The Mooch on The Mooch: Anthony Scaramucci Has a Few Thoughts

(Bloomberg) -- The Mooch, a.k.a., Anthony Scaramucci, wants to get a few things straight about those 11 days in the White House.

Yes, he has regrets. He was, he says, seduced by it all -- by the presidency, the Oval Office, Air Force One, the lot of it. He’s a “flawed” person, a bit of a “romantic.” He’s tried to atone for his “mistake” -- his word -- of serving Donald John Trump.

Slick-haired, Windsor-knotted, the entire North Shore of Long Island in his accent, Scaramucci was always one of Wall Street’s favorite characters on Trump Island. He is, after all, one of them, unabashedly promoting, packaging and monetizing the singular product that is the Mooch.

He’s also been the butt of a few jokes, too, as the Mooch is quick to admit. His nickname has entered the lexicon: a “Scaramucci” has come to mean a period of 11 days, the time he lasted as communications director before being defenestrated following that infamous remark about Steve Bannon.

“Jeez, I thought I’m gonna last longer than a carton of milk in the refrigerator,” Scaramucci says.

Now, with less than a Scaramucci left to go for the Trump administration, the Mooch is sitting behind the desk of his basement office in the upscale hamlet of Manhasset, 20 miles from Manhattan, musing on what it all meant. He’s wearing a dark suit, his hair quaffed just so, a rendering of a 1976 Superboy comic book on the wall behind him.

Those 11 days nearly cost him his marriage, he says. And also nearly his stake in SkyBridge Capital. But the Mooch has endured, even prospered. He’s got a new Bitcoin fund that’s been getting press. He’s got MoochFM, a weekly podcast. He was recently out in Iowa with the man who fired him, former Trump White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, whom he now calls a close friend.

“You cannot fully understand Donald Trump until you’re inside that first-electron orbit around him,” Scaramucci says of the only American president to be impeached twice. The Mooch says he was horrified watching the Capitol siege on Jan. 6 – his 57th birthday, as it happens.

“And I’m sitting in my home watching this unfold and I’m thinking, OK, Jesus Christ, my birthday is going to go down with 9/11 and Dec. 7, because this is one of the more horrific days in American history,” he says. He reconsiders. “It’s certainly – I don’t want to compare it to 9/11,” he says. Thousands died that day. “But in a very weird way, from an ideological perspective and from an ethereal perspective to the United States, this was worse.”

Soon the Mooch is on a tear, and he goes there: Nazis, Hitler, Goebbels, the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, Trump-as-Russian-operative. He pauses mid-interview to tweet out a phrase that just came to him: “Trump-Qaeda.”

“At best, he’s a useful idiot for the Russians,” Scaramucci says of Trump. “At best, OK?” He predicts Trump will be convicted by the Senate and possibly face other legal consequences.

Some in Trump’s Washington will carry a taint from their time there; many others won’t, Scaramucci predicts. Mick Mulvaney, for instance, has taken a page out of the Mooch’s book and is opening a small hedge fund. Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, will probably land back in the world of finance, Scaramucci says.

The most troubling legacy of the Trump years is that the nation has normalized so much of it, Scaramucci says.

Only the day before the Capitol was stormed, he says, Scaramucci participated in a virtual CEOs forum and warned the executives, “I have a very, very bad feeling about tomorrow,” he says.

“And several of them said, ‘Calm down, calm down!’ You know, ‘No way, no way!’ OK, but I know the guy. And that’s how I started our conversation. I know the guy because, unfortunately, I was close enough.”

Scaramucci’s unequivocal conclusion: Trump has been bad for America. “And I regret working for the man, for sure, because he’s a malignant person,” he says.

Then he adds: “But I don’t regret the experience. You know, I flew on Air Force One. I was in the Oval Office. I got to read the intelligence briefings.” He drops a few names; he also considers former Attorney General Bill Barr a personal friend.

“You know what, I changed,” Scaramucci says. “It’s made me more self-aware, it’s made me more humble.”