Anthony Scaramucci is mercilessly roasting me for ordering French toast.
“This motherf---er, he’s got a metabolism like a coal furnace, he’s having French toast. If I had French toast, I’d be in a f---ing coma. No, I’d be an extra five kilos, but I’d also be in a coma,” he says.
Scaramucci, the Wall Street financier and one-time Donald Trump whisperer, is content to enviously pick at a bowl of berries with a side of yoghurt when we meet for breakfast in the cafe at the Capella Hotel up the road from Circular Quay.
“The Mooch”, as he’s affectionately known, is a man in high demand. He’s flown into Sydney to headline the Sohn Hearts & Minds conference at the Opera House, an investment community jamboree that raises money for charity. He landed in London the night before, and will leave Sydney the next day for the brutal 24-hour return to New York.
Thanks to that punishing schedule, our “lunch with” has become a brief “breakfast with”. Not that the early start, or jet lag, stops your correspondent from getting the full Scaramucci experience.
The Mooch talks fast and he talks big. He drops expletives liberally and greets me with jokes about the “fake news media” followed by a conciliatory bear hug.
And he has the self-deprecating sense of humour that emerges when your claim to fame is being a global punchline.
The joke that preceded the punchline was the first Trump presidency. Scaramucci became White House communications director in July 2017, and infamously lasted just 11 days in an episode that would come to symbolise the chaos and dysfunction that plagued Trump’s Washington.
The whole thing began to unravel when Scaramucci phoned The New Yorker’s Washington correspondent, Ryan Lizza, and launched into a lengthy, profanity-laden tirade that involved some extremely colourful editorialising about a couple of his White House colleagues.
Scaramucci insisted the conversation was off the record. Lizza, and The New Yorker, said it was not, and duly hit publish. Five days later, the Mooch was fired. There has never been a shorter-serving communications director.
“I made a mistake in trusting in a reporter. It won’t happen again,” he tweeted.
Mercifully, our breakfast is entirely on the record, and the Mooch seems in a trusting enough mood. The conversation is made easier by the fact that these days, Scaramucci, 61, has no trouble telling the world how he really feels about Trump.
“If you’re inside Trump’s near orbit you hate his guts. Don’t forget that,” he says.
“He’s [Trump] in it for the money and he’s in it for the attention. He’s not in it to serve the American people or to make the country better. He’s into punishing people. He believes in humiliation rituals, particularly for our allies.”
When Trump gave Prime Minister Anthony Albanese the cold shoulder for months, there were widespread fears Australia would be subject to such a humiliation ritual.
Instead, Scaramucci says, the prime minister and ambassador Kevin Rudd played the Trump game well.
“Remember, you’re going on stage in a live reality television show that’s being produced by Donald Trump. And so you can go in there reactive, and then you’re going to get destroyed.”
Unlike Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, or South African president Cyril Ramaphosa, Rudd and Albo went in and “co-produced” the production. As for Rudd’s now deleted mean tweets about the president?
“If you’re sending out critical tweets of Trump he has way more respect for you than you think because he hates himself,” Scaramucci tells me.
“He’s a bad human being, prima facie bad human being. And he’s prima facie out to hurt people.”
How, and why then, did Scaramucci end up working for such a bad person?
A blue-collar Italian-American kid from Long Island, Scaramucci hustled and bustled his way into the East Coast elite by way of Harvard Law (where he was a contemporary of Barack Obama) and Goldman Sachs, before starting his own investment firm, SkyBridge Capital.
Along the way, he crossed paths with Trump, another quintessential New Yawker, and the pair had known each other for two decades before the 2016 election.
“You can never say that you’re friends with Donald Trump because then you’re overstating the relationship. You’re an acquaintance. It’s quite transactional,” the twice-married father of five says.
Scaramucci describes himself as a lifelong Republican with a lower-case “r” (he believes in things like same-sex marriage and women’s reproductive rights, and is envious of Australia’s gun control regime).
