What's a dystopian view of how it might end, in your point of view? You could see a situation where he doesn't want to leave power. And there will be a group of people that will want to dislodge him from power. Would he willingly let go without resistance?
I would say no, he would probably want to stay in power.
Hi. My name is Mark Borkowski and welcome to my podcast the Fame Formula. This is going to be a regular chat with individuals who have experienced the ups and the downs of fame. Today's guest is the iconic Anthony Scaramucci. Financier, influencer, broadcaster, investor, and author. And perhaps more famously for 11 long days, Anthony was the communications director of President Donald Trump. Anthony is a busy boy. He is the managing partner of SkyBridge and of SALT. He hosts, famously here, the American version of The Rest Is Politics US. He has his own podcast called Open Book. And coming out later this year is his new book All the Wrong Moves. I was most grateful for the time he gave us at quite an interesting point in American politics and the societal backlash of ICE and all its adventures in Minneapolis. You've had a sort of varied background. I'm fascinated to understand how you got involved in politics with Donald Trump. You're out of that now. You're a man involved with finance. Your Goldman Sachs background, your law background. How did you find yourself in Donald Trump's orbit?
Well, I don't want to overcomplicate the story. Some of it doesn't reflect well on me. I think it's a cautionary tale for people. So I certainly don't mind sharing it and hopefully people will listen to me and get something out of it. I think the overarching message is beware of your ego and your pride because those are two of your enemies whether you like it or not. The ancient Greeks are correct and so the aphrodisiac of power, Mark, I think is overwhelming and we can sit there as armchair quarterbacks or armchair pundits and say, 'Oh, that would never happen to me.' But guess what? It did happen to me. I'd like to think of myself as someone that's morally superior to people, but let's face it. I'm probably unfortunately morally average. I would like to get better and I'm continuing to get better. It's a process, but I was attracted to the power. My wife told me not to do it and I said, 'Well, I'm going to do it anyway.' And I've said this joke often, but my wife probably hates Trump almost as much as Melania hates him, Mark, and that's a very high standard of hatred, but she didn't want me to do it and she said it would hurt our family and it would end brutally with him. Of course, she was right about those things. But to really take you back, I was a garden variety political fundraiser. How did I get into political fundraising? I grew up in a blue-collar family. My father's union was controlled by moderate Republicans out of Long Island. And so when I registered for the draft in US military and I registered for the opportunity to vote, I registered as a Republican as requested by my father because the Republicans were helping him with his wages and he wanted his family members to be Republican. So I was a garden variety Republican. I then went to Tufts University and Harvard Law School. When I graduated from Harvard Law School, I got a job at Goldman Sachs. It was in the private wealth area and my responsibility was to meet people of wealth and see if I could convince them to have their assets managed by Goldman Sachs. Problem is, Mark Borkowski, I didn't know people of wealth. I didn't grow up in a wealthy neighborhood. I had never seen the inside of a country club. My father wore a greeny, which is basically a green equipment uniform when he was operating a crane. And so it was very difficult for me to get started. Even though I'd gone to Harvard, which is an old boys network, I was a young boy in an old boys network. I didn't really know anybody. So I went into political fundraising because it was a way to meet influential people. So I did my first political fundraiser for a guy named Rudy Giuliani. It was 1993. I was 29 years old and I wrote a check for $250 for Young Republicans for Rudy. Mr. Giuliani went on to become the mayor. I became very close to him. It was great for me. I had probably one of the best parking passes in New York. If you know anything about New York, Mark, if you got a parking pass, you're rate in this town. I could probably park my car on two wheels on a fire hydrant in front of Radio City on Christmas Eve. Didn't have a problem. But I started to build a network, if you will. I started to build a coalition of wealthy individuals that became clients of mine primarily through the political process. I worked for Giuliani. I ended up working for George Pataki. I worked for Bob Dole. I worked for George W. Bush. I spent 30 years, frankly, in presidential fundraising. Mitt Romney, etc. And so when I was with Jeb Bush on his campaign, Donald Trump called me. We had known each other from The Apprentice world. I had worked at CNBC when he was a star. Let's face it, that's what he was. He was a television star at NBC. It was a show that went on for 15 years with great ratings. He was now running for president and he said to me, 'Hey, I want you to come work for me.' I said, 'Well, I'm with the Bushes.' He said, 'Well, when I knock Bush out of the race, come work for me.' So mistake number one, I went and did that. I could have just stayed in that garden variety fundraising position attached to my asset management company known as SkyBridge. I did a lot of media punditry at that time. I was on CNBC, on