US Politics
Scaramucci says Trump ‘has gotten the drug of power’ and no longer has Kushner reining him in
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Anthony Scaramucci, the short-lived White House Director of Communications in President Donald Trump’s first term, has said he believes his former boss is no longer the man he once knew “because he has gotten the power drug.”
Speaking to Joanna Coles on The Daily Beast Podcast, Scaramucci, 61, said the change in Trump has come about because, metaphorically speaking: “He’s smoked the ganja, the crack crystal of power. And he’s marveling at the fact that he can bully people that are powerful and they kowtow to him.”
In a separate interview with MSNBC Monday, Scaramucci said Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and his “more rational” advice was no longer the president’s primary influence in his second term.
A New York financier and former Goldman Sachs banker, Scaramucci lasted just 11 days in his role with Trump in July 2017. He has since reinvented himself as a media pundit and podcaster known for being sharply critical of the president and for backing Democrats Joe Biden and Kamala Harris over him in the last two presidential elections.
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White House spokesman Kush Desai responded to the power remarks: “After getting caught up in the drug of relevance, Anthony Scaramucci is marveling at the fact that The Daily Beast still takes him seriously.”
Scaramucci told Coles in the same interview that Trump has been “flexing on everybody successfully” during his first year back in the White House and has been emboldened by the results he has seen when testing the boundaries of his authority.
“I know enough about his personality to know he’s marveling at that,” the former aide said. “He’s laughing. He’s laughing at it.”
He also accused many of Trump’s fellow world leaders of “caving” into his bullish demands – making exceptions for strongmen Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney – suggesting they see appeasing the president as a necessary act of pragmatism for the greater good.
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Scaramucci also suggested that Trump’s MAGA coalition will implode once he finally departs the world stage and leaves behind him a “leadership vacuum.”
“When the witch got hit with the water in The Wizard of Oz, what happened?” he asked Coles. “The witch shrunk down, you were left with the witch’s hat, that’ll be the MAGA hat, the red hat. And then the guards around the witch said, ‘Oh jeez, I’m sorry Dorothy…’”
Scaramucci referred to Trump’s support as a “full-on personality cult” and predicted that “the Wicked Witch of the West Wing” will eventually get “hit with the water” because “a lot of people in the country… know how bad he is and know what he’s doing is very disruptive to the Constitution and very disruptive to the checks and balances of the country.”
He concluded by saying he is personally eager to be “part of the debate” over who will succeed Trump as the face of the Republican Party in order to “break the populist hold on this party and see if we can return to something more germane and something more relevant that actually helps people.”
In separate comments to MSNBC’s The Best People podcast, Scaramucci claimed Trump was now more influenced by his son Donald Jr than his first term.
“I think the spirit animal for ‘Trump 2’ from the family is Don Jr.,” he told Nicolle Wallace. ““The spirit animal from ‘Trump 1’ from the family was Jared Kushner. So, whatever you think of Jared, Jared was a safer pair of hands, he was a lot more rational.
“We used to call him the goaltender, meaning he would block the insane shots on net from Donald Trump, and a lot of the policies that we’re seeing right now were blocked by Jared or Gary Cohn or Steven Mnuchin or John Kelly in ‘Trump 1.’”
