President Donald Trump’s former communications director is going forward saying that his former boss is bad for America — and that even when he is gone, his legacy will endure.
“Trump is a symptom, not the disease,” Scaramucci posted on X on Wednesday. “If it wasn’t him it would be someone else with the same narcissistic, populist impulses — because the underlying conditions that created him haven’t changed.”
He added, “The median home in the US is $430,000. You need about $150,000 in income to cover the mortgage and have any discretionary money left. The median salary is $84,000. That’s a $50,000 gap. Fifty years ago 80% of Americans could afford the dream. Today it’s out of reach for at least half the country.”
Scaramucci argued that this rising economic inequality and suffering explains why so many Americans supported Trump.
“When people feel the system is rigged against them and nobody in power is fixing it, they check out,” Scaramucci said. “When they check out long enough, someone like Trump comes along and becomes the avatar for all that anger. They adhere to him even when he’s doing the exact opposite of what he promised. The idea that when Trump loses power in 2028 things revert to normal — that’s not going to happen.”
The ex-communications director concluded that, because this dire context still exists, Trumpism is unlikely to go away even after Trump is no longer president.
“The conditions that created him will still be there,” Scaramucci said. “Until we fix those, we’re just waiting for the next one.”
On Tuesday Scaramucci observed that Trump’s economic policies in general are setting Americans up for a worse standard of living than they had previously known.
“If Barack Obama had done half of what Trump is doing now, Fox News would have been calling for impeachment,” Anthony Scaramucci, former White House Communications Director during Trump’s first term, posted on X on Tuesday. He was referring to how Trump’s spending, much of it unauthorized by Congress, is on pace to reach $9 to $10 trillion by the start of 2029
He added, “Trump has no economic philosophy. He spent $8.2 trillion in his first term and he's on pace for $9 to $10 trillion in this one. We'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.”
He even claimed his Wall Street friends oppose Trump’s policies.
"Trump is too dangerous,” Scaramucci said earlier this month. “It’s funny, all my Wall Street buddies voted for him and now they’re regretting the fact," later clarifying that "most of the people are.”
"I’m of the belief that prices are higher,” Scaramucci added. “We have an oil crisis. He imposed illegal tariffs, which raised the pricing umbrella for all the lower-middle-income people that voted for him. He’s put us in a very vulnerable state as a country and an economy. If you want to make the case that the banks have record profits in the short term, sure — but he’s also suing some of the banking executives. You are losing the predictive capability of our justice system — what our civil rights are, what our free speech rights are. It’s very, very bad for business."
Speaking with this author for Salon in 2018, Scaramucci argued that Trump’s political movement is fueled by economic suffering.
“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.’”