Bloomberg. I could have stayed in that zone, but I didn't do that. That was due to pride, due to ambition, due to egocentrism. When he offered me the job, I took it. It was the wrong job for me. I was not experienced enough to handle that job. But I made a decision that I was going to go do it. I also was not politically aligned with him as much as I originally thought because when he got into the White House, he wanted to do certain things that were really not traditional Republican ideas or moderate Republican principles. People can be critical of me for this, Mark. They could say, 'Oh, well, he was from day one and you should have known that.' But he was actually quite moderate. He started out as a Democrat. He went to Elton John's wedding. He was indifferent to people's sexual orientations. He was pretty forgiving about those things. He began a process of migration into the position that he's in now. Other people could say, 'Oh, no, he was always like that.' Go look at the interviews of him in the '90s or in the early 2000s. No, he wasn't always like that. We can rewrite history, and there's going to be a group of liberals that no matter what I say or what I do or help Kamala Harris in debate prep, worked on Joe Biden's campaign to try to knock him out of the presidency because I saw the dangers of him, they'll never forgive me for working for him. And that's fine. They're entitled to that. There's a level of righteousness on the left that I won't fully understand. But it was a political odyssey for me. It was difficult. When you go into politics, you get two-dimensionalized. I got characterized. Bill Maher called me a Jersey Shore cast member. I was called Tony Soprano on the Potomac. You get all of these caricatures and then people try to demean you and they're always ad hominem attacks because if they can do that successfully, then they'll demean your intellectual thought process and they'll demean the words that are coming out of your mouth. I'm the type of person I wasn't going to let people do that to me. When I got fired, I immediately returned to the media and I immediately returned to the punditry and the writing. And frankly, again, I don't want to alter history. I was with Trump. I got fired, sir. I was still with Trump. I didn't want to be that baby that got fired and then became the embittered firee, if you will. And so I was with Trump, but then it became impossible to be with him. The Charlottesville situation. I could take you through all the different facts. He finally said something where he said that the women, these African-American women and these Hispanic women should go back to the countries they originally came from. These were the members of the squad, three of which were born in the United States, ironically, one naturalized from Somalia. And I said, 'Well, that's American nativism.' They said that to my Italian-American grandmother in the 1920s that she should go back to the country she came from. It broke her heart. I said, 'He shouldn't talk like that.' He came after me on Twitter. I'm a big boy. He came after me and so I went back at him. I'm a New Yorker. I think I called him the fattest president since William Howard Taft because he hates being so fat, and just get the conversation going. And we've become adversaries. I think what he's doing is very, very dangerous. It's getting more dangerous, the escalation of danger and the potentiality for violence, and we just saw this very tragic act happened in Minneapolis over the past couple of days, which is reprehensible, and the stuff that he's doing globally, and the flexing and threatening against our NATO ally Denmark, and the different things that he's doing is just very, very dangerous. I've been speaking about this since 2019, what the danger is. And I saw it firsthand. And was it wrong for me to go work for him? It was. Was it the stupidest thing I've done in my life so far? Yes, I'm willing to say that. But it did come with some positive externalities. It gave me a platform to speak out against him. And so the irony is on one of the worst days of my career, which was the 31st of July 2017 when I was fired from the White House, and the infamy that ensued from that, and the sort of desecration of my reputation that came out of that, it ironically gave me a platform where I could articulate forcefully what he's doing and the danger that he represents. So, you have to take the good and bad in life, Mark. It's a long-winded answer, but that's what happened.
Yeah, well, no, it's fascinating. I wrote a book 20 years ago, spent a lot of time in America interviewing the last of the great Hollywood publicists, and one of them was a guy called Jay Bernstein. He came out with the wonderful quote I often use: 'Wherever ego I go.' And I think that ego is dangerous, and it would suggest that you learned a lot from the toxicity of that fame. You talk of yourself as a big boy, a tough guy. You have to do that to survive. You know, what was it like becoming a global icon in many ways? Those pitched battles were entertaining lots of people. And people talk about Trump as some all-seeing media genius. From what you saw, is he generally strategic, or does he just trust the volume and repetition of what he does to build that fame where he is now, which some people would describe as sort of unimpeachable? He has so much power now, and if you go back to your point about that being the most corrosive element, that has grown and grown inside him, not even because he's changed the media agenda. He's changed the fourth estate. Would you agree with that?
