never let anyone know he was gathering information to make policy out of it… So he made it seem like he was chatting, talking economics and trade policy the way you’d talk about the New York Mets. Then he synthesised all the responses into one position, letting in the good bits and keeping out the bad,” he writes.

Trump understands the common man and delivers an “authenticity” other politicians lack, he adds.

On Steve Bannon

At the end of his time in The White House Scaramucci gave a notorious late-night phone interview to The New Yorker in which he said, among other things, “I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own cock.”

In his book, Scaramucci avoids repeating such epithets, but he does continue his campaign against Trump’s former chief strategist, whom he calls “megalomaniacal” and “one of the biggest hypocrites in a town lousy with them”.

“It was as though he was borderline delusional, and I’m not saying that in the heat of some late-night phone call,” Scaramucci writes of Bannon. “His was a power-dream fantasy.”

On John Kelly

Scaramucci was fired by Trump’s chief of staff John Kelly within days of Kelly’s arrival on the job, and the retired general does not escape Scaramucci’s ire in the book.

“His personal insecurity has proven to be a poor match with the self-confident, gregarious president,” Scaramucci writes of Kelly, whom he says is “incapable of recruiting a compatible staff to work with him”.

“I’m hopeful that the president will choose someone as his next chief who actually likes him,” he adds.

On Reince Priebus

Priebus had been a colleague of Scaramucci’s during Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, and they were on friendly terms, Scaramucci writes in the book - until Priebus, then Trump’s chief of staff, decided to join forces with Bannon to push Scaramucci out of the White House.

“Reince sold himself out,” Scaramucci writes. “He joined the rodent family in order to survive.”

The tension among the three men “produces one of the most memorable scenes in the book”, says The Guardian, as Scaramucci describes Bannon and Priebus accompanying him to the Oval Office in an effort to stop his elevation as communications director.

“The president sat behind the Resolute desk, his jaw set and his eyes a steely blue,” Scaramucci recalls. “[Trump] then looked back at Reince. The president’s expression was one of absolute disgust.”

“‘I don’t want any of your taint on Anthony’, he said. “It was war. Full on.”

Trump, the Blue-Collar President is published on 23 October