President Donald Trump’s former communications director has a surprising prediction — namely, that the Republican’s abuses of power will actually help Democrats if they can take advantage of them.
“Trump’s grift will be caught,” Anthony Scaramucci said in an X post on Thursday. “It always gets caught. The insider trading, the crypto grift, the international bribes, the ballroom donors getting contracts, the pardons going for five to ten million dollars a piece, there will be a reckoning for all of it.”
Yet despite this “disgusting” conduct, Scaramucci argued that a Democratic president who is “reform-based” could avail themselves of the opportunity to strengthen American democracy.
“Every norm broken, every standard flouted, every weakness in the system exposed, it’s all documented,” Scaramucci wrote. “That’s actually the roadmap for reform. Trump has been so brazen about all of it that he’s inadvertently shown us exactly what needs to be fixed.”
Earlier this month, Scaramucci went so far as to say that Trump is openly admitting to his corruption.
“Trump said something outside a press gaggle that I don’t think enough people caught,” Anthony Scaramucci posted on X. “A reporter called him out on the corruption. He gave three responses.”
The Wall Street expert then summarized Trump’s replies to questions about his $1.8 billion slush fund as essentially arguing that “1. I have the right to do it. 2. He’s not stealing that much. A billion or two billion dollars. Not that much money. Classic Trump. 3. People don’t care.”
He concluded, “That’s the permission structure. Our collective apathy is what they’re using to justify everything happening in Washington right now.”
In May Scaramucci claimed that Trump has “no economic philosophy,” adding that the president’s spending will increase the debt to $9 trillion to $10 trillion by 2030.
“If Barack Obama had done half of what Trump is doing now, Fox News would have been calling for impeachment,” Scaramucci said. “... [W]e're at 100 percent debt to GDP held by investors — 122 percent if you count the Fed's balance sheet. Ray Dalio will tell you those numbers put you in sovereign debt crisis territory. And when that happens, the only way politicians are willing to pay for it is through inflation. Which is the cruelest possible outcome, because inflation is the worst tax you can impose on lower and middle income people.”
Speaking with this author for Salon in 2018, the then-Trump supporter argued that the Republican was winning over voters by speaking to their working class concerns.
“What I saw was in a generation we went from aspirational working class families, like the one I grew up in, to [desperate] working class families,” Scaramucci said. “What I saw is a decline in wages causing some level of economic asphyxiation for a very large group of people. And so Trump being out there, going into those areas, explaining the policies that he’s going to put in place, and then executing on some of those policies. I mean it’s not me saying, it’s just go look at ‘The Wall Street Journal.’”
