Anthony Scaramucci: Farage is a dumber version of Trump

Anthony Scaramucci is a man of many stripes. Former Donald Trump adviser, one-time White House official, financier, broadcaster and, it turns out, astrologer.

We are sitting at the table of a swanky west London hotel to discuss his upcoming book – a tell-all memoir covering US politics from his front-row seat, which featured an infamous 11-day stint as Trump’s White House communications director – but the first thing Scaramucci wants to talk about is star signs.

Within a few minutes, he has used my age and birthday to analyse my romantic relationship and diagnose my personality traits with surprising accuracy. I ask about Trump’s horoscope. “He’s a classic Gemini,” he replies in a broad New York accent, referring to the sign typically symbolised by a good and bad twin. In the President’s case though, both are “evil”.

There is perhaps some celestial irony that Scaramucci’s own birthday is 6 January, the date now immortalised by the Capitol attack of 2021, when about 2,000 Trump supporters smashed through the seat of the US Congress, demanding the result of the presidential election be overturned. It was the zenith of a political movement that Scaramucci helped to build – and now sees as his mission to tear down.

A long-term Republican donor and founder of investment firm SkyBridge Capital, Scaramucci worked as an adviser on Trump’s presidential transition team and was a top official at the Export-Import Bank – the US Government’s export credit agency – before joining the White House as communications director in July 2017.

The appointment of Scaramucci, an acquaintance of real estate mogul Trump from the New York social scene, led to the resignation of White House chief of staff Reince Priebus and spokesman Sean Spicer.

Ten days into his tenure, he was sacked after making disparaging comments about administration officials in a conversation he thought was off the record.

Now, at 62, “The Mooch” has become a broadcasting star – he hosts podcast The Rest Is Politics: US alongside BBC correspondent Katty Kay – and one of the US President’s harshest critics. He describes his support for Trump as the “biggest mistake of his life”.

“It’s as if a bully got the top job,” Scaramucci says of Trump’s election. “You want a benevolent uncle who’s sitting on the most powerful military and the most powerful economy in the world to help oversee the world, but you got a bully.”

The presidency was, he believes, a lifelong goal of Trump’s – not, as was rumoured, a response to teasing from Barack Obama at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Trump has a “massive chip on his shoulder”, Scaramucci says, though he still hasn’t figured out exactly why. “I’m not a psychotherapist, but it’s very important for him to force himself into the world, right? He’s got to have his name plastered on every building. He’s got to have different brands associated with his name.”

But he is nothing if not tenacious, adds Scaramucci, noting Trump’s capacity for bouncing back – from bankrupt businesses to reality TV and later, the presidency. “On a scale of one to 10, what is his resilience? It’s a 10. Coming back from failure? It’s a 10. You can hate the guy, but I’m just telling you,” he says. “He’s an incredibly hard worker. You can’t look at a guy who’s 80 and say he doesn’t have energy and he doesn’t have a robust personality.”

Trump’s stellar recovery is not unlike that of the indefatigable Scaramucci himself, who turned his ill-fated stint in the White House into a successful media career and is now worth an estimated $200m (£148m), thanks to his hedge fund and hosting popular crypto conferences. He will appear in Sky’s four-part “constructed documentary” series The Wargame from next week, alongside former UK cabinet ministers Michael Gove and Penny Mordaunt as well as former Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon.

Yet in their outlook, the two men are poles apart. Scaramucci recalls a TV appearance where he was asked about the US President’s comments on four Democratic congresswomen known as The Squad – all women of colour – in which Trump said they should go back to the countries they came from. Three of them are American-born and the other is a naturalised US citizen who came to America as a child.

“I said, that’s a nativist, racist thing to say,” he says. “They said that to my Italian American grandmother in the 1920s. It hurt her feelings. She used to always talk about that with us. None of us speaks Italian because of that; because my grandmother was afraid of that racism.”

Trump is often accused of having no ideology, taking a purely transactional approach to decisions honed in his real-estate past. Scaramucci doesn’t agree. Instead, he categorises the 80-year-old’s ideology as one of three components: isolationism, xenophobia and anti-immigration.

Scaramucci believes that Trump and Steve Bannon (his former White House adviser, ex-convict and prominent Maga broadcaster) have a vision of an America that has been taken for granted by the world and should be walled off – at times, literally. “They would rather have the plastic cup made in the US for $5 (£3.70) than in China for five cents,” he says.

