U..S. President Donald Trump gestures at the site of ongoing construction of the planned White House ballroom in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 19, 2026, REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
President Donald Trump’s former communications director has a warning for members of the Trump administration — this president eats his young.
“There’s one thing every rising star in Trump’s orbit eventually learns the hard way,” Anthony Scaramucci, a financier who served Trump during his first term, posted on X on Sunday. He eats his young. And if you don’t believe me, ask Pence, ask Pompeo, ask Nikki Haley.”
Mike Pence was Trump’s vice president, who he blamed for not helping him steal the 2020 presidential election. Mike Pompeo was Trump’s secretary of state and Haley was his UN ambassador, and he threw them under the bus when there were controversial foreign policy decisions in which they were involved. Perhaps not coincidentally, Scaramucci pivoted from there to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
“So I think if Rubio’s smart, he resigns on his own terms — before Trump does it for him,” Scaramucci wrote.
Since leaving the White House, Scaramucci has been an outspoken critic of Trump. He has posted on X on various occasions criticizing the president on a number of fronts.
“Trump's third tariff tantrum piles more dizzying distractions on top of ever-spiraling failures,” Scaramucci posted on X earlier in July. Similarly, early in July Scaramucci wrote that “America has a structural problem. When you gerrymander your district and screen out everyone who doesn’t already agree with you, you never have to modify your positions. You never have to meet anyone in the middle. You just keep winning by playing to your base.”
Notably, Scaramucci argued that the teleprompter operator who was accused of using inside information on Trump’s speech to trade on prediction markets was thrown under the bus because he is not wealthy enough for the president to care about his fate.
“I think the problem with what's happening with the teleprompter guy — he probably heard the president say that he was going to pardon everybody inside 200 to 250 feet of the White House, as reported in ‘Regime Change’ by Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman,” Scaramucci told MS NOW host Nicolle Wallace in July. “But he doesn't qualify, the poor kid, because he doesn't make enough money. He's not influential enough, and his last name isn't Trump. So the kid's obviously in a lot of trouble, and he's going to pay the price while the president's going to go on to make several billion dollars for himself.”
In terms of the president’s own insider trading, Scaramucci said he does not see any problem with it.
“He sees it as incredibly smart: ‘Look how smart I am. The other people that held his position, they couldn't do this. Look how great I am,’” Scaramucci argued. “While Barack Obama had a seven- or eight-page financial disclosure, he had a phone book of 927 pages. And, oh, by the way — you pointed this out — he thinks it's peanuts compared to what the tech blogs make, etc. He also thinks a lot of the stuff that he's doing is legal.”