I would agree with that, but he's a decaying political asset. First of all, it's a great question, and it's an astute observation. I agree with everything that you said, except for the fact that in 10 short months, he'll be over the hump of the midterms, and he will be in a situation where he's a lame duck. And so, if you're telling me he's going to totally flex the Constitution and disallow elections, and the American military is going to allow that, and the American Congress, and the state and local legislatures around the country are going to allow that, then we've got a very changed, very different country than the one that I grew up in, and I guess we'll have to accept that, and I'll become a dissident in the country until they throw me out of the country. But if he gets over the hump, the Republicans break from him, which I predict that they will do as they try to figure out who's going to be their horse for 2028, I think there'll be a civil war in the Republican Party, and I think there'll be a debate around the ideas of Trumpism, and the debate about the ideas of where the future is of that party. The best thing the Republicans have going for them are the Democrats. They're in complete disarray. They've offered no real solution. They're anti-Trump. My buddy George Conway, I adore him, but he's running for the Congress, and I told him yesterday, I appreciate the anti-Trump rhetoric, and I understand it, and I think it's very thoughtful, but let's work on other issues that are important to your potential constituents, which would include affordability, which would include raising living standards, and fixing the wealth gap in the country. Because if we don't fix the wealth gap through traditional American capitalism, democratic-style capitalism, you'll end up with a populist leader on the left or a populist leader on the right in perpetuity. That'll be very dangerous for the country. So, to me, yeah, he looks imperious, and he looks very powerful, but if you look at the tea leaves, he's got 36 months to go. He could do a lot of damage in 36 months, but it's 36 months.
Yeah, he sure can. Obviously the media enabled Trump because it gave him good ratings. Do you think Trump recognized that clocking outrage was something that was very powerful? And do you think there was a time when he stopped distinguishing between the narrative he created and objective reality? I'm fascinated to understand that. He was created by the media. He was built by the media. He talked about himself as a reality star. I remember seeing him on Home Alone and on WrestleMania. He knew what it was. He's like P.T. Barnum on steroids. He at one point understood the power of creating these headlines. But surely that addiction to media attention has gone too far now because he can't cope with the criticism.
Well, I see it in the most primitive way that you can see it. I think due to his narcissism, he's addicted to things, attention. He wants your eyeballs on him. And I think he wants to make money through the process of getting your eyeballs on him. Every single thing that he's done in his life, you can see through those two prisms. If he could get a media impression on Home Alone, he was asked to be in Wall Street 2. Oliver Stone was filming him in the barber shop alongside the Gordon Gekko figure played by Michael Douglas, and Oliver decided to cut it because he thought it was too distracting. His fame or infamy was distracting from the art of the movie. But generally, if he could get a media spot, speak on Fox, go on The View, do a Larry King interview, he would do that in perpetuity. He wanted a presence. He even imitated a PR executive. He made up a name, and he called into people and told them, 'I'm Trump's PR executive. I'd like you to interview Trump.' He created this fictional third party to generate that media experience. Now, Mark Burnett took all of that imaging, took all of the millions of dollars of celebrity, the Art of the Deal book, the constant presence in the media, and he said, 'Well, the American people see him as a success, despite the bankruptcies and setbacks. I'm going to position him as uber-successful through the magic of television.' And it worked. The 15 to 20 million people that saw him on the show over a 15-year period, it was probably circulating through 100 million people. And when I was on the campaign with him in '16, those Americans thought of him as a very successful businessman, and they were tired of the everyday politician, and they wanted somebody who they thought had the resources of an entrepreneurial businessman to run the country. The great irony is he is a successful person. I'm not saying that he isn't. But he was really more of a raconteur, and he was more of a media-focused person. He wasn't super thoughtful on policy. He never really has been, but he has phenomenal political instincts. You can't go from being a reality television star and a marginal real estate developer in New York City to the American presidency, slay every formal experienced politician in 18 months, take out the Clintons, and ascend to the presidency if you don't have really good political instincts. Moreover, he created a consequential disaster on the 6th of January 5 years ago, did tremendous damage to the integrity of the electoral process, created lots of cynicism in the country, and yet was able to return to the presidency. This is the greatest political comeback in US history. And if you ask somebody and they're being truthful with you, Mark, who is the looming figure of the first quarter century plus now of the 21st century? It's Donald Trump because of this interregnum period where he loomed over the Biden administration. He's been in our eyes and in our ears for 10 years. And we've got 3 more years to go. He is the looming figure. And he's breaking the rules. He's crushing the norms. The greatest beneficiary of this is his pocketbook, number one, but secondarily and equally important are the Chinese. The Chinese are looking at this saying, 'This is fantastic. He's disavowing his allies. He's rupturing all the predictability of America as part of the Western alliance.' Here we are representing ourselves as long-term stable partners in multilateral relationships around the world where the United States is taking away aid from people. They're busting agreements like on the environment. They're increasing. You've got the Canadians and the Danes preparing for potential military invasions from the United States. And that's a 12-month...