Despite some failures – he cites Afghanistan and Iraq – Scaramucci believes that the US has helped raise living standards around the world and, through legal migration, its own “intellectual capital” at home.

He recognises some of the Trumpian politics here in Britain, describing Reform UK leader Nigel Farage as a “dumber version of Trump”.

“He has Trump’s guile and shamelessness, and he’s got Trump’s corruptibility. But Trump is smart. He got to the American presidency twice. Farage doesn’t have the political instincts Trump has; he doesn’t have the bombast and the flair. In 2016, Trump had almost 100 per cent name recognition. Farage doesn’t have that.”

Farage has long aligned himself with Trump, making regular trips to the US, calling him a friend and suggesting his presidency bodes well for Reform.

Police are investigating Reform UK over allegations it broke foreign funding laws, which the party denies. Farage has personally come under parliamentary scrutiny for not declaring a £5m donation from a crypto billionaire. He said he did not need to do so because he received it before he became MP for Clacton and it was not political.

Two of Farage’s close advisers, Dan Jukes and James Orr, resigned this summer after a Channel 4 investigation appeared to show them discussing ways to get around electoral law.

Critics of the US President say he has been equally destructive abroad as at home, launching a war in Iran which has killed thousands, spooking the global economy, turning on allies and ditching international institutions. “If you said to me that in my lifetime an American president would reject Nato, threaten the invasion of Greenland, post pictures of putting the American flag over the provinces of Canada and Mexico and Greenland, I would tell you: that’s absolutely mad,” Scaramucci says.

He is particularly incredulous at Trump’s decision to cut back military aid to Ukraine as it faces a brutal Russian invasion, particularly after the 1994 treaty with Kyiv, when it handed over nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees.

“Putin has a hold on Donald Trump, and I don’t know why,” Scaramucci says, echoing fears around the US President’s threats to Nato and repetition of Russian rhetoric that – inadvertently or not – appears to play into the Russian leader’s hands. “We have an agent for Vladimir Putin at the top of the American government.”

A US government report found systematic Russian attempts to interfere with the 2016 election, including a social media campaign in support of Trump and intelligence work against Hillary Clinton. The New York Times exposed phone records and intercepted calls that showed Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election. Trump admitted that his son met a Russian lawyer to garner information on his opponent but argued it was legal.

“Trump challenging our electoral integrity in our country is full-on cynicism that somebody like Vladimir Putin would want in the West,” Scaramucci says.

On Venezuela, however, he thinks Trump was right. “Even though I despise the guy, he does deserve that win,” he says, noting that Nicolás Maduro was an unelected dictator and his removal was “a net positive to the West”.

Trump’s latest target is Ireland, with his comments supporting Irish reunification during his weekend visit threatening to blow open tensions there. But Scaramucci brushes this off. “I think if it was said by Barack Obama or Bill Clinton or a president that was viewed as a normal person and not a bipolar maniac, I think it would be taken more seriously. But I think that commentary will be wrapping fish in two weeks.”

Scaramucci may have done a U-turn on Trump, but believes the US President too has changed, morphing into a “hard-right ultra-nationalist and an ardent and strident social conservative”. His slide to the right has been accompanied by growing concerns about his health. Earlier this year, 30 senior doctors signed a statement declaring Trump was mentally unfit to serve and that his ability to launch nuclear weapons was a “danger” to the world.

Scaramucci has previously claimed Trump has been “losing it, mentally” but dismisses theories that the President has dementia as “BS”, putting the change down to a combination of age and status. Trump became the oldest US president to be sworn in to office when he returned to power in February 2025 aged 78.

“Has he declined? We’re all declining,” says Scaramucci. “There’s also the imperial nature of the presidency: the majesty, the power, the pomp, which has also changed him. Obama said it better than me: the presidency, if you’re a good guy coming into the presidency, you can magnify your good-guyness. If you’re a bad guy coming into the presidency, guess what? It’s going to magnify your bad-guyness.”

With such ideological chasms between Scaramucci and his former boss, how did he end up as Trump’s professional attack dog?

“I’m a 30-year Republican presidential fundraiser,” he explains. His political work began with Bob Dole in 1996, and in the 2016 Republican primaries, he worked for candidates Scott Walker and Jeb Bush before they dropped out of the race. Trump was his third choice, Scaramucci says, and he initially didn’t take the tycoon’s candidacy seriously.