Truth be told, the Mooch had been a little politically flirtatious, supporting Obama in 2008, Republican Mitt Romney in 2012, and working on the doomed campaign of GOP frontrunner Jeb Bush in the 2016 primaries.
When Bush dropped out, Scaramucci joined the Trump campaign.
“I made a decision to go work for Donald Trump, which was a combination of ego-based decision-making and moral equivocation,” Scaramucci says.
It was, the Mooch says, a big mistake. But it’s a mistake that has made him famous.
Trump’s celebrity is radioactive. The MAGA-verse is full of people who owe money, power and influence to their decision to kiss the presidential ass. Similarly, there is a thriving cottage industry of Republican rebels, whose excoriating of their old party, coupled with insider-ish commentary on the Trump circus, has found a vast audience among liberal types equal parts fascinated and repulsed by the binfire in the Oval Office.
Legend has it that Scaramucci once paid $100,000 for a brief cameo in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. Trump has given the Mooch far more fame than 15 seconds in a middling 2010 sequel ever could.
“He probably made me infamous more than famous, but I think weirdly, he gave me a platform to speak out against him,” he says.
Ever the savvy entrepreneur, Scaramucci has made the most of that platform. He’s the co-host of The Rest is Politics: US, an American spin-off of the hugely popular British original.
Scaramucci thought it would take an hour of his time for a couple of months before last year’s presidential election. Instead, he’s doing about 20 hours a week on the show, which is still going strong.
“I think Trump sucks for everything, but he’s great for the podcast,” he tells me.
“If [Kamala] Harris won, would the podcast be as popular? Probably not.”
My French toast arrives, fluffy and dusted in brown sugar. The Mooch resumes his roasting, and demands the waiter summon a side of butter because “I want him to be in a diabetic coma by the time the interview’s over”.
The week before we meet has been another aeon in American politics. The longest government shutdown in US political history ended. More documents concerning the affairs of deceased paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein were released. And in Scaramucci’s hometown, 34-year-old Muslim democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani claimed a stunning victory in the New York City mayoral race, sending shock waves through a geriatric, painfully timid Democratic establishment.
Mamdani wasn’t Scaramucci’s first pick, but he understands his allure to younger New Yorkers frustrated by escalating housing costs and uninspired by the city’s current leadership.
“The Mamdani election is a message from the younger generation. You guys suck, and we would like to try something different,” Scaramucci says.
And while the mayor-elect’s populist tax and spend program triggered plenty of bed-wetting about billionaires fleeing the Upper East Side for the likes of West Palm Beach, Scaramucci says the idea that Wall Street will abandon Wall Street is all a bit of bluster.
“J.P. Morgan just built a $2.7 billion corporate office. Where are they going? They’re not going anywhere. I’m not going anywhere,” he says.
Mamdani (who is Ugandan-born and cannot run for president) might be the future in New York, but on the national stage, Scaramucci likes California Governor Gavin Newsom as a top Democratic hopeful for the 2028 presidential race.
He describes former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg as exceptionally talented, but worries that the openly gay politician’s sexuality will hurt him in the African American community.
“That polling is near zero and again,” he says.
Will there even be a new president in 2028? Despite Trump’s constant musing about disregarding the Constitution and seeking a third term, and Congress being, in the Mooch’s words “a bunch of weenies and jellyfishes”, Scaramucci isn’t giving up on American democracy.
“Go through the 250-year history of America – we have spasms of self-doubt, then we have reflection, and then we have renewal,” he says.
Before that, America must endure another three years under an increasingly erratic president. And a vengeful one. Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has used the Department of Justice to settle old political scores, with former FBI director James Comey, and New York Attorney-General Letitia James both facing criminal indictments brought against them by prosecutors hand-picked by the president.
Does the Mooch fear becoming a target?
“I mean, if he’s going to come after me, let him come after me. I’m a big boy,” he says.
“But hopefully you and I will build a good rapport. You’ll come visit me in jail.”
This article was originally posted by The Sydney Morning Herald here.
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