That seems unbelievable to me. That seems unbelievable.
I'm not making that up. That's being reported in the Washington Post and the Economist. And so that's him. Vladimir Putin is super happy about that. President Xi is ecstatic about that. So let me get this right. You're going to foment violence on the streets. And again, I'm not saying who's right or wrong. One side says it was a cold-blooded murder, the other side says it's self-defense. I'm not going to get into that debate. I'm just talking about the violence. So you're fomenting violence in the streets of the domestic cities of the United States. You're flexing violence around the world. You're threatening your NATO allies. And you just called for a military increase of 5 to 600 billion dollars. You want to go to a 1.5 trillion-dollar dream military. Will he let go of power? The only way he's going to let go of power is if they tell him he has to let go of power. Pete Hegseth is going to tell him that he can stay in power. He's one of his ass-kissers. Marco Rubio's unexplainable to me at this point. I find him to be a disgusting human being. But you have to tell me if the Republicans are ambitious enough where they all see themselves as the 48th president, they may flex on him and get him out of power. I don't know. But if you're telling me would he willingly let go of power without resistance, I would say no. He would probably want to stay in power. You said to me, 'I find it unbelievable that the Canadians and the Danes are preparing for a potential military invasion by the US.' But yeah, there we are. And so then we would be sitting here in 2028 saying, 'Oh, wow, we find it unbelievable that the oldest existing democracy, the United States, has ended its reign as an electoral democracy.' But if you step back throughout history and you look at 5,000 years of history, it's really not that unbelievable. Caesar crossed the Rubicon and ended the republic. We've had people end different democracies over the years. This looked like a very stable one, one that had lots of checks and balances. But if we're going to write a historical document 50 years from now about this period of the United States, I think there'd have to be many chapters on the recusal of the American Congress. They had Article 1 powers to hold the president in check. They had Article 1 powers to rebuke the president, whether it was on tariffs, military interventionism, the release of ICE soldiers, National Guard soldiers in domestic environment. And they wouldn't do it. And anybody that is in opposition has done nothing creative or aggressive to really be the rallying cry of the opposition. So the Republicans are in lockstep with him. They won't admit it on your program, but if you were with them privately and you were one of their donors, they would tell you, 'I hate the guy, but I got to do this. I'm trying to stay in power. I'm waiting for my move with the guy.' Here, I'm going to show you something if you don't mind.
Every time a politician comes in here and asks me for money, I give him one of these. See what that is? Put it in the jar. Look at it. Maybe you can find yours to stand up against the nonsense that's going on in the society. They give me a hassle. They're hassling me. I get threats all the time. I'm not to be intimidated into silence.
But in what way? In what way do they threaten you into silence?
They come after me. His henchmen come after me and I've gotten various levels of threats.
Violence towards me and my family. I mean, you know, whatever. I don't care. My attitude is I'm an American citizen. I have a First Amendment right. And he's gone after his adversaries like the attorney general here in New York or the former FBI director. And obviously these are specious claims against them. He couldn't even get a grand jury to indict Tish James, the New York attorney general. Couldn't get a grand jury. You know, I took criminal procedure at Harvard Law School. One of the professors said you could indict a ham sandwich, okay, but he couldn't get an indictment against her because there was nothing there. The case against Comey will likely get thrown out of court completely. Lots of pieces of that case have already been discharged. But that's... there's a weakness now. There's weakness in traditional media. We're now all in our silos. We can go anywhere to find views that reflect what we wanted to hear. It's a splinter net now. Social media's done a huge amount of damage in terms of what you would call real news. One person's fact is another person's conspiracy theory. One person's conspiracy theory is a fact. Never before have we been in this place where there is no guidance. He has taken down the media. I notice people always call CNN left-wing now, CNBC left-wing. These have been described, and he's got the power of Fox. He's got the power of his truth channel. These are very big. I'm fascinated to hear from you, in terms of communications, how do you see the blue collar? How do you see the ordinary American who put him in power looking at it now? Do they see a strong man and they're entertained, or they're going to their news feeds to hear what they want to hear? And these bubbles, these silos, are more dangerous than ever if we're talking about holding power to account.
