Scaramucci feud: The Mooch's side of it

Even after John Kelly, then the chief of staff, fired him in the aftermath of his profanity-laced diatribe against other members of the White House staff that appeared in the New Yorker, Scaramucci stayed loyal to Trump, defending him publicly on TV spot after TV spot. But now, nearly two years later, the Mooch has soured bigly on Trump—and vice versa.

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A Harvard Law School graduate with working-class roots from Port Washington, Long Island, he’s not one to back down and is happy to go toe-to-toe with the most powerful man on Earth. I’ve been reporting on the Mooch for years, and so was curious about just what he is up to this time. What follows is a lightly edited and condensed version of our recent conversation, now that Scaramucci has decided to throw cold water on the man he calls “The Wicked Witch of the West Wing.”

  Vanity Fair

I like that. Fits with the witch hunt, too.

"Oh my god, this jackass. You know, it’s all good. I mean, it could be the best three or four days ever, actually."

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The red line was the racism—full-blown racism. He can say that he’s not a racist, and I agree with him, okay? And let me explain to you why he’s not a racist, ’cause this is very important. He’s actually worse than a racist. He is so narcissistic, he doesn’t see people as people. He sees them as objects in his field of vision. And so therefore, that’s why he has no empathy. That’s why he’s got his thumb up in the air when he’s taking a picture with an orphan. That’s why when someone’s leaning over the desk and asks [Nobel Prize–winning human rights activist Nadia Murad], “Well, what happened to your family members?”—they were murdered—he just looks at her and says, “Okay, when are we getting coffee here?”

/You know, he doesn’t look at people—and by the way, if you and I were in his field of vision and he had a cold and the two of us had to die for him to get a Kleenex, you’re fucking dead. I mean, there’s no chance. You understand that, right?

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He has declining mental faculties; he’s becoming more petulant; he’s becoming more impetuous. Okay, you see just by the way he’s sweating, his body’s not doing well. It’s obviously not a guy that takes care of himself, right? And he doesn’t listen to anybody. And just think about this, okay? There’s no one—there’s no Jim Mattis; there’s no Gary Cohn; there’s no one to check him anymore. Whatever my differences were with General John Kelly, after he left, this thing has completely unspooled.

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I don’t have Trump derangement syndrome, but what I do have is Trump fatigue syndrome. It’s a very different thing, okay? And I submit to you that the nation, my party members, all have Trump fatigue syndrome.

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Trump has figured out a way to push people so that the average person says, “Okay, wait a minute.” They’ve lost their—they’re too emotionally invested in hating. I don’t hate him. He needs to be dismantled because he’s un-American; he’s hurting our civics, and he’s hurting our culture.

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This is an observational objective thing: the guy’s nuts. We’ve gotta defeat him. Everybody in the Republican Party knows it. They don’t want to lose their mantle of power and their mantle of leadership, so let’s primary the guy.

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He’s gonna drop out of the race because it’s gonna become very clear. Okay, it’ll be March of 2020. He’ll likely drop out by March of 2020. It’s gonna become very clear that it’s impossible for him to win. And is this the kind of guy that’s gonna want to be that humiliated and lose as a sitting president? He’s got the self-worth in terms of his self-esteem of a small pigeon. [...] And by the way, he is smart enough to know that that entire Congress hates his guts.

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So therefore, that’s why he amps up the bullying: let me show you what I’m gonna do to Scaramucci. I’m gonna disgrace and bully him, okay, and therefore he’s gonna now become a pariah, and that’s what I’m gonna do to you if you open your mouth about me. But what I've just proven, you can’t really disgrace me.

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[T]here’s gotta be somebody in the Republican Party that’s worried about 2024 and the identity of the Republican Party.

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We had the Wicked Witch of the West, but he is the Wicked Witch of the West Wing. We gotta get some water thrown on him. He’ll start melting.

But he may well melt down the whole earth first.