Anthony Scaramucci, the former White House communications director and SkyBridge Capital founder, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Tuesday that he expects President Donald Trump to be “trounced” in the U.S. midterms and foresees a “civil war” for the Republican Party in its wake.
Scaramucci said America is in the grip of an economic and cultural battle as the two principal parties put forward “two different visions of where the country should go.”
“I think the president’s going to get trounced, by the way, and I think he knows he’s going to get trounced,” he said. The only customer relations survey one can do on the American president is at the midterms, and “people are not happy.”
Trump made promises of affordability, transparency on the Epstein files and an end to forever wars, according to Scaramucci. “He didn’t deliver on any of that stuff, and so there’s a lot of people inside MAGA that are now also breaking from him.”
After his 10 days as White House communications director in 2017, during Trump’s first term, Scaramucci has since turned into a regular critic. He called the Democratic Party’s “disarray” “the best thing that has happened for Donald Trump.”
But if Trump is beaten in the midterms, he said, the Democrats will be eager to get to the bottom of what is happening in the administration, and Congressional investigations will be “the main show.”
As for the Republicans, “I think there’ll be a great intellectual civil war,” he said. “The Republicans are going to have to reconcile where do they want to go.” It’s “no longer the party of Ronald Reagan, certainly not the party of George W. Bush,” he added, but “is it the party of Donald Trump after he leaves the stage?”
Getting away from the MAGA movement will take some time, he said. “There’ll be DNA elements of MAGA in the next presidential candidate for sure,” Scaramucci said.
With several hundred million dollars of Trump’s PAC money looming over the 2028 race, candidates will not want to put too much distance between themselves and him. “So there will be elements of MAGA, but I also think there’ll be a civil war in that party.”
MAGA and the America First faction have already split outside of the White House. Former Trump supporters such as Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene have distanced themselves, accusing the 80-year-old president of betraying the America First agenda.
The Epstein Files and the Iran war have been a sticking point for the America First coalition, which voted for Trump based on his pledge to not start new wars and focus on economic growth.