Well, okay. So let me step back for a second because I grew up with those people and I live out on Long Island where they decidedly in my county, they voted for Donald Trump. And so some of it's white. Some of it's nostalgic. Some of it's watching Fox News and getting reinforced by the hate screeds on Fox News. That's sort of circularity of rhythm and Trump beats that drum. Some of it is culture war. I don't want transgender athletes playing in women's sports, you know, that sort of thing. I want to be able to say Merry Christmas, you know, this sort of fictitious culture war that these guys have brewed that Trump is a general of. He's a master of it. So it's all of these things. But if you're asking me, there's 25% of the population of voting age that come hell or high water, they're with Donald Trump. They see him as the last great white hope. They're with him if he bombs Iran, even though he said no more forever wars. They're with him if he takes Maduro, even though he said we're not going to use military interventionism. They're with him. And he can do whatever the hell he wants whenever the hell he wants to do it. He said astutely that he could shoot people on Fifth Avenue and he wouldn't lose any support, and there's a good quarter of the population that believes that. However, he does have a 36% approval rating if you look at the totality of the vote. And I think that's ICE related. And it may or may not be, but those are my instincts. I believe that even if the economy's doing okay, even if he was able to handle successfully the affordability issue, which the jury's out on that, I think that the thuggish nature of what's being displayed on social media in this country is hurting the president. I think it's hurting his staff. And that's the best thing that the Democrats have going. The Democrats are in complete disarray. And they don't know how to handle themselves and they have no formal vision and the hard left thinks they're the signal and the centrist left thinks they're the noise. And they're going to fight that out with this stupid righteousness as opposed to focusing on principles as opposed to policy. But what they have going for them is this bad aura, this negativity around ICE and negativity around their neighbors getting pulled out of their houses and deported. And that's going to come home to haunt the president in the midterms. He's smart enough to know that. Which is why he was with the Republican congressional leadership over the weekend saying, 'Hey man, we got to get our stuff together or I'm going to get impeached again.' Remember, he didn't say to the Republicans, 'We got to win. Here's my plan. Here's my vision. Here's how I'm going to help the American people.' He didn't say that. He made it very ego-centric, very individualistic. He said, 'I'm going to get impeached again. And so you're going to help me not get impeached again.' Because remember, the Trump way is to make money. Trump way is, 'I'm trying to make $20 billion off the presidency. I made five last year. I'd like to make six next year so I can make four the year after.' And he's going to try to make $5 billion off the presidency. And that's the Trump way.
I mean, that is fascinating. I mean, you were in and you were spectacularly out. You talked openly and honestly about the lessons you learned from that, because that sort of level of fame is toxic as we know. But what about the people that surround him now? You call them soldiers of fortune, arse lickers, which everyone wants to call them. They might have to get their tongues surgically removed from the anus of their political masters. But what sort of person is attracted to him now? Is it because they're going to get something from it, being close to it? Do they not see the toxicity of it, that they actually might get scooped up into this? What attracts some of these characters that sort of run themselves in the Trump camp? Is it purely power? Is it a similar scenario to what you went through, that they are drunk on that power?
I think it's worse. I think it's worse. You know, I was drunk. Look, I called it Potomac fever. Okay, so let me tell you what Potomac fever is. I'm from New York. I'm a smart Wall Street guy. Everybody in Washington is stupid. I mean to descend on Washington and teach them a lesson. Okay, I know better than them. Okay, the Silicon Valley people are coming into Washington with that thought. Wall Streeters are coming into Washington with that thought. One of the great symptoms of Potomac fever, Mark, is that you don't know you have Potomac fever. And the reason I know this is because I had Potomac fever. Okay, and what happens is Washington absorbs you for a minute or two and then it ejects you. But what's happening here is because Trump is scared the daylights out of his coalition, his Republican coalition, that these people that have Potomac fever are breathing the noxious fumes of Potomac fever. Okay, that's what's going on here. And it's like a very powerful, intoxicating sort of thing. And yeah, Luttig has it for sure. I just watch his antics on television. He has it. Bossert has it. He's a little calmer, looks a little more stable than Luttig. But they both have it. Yeah, it's a disaster.
