Possibly a man who needs no introduction. Anthony Scaramucci. What's the first thing people think of when they hear your name?
Oh, I don't know. It's a good question. I don't know. Like they handsome and suave maybe. No, I don't know. I don't know. Probably failed White House communications director.
Well, that's what... fired by Donald Trump, maybe is what they think. I don't know.
You write yourself, I became famous as an epic failure in your new book, All the Wrong Moves. It's quite self-deprecating that because, you know, I don't know that in the context of the court of Donald Trump, getting chucked out is necessarily a badge of dishonor.
Well, I mean, listen, as I write in the book, we were fighting over things that he wanted to do that I didn't want to do. I didn't thought they were appropriate. You know, I think my allegiance and friendship with General Kelly, who actually fired me, I think is a testament that him and I were all trying to do the right thing at a time when someone was trying to do some very wrong things. So, yeah, I mean, I wear it today as a badge of honor, but I will tell you that was a rough period of time in my life.
But you've turned it into something rather different. I mean, you made a significant sum of money as trading, an investment firm, and...
Well, that was prior to the White House.
That's what I mean. But then you chose to go into...
I had a nice career going. I had to mess it up. I had to put myself into the Trump wood chipper and mess it all up. But it's all good. I mean, I still have my company and I've been able to, in a weird way, it's given me a platform to talk to people like you about some of the things that are going wrong in the country that we need to fix.
How much of what you've concluded and you talk about the three catastrophic decisions that have sort of led to much of the current malaise and then at the end of the book you offer up a prescription, five key areas in which things can be improved. And you were only in the White House for 11 days I think in total. How significant was that brief experience to the thesis that you develop in the new book?
Well, I mean, the White House in many ways was very significant. And I had spent 30 years as a political fundraiser, a presidential fundraiser on the side of the Republicans. I had known a lot of politicians, but I think even though it was a very short period of time, I got to see the fireworks. You know, Trump said something to me inside the White House. We were sitting having lunch in the study off the Oval Office. This happened on a Wednesday. I know that because I was only there for one Wednesday, so I know it was a Wednesday. We were sitting there and he said to me, 'Man, this is a rough town.' He goes, 'I thought I was a billionaire real estate guy.' He said, 'I thought we were a bunch of killers.' He said, 'The assistants here will peck your eyeball out. They'll like stab you in the eye with an ice pick and drop it in their martini glass while they're talking to you, you know.' And he was right. It's a very rough town. The stakes are very different. I think people fight in a way in Washington that's very different than Wall Street or business. And so, yes, it was very eye-opening. I learned some rough lessons in Washington. Got fired very quickly. At the time I thought it was a travesty. But reflecting back on it, it probably saved my marriage. It probably saved my career and it gave me, as I said, a platform to talk about these things. And what's extraordinary perhaps, and this was first term Trump which is very different from second term Trump, is that how...
You got dispensed with. I understand what you say about your marriage and your job because people never seem to dispense with him once people have been invited into the inner circle, however bad things get. And the second term Trump, I would very casually use words like depraved and immoral, but people never ever walk away from him. Why is that?
They want to be significant. They like power. They're susceptible to corruption. They want to make money in that sort of feeding funnel alongside of him and his family. There's an aphrodisiac to that. You know, I called it Potomac fever. You know, you cross the river Potomac and you think you're either going to help the country, something I thought, or you're going to be involved in something that would change things for the better. But there's another, there's a darker side to Potomac fever where you're like, 'Okay, I'm here now. I can get a piece of this action along somebody like Donald Trump.' When you say the word depraved though, it is so much worse than that. It is so much darker than that. Because there's a level of shamelessness to him and shameless, they are literally overtly now stealing money. I mean, they're literally selling pardons. They're literally insider trading with information that they get from the government. It is a scene that I think will long be remembered by Americans. If we can get a reformer to come in after him and clean this up, it'll be one of the darker parts of our history. You know, he, I mean, just this whole war. Who the hell knows why he started that war? We don't know all of the nefarious underworkings of the things that he does. And I mean, that's...
I know this is British radio so again I'm giving my opinion not LBC's, this you don't have to do that, I don't have to...
Well, a lot of what you said is factually correct. You can pay money to get early heads up on...
No, I feel like a million dollars you get a pardon for anything, you know, from him. Talking about people who've had pardons of Donald Trump being involved in British politics today. But the reforming president is one of your solutions. Let's run through the three catastrophic decisions that...
That you think explain why Donald Trump was able to harness this populist...
So I think it's very important for people to understand that we had things going in the right direction after the Berlin Wall came down. I think it's very important for people to understand that we put guardrails on the Congress. George Herbert Walker Bush did that. President Bill Clinton adhered to it. By the end of the 1990s, we were running a budget surplus in the United States. We printed a $240 billion budget surplus. But one of the problems was we allowed in 2001 China to enter the World Trade Organization relatively unchecked. And so what do I mean by that, sir? We let them come in as an emerging market. They could protect their markets. They could sell into the West, the UK, the US, elsewhere unfettered without tariffs from us. But as they grew to the size of the economy of Germany, we needed to check them and start treating them like the UK or Germany. We allowed them to stay in emerging market status for too long. And it's hurt us geopolitically. It's also hurt our manufacturing industries.
That was Clinton and that's...
That was Clinton. So again, this is a book not about being...
It's not partisan at all.
It's not partisan at all. In fact, if anything, if it was about my mistakes, sir, it would have been a phone book. Okay? So we just left it to some of the political leadership. I don't sit here pedantically deriding people. I'm just trying to offer an objective observation of well-intended people on both sides looking at a problem thinking they were going to get a different outcome than the outcome that they got.
So China takes a huge chunk out of US industry and that leaves a dispossessed workforce and...
And we thought China was moving towards us. We thought it was the end of history. Fukuyama had said that we were, we thought they were going to have more of a democratic style of government. So we totally get this wrong. We go to war in Afghanistan and Iraq with tax cuts. A first time in our history that we do that. We usually increase taxes going into the war to afford the war. So we're paying for these wars on a credit card. And then last but not least and probably the one that really ignites all the anger is the bank bailout.
What was the option? This is Obama bailing out Wall Street and what was the alternative? What else could he have done? So I certainly think that...
To be fair, just to make your point, so you go Clinton, Bush, Obama when you're looking at the three big things. So you are, and I would just say in President Obama's, you know, again, very, President Obama in many ways a really, really smart, savvy leader. TPP and the Iranian resolution to the nuclear situation. Both of those things should have stayed in place but unfortunately the populism erased that. But with Obama, the mistake was we gave all the money to the banks. And so 5,000 bankers got $1 million or more annual bonuses at the end of the year of the great financial crisis. That was a travesty to the average worker. Okay. And all...
Was he naive? Did he think the banks would put the money to different use as opposed to doing what banks always do with it?
Yeah. I don't think it was necessarily naive as much as it was a very fast-moving, expedient thing. And remember, George Bush had set it up. It got passed in the lame duck session of Bush and then it got kicked over to Obama. He implemented it. In hindsight, again, this is the value of hindsight. We probably should have given 750 billion to the banks and maybe 250 billion for mortgage relief or rental relief or credit card relief. We should have helped the lower and middle income people. They didn't get helped in that situation. They lost their homes or they had to restructure their families. The bankers didn't have to do that and it caused the Occupy Wall Street movement. It caused the Tea Party movement which were the precursor movements to MAGA.