“Like most Republicans, I was reluctant to be with him, and I ended up with him by default because he won. Now, I have said it repeatedly, and I’ll say it to you, that was probably the biggest mistake of my career. Jeb Bush told me not to go work for him. I didn’t listen to him.”

Over time, Scaramucci says he got “sucked in like everybody else”.

He adds: “You get sucked into your own bullshit of power and significance, and then you start to equivocate, and then you start to lose yourself. You become a moral hypocrite like everybody else that goes to work for Donald Trump.”

It was a mistake that nearly cost him his marriage. In July 2017, Scaramucci’s pregnant wife Deidre Ball filed for divorce, and later that month he missed the birth of his son James because he was on board Air Force One. The couple later reconciled.

Many Republicans, Scaramucci argues, are “still lying to themselves, trying to justify their support of Trump and all the stupid shit that they do”.

He insists: “I don’t do that. I say: the guy’s a f**king asshole.”

But he believes the tide is turning on Trump. Republicans on the campaign trail are, he says, distancing themselves from the President, scrubbing his name from websites and campaign posters. His approval rating is hovering around 33 per cent of registered voters, a record low.

Trump supporters, Scaramucci thinks, are experiencing “buyer’s remorse”. A quarter of his fans are diehard and will be with him no matter what because of the “anger-based politics” that exists now, he believes, but independents feel misled. Trump promised to lower prices and end forever wars, but has increased both, he adds.

Polling indicates that the Republicans will be punished for this at November’s midterm elections, losing the House of Representatives and possibly the Senate. But if the Democrats pick a leader further to the left, they could still lose, Scaramucci believes, saying Americans “don’t like wokeism and the culture war stuff”. At the next presidential election, his money would be on California Governor Gavin Newsom or Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, both of whom he believes could beat almost any Republican.

Despite Trump’s comments on 2028, Scaramucci disputes theories that the President will try to change the constitution to give himself another term in office. He thinks the US government will be able to constrain Trump, or that the President will struggle to pull it off. “The good news about Trump is he’s very disorganised. He has the attention span of a fruit fly. He’s going to be 82, and he’s universally disliked. If he was 51, I’d say: you’ve got a huge problem with this guy.”

In response to Scaramucci’s criticism, White House spokesman Davis Ingle told The i Paper: “Anthony Scaramucci lasted 11 short days in the White House. He makes lightweights look credible.”

When Trump eventually departs the Oval Office, Scaramucci is not sure how long it will take the Republicans to return to the “old legacy party” he supported. But he believes the “populist anger” gripping America, fuelled by spiralling inflation, won’t disappear overnight: “This is economic desperation, as opposed to aspiration.”

His new book, he says, is an attempt to unpick how the US got here. It is not a hit piece, nor is it tribal, he insists. There are well-intentioned characters of different political persuasions – like Barack Obama and George Bush, who Scaramucci feels were trying to do the right thing – as well as villains. Trump falls in the latter category, with Scaramucci describing him as a fundamentally “malevolent person”.

He says: “It’s an objective observation of mistakes that we made, Democrats and Republicans… that led to the anger-based populism that we’re living in today. I believe that the platform I’ve been given, due to the infamy of my firing, is giving me a standing to at least object to what is going on and to offer some ideas.”

Would he ever run for office himself? “I’m not well suited for that.” Why? “I don’t think I’m a congenital liar,” he says, smiling. He would, however, be willing to back another candidate with fundraising and media support.

Though his fall from power may have been dramatic, it is clear Scaramucci is far from done with US politics. After his role in creating the problem, he says: “I would like to be part of the solution.”

All the Wrong Moves by Anthony Scaramucci (The Bodley Head, £25) is published on 17 September

Key context

Anthony Scaramucci studied at Harvard Law School before beginning his Wall Street career at Goldman Sachs and going on to become an influential figure in the cryptocurrency and blockchain world. He has written six books

He was fired from the Trump administration after giving a profanity-laced interview to The New Yorker in which he called White House chief of staff Reince Priebus a “paranoid schizophrenic” and made vulgar comments about chief strategist Steve Bannon

Scaramucci is a long-term Republican donor but his support has shifted across party lines. He fundraised for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign (later asking Obama when he would “stop whacking Wall Street like a piñata“) and donated to Hillary Clinton before serving as national finance co-chair for Republican Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign and becoming a Trump backer. In the 2024 presidential elections, he supported Kamala Harris