President Donald Trump’s former White House communications director has a warning for the American people: He is preparing to send ground troops into Iran.
In response to Trump declaring on Monday that he is going to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Age,” Anthony Scaramucci warned on the social media platform X that the president is using bombastic rhetoric to tenderize public sensibilities for his actual war plans.
“He's softening the public up for ground troops,” Scaramucci wrote. “That's the tell. You don't talk like that unless you're preparing people psychologically for what comes next. And what comes next — I have it at 55 to 60 percent probability — is ground troops going into Iran.”
He added, “And once ground troops are in, everything changes. The Strait of Hormuz situation becomes infinitely more complex.”
When AlterNet reached out to the White House last month about economists’ claims that Iran targeting the Strait of Hormuz in response to America’s invasion would raise oil prices, a spokesperson replied that the economists making that claim are “idiots.”
“Oil flow becomes a live variable in a shooting war and here's the piece nobody is talking about loudly enough,” Scaramucci wrote. “Forty to 50 percent of that oil flows to China. If ground troops go in and the Strait gets disrupted — we are simultaneously slowing down the Chinese economy. That is not a side effect. That may be part of the calculation.”
Yet while Trump may like the idea of hurting the Chinese economy, Scaramucci noted that this will almost certainly lead to economic reprisals against America.
“But you are playing with fire at a scale that has consequences for every economy on earth including ours,” Scaramucci wrote. “$300 oil doesn't just hurt China. It destroys the American consumer. Think carefully about what you're being prepared to accept.”
Speaking with The Guardian last month, Scaramucci warned that Trump continues to be a powerful president despite his falling approval ratings amidst fallout from growing awareness of his longtime friendship with the late child sex trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein.
"You can never count him out,” Scaramucci explained. “The Epstein files won't knock him out. I've said that consistently." He also explained why Trump is always so "angry."
"You have to get comfortable with being an outsider," Scaramucci told The Guardian. "Trump is an outsider, but he’s an uncomfortable outsider, and so, he has a chip on his shoulder. He's angry that he can't get into the salons of the uber-wealthy, the establishment. So now, he's trying to lord over them. He couldn't get into certain golf clubs that the bluebloods were members of, so he built himself golf courses.”
Speaking with this journalist for Salon Magazine in 2018, Scaramucci said that he believed both Trump and his critics engage in too much “identity politics” and that this interferes with their ability to effectively serve the American people.
“I always felt that the most successful politicians would take an adage from what Harry Truman said about himself,” Scaramucci said at the time. “He said, ‘Listen, I am a lobbyist, and it’s my job to represent all Americans, whether they voted for me or they didn’t,’ and that’s the role of the president. I would like to see more of that and less of the identity politics.”
He then added, “Now, to be fair to the president, you would probably say, ‘Well, it happens on both sides, and so I’m just responding to the way they’re acting.’ Then they would say, ‘Well, we’re responding to the way he’s acting.’ Then I would say, ‘Okay, why don’t we both dial it up back and let’s focus less on what’s left and right about the situation or left and right policy, and focus more on right or wrong policy.’”