Former aide details the exact moment he realized Trump was destructive

An edited excerpt from Anthony Scaramucci’s new book All the Wrong Moves in the Saturday issue of the Guardian reveals President Donald Trump’s communications director quickly picked up on the chaos of Trump’s first administration.

“Working for Trump wasn’t just a huge mistake. It gave me the opportunity to make a lot of other huge mistakes. I got famous for them, and in the fallout, my whole life looked like it would fall apart,” said Scaramucci, who now an avowed and vocal criticcritic of his former employer. He added that he learned quick that the administration was a series of leaky, hostile silos.

“Trump had offered me a job: director of the Office of Public Liaison, the White House unit that interacts with interest groups. Reince Priebus, Trump’s chief of staff, blocked that appointment. Steve Bannon, the chief strategist, was also against my working in the White House. I was a traditional moderate Republican type with connections to Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner,” Scaramucci said. The Kushner group made up one silo in the administration. Priebus made another silo: the Republican National Committee. Bannon was MAGA far right. All silos were mutually hostile: Priebus and Bannon were leaking on each other constantly. But they allied in not wanting me anywhere near Trump.”

Later, Scaramucci said both Priebus and Bannon tried to waylay him with an ambassador appointment.

“They asked me to meet with them before the Oval Office announcement. So I met with them in the chief of staff’s office and called them (CENSORED) who were leaking on each other and hurting the president. In other words, things were not going well. Already,” said Scaramucci, who describes himself as “a front stabber.”

Later, after landing his communications job, Scaramucci said he got a call from a Capitol Hill operative, complaining that he was doing his job too well.

“You’re getting too much attention. You’re talking in complete sentences. Trump’s gonna … fire you. Be careful.’ I said to myself, ‘I’m never doing another press conference.’ But that wasn’t going to work. Because I couldn’t read the situation. Meaning I couldn’t read Trump,” said Scaramucci.

But then Trump changed after winning his first term, he added.

“During the campaign, when I thought Trump was doing something stupid, I’d say, ‘This is … stupid.’ And he would look at me and say, ‘Well, why is it stupid?’ And then, if he agreed with me, he wouldn’t do it; and if he didn’t agree, he would keep doing it. He told Jared Kushner I reminded him of his dad, Fred Trump. I said whatever was on my mind; I was classic New York; I made money on my own, didn’t inherit it from my father. So he sought out my opinions,” Scaramucci said.

But he made the mistake of remaining frank after Trump’s victory. And honesy, he realized, would no longer do.

“Right away, I now see, it irritated the hell out of him. He was president of the United States. He expected to be flattered with total obsequiousness by everybody he talked to. I didn’t see it then,” Scaramucci said.

When Trump wanted to veto a Russia sanctions bill over election interference, Scaramucci advised against it for the simple fact that Trump’s “own team” [of Republicans] had passed it.

“He looked me straight in the face. ‘They can’t do that. I’m the president of the United States.’ ‘They can do that,’ I said. Now we were doing eighth‑grade social studies. He picked up the phone and called the general counsel, Don McGahn. Probably as startled as I was that he had to explain it, McGahn confirmed that, with a supermajority, Congress can override a presidential veto.”

Soon after that, Kushner was telling Scaramucci that he’d “embarrassed Trump and was probably going to lose [his] job.” And he did.

But by 2019, Scaramucci said it was harder to defend the president due to the constant policy goalpost shifting.

“Trump was exploiting the suffering of the people for his own narcissistic and malevolent ends,” said Scaramucci. When he called out Trump for demanding certain Democratic lawmakers “go back” to the countries they came from, it triggered a “flame war” on Twitter, forcing Scaramucci to break not only with Trump but the Republican Party.

“He’d picked a vulnerable major party, my party, and went after it and did a mergers-and-acquisitions transaction. Even as I was separating from the party, the rebranded Trump-GOP was magnifying itself. Guys like Henry Kissinger and Dick Cheney started leaving. And people like Marco Rubio started going all in,” he said.

“But if I hadn’t gone through it, if I hadn’t been forced toward a moral and existential reckoning, I never could have arrived at the ideas about our country and our crisis that I have now,” Scaramucci said. “I’m more empathetic, more psychologically minded; I know myself better. I’m aware of the frailty of others – and my own frailty, too. I bought into Trump, and I almost lost myself.”