It’s just after 6pm in New York, and Anthony Scaramucci is in the back seat of an Uber heading uptown.
He got the call a short time ago. A table has suddenly become available at Rao’s, the legendary Italian restaurant in East Harlem that’s more famous for being impossible to get into than its signature meatballs.
Scaramucci left his Madison Avenue office and is racing to get there by 7pm. “If I bomb out then I can’t go there anymore,” he says.
Known worldwide as “the Mooch”, Scaramucci is speaking to The Australian via video link.
The fast-talking Wall Street hedge fund manager from the Italian suburbs of Long Island was catapulted onto the global stage when he was tapped by Donald Trump, to become communications head during the US President’s first administration. It was 2017 and The Mooch lasted just 10 days in the job before he was fired by Trump amid an acrimonious falling out.
Scaramucci had known Trump for more than two decades before he became president. They first met when The Mooch was at Goldman Sachs, but the two connected over their big personalities and all things New York. That gulf is now so great, Scaramucci has labelled Trump as “dangerous” and endorsed former vice president Kamala Harris in her failed bid for the White House.
Seeing Trump up close in business and private long before his political career, Scaramucci knows what makes the President tick. It all comes down to two things: money and attention. Both forces are constantly vying to be at the top spot.
“When you look through the prism of what he’s doing, it is best to say: ‘Okay, what does that get him attention or money?’ Scaramucci says. “The tariff thing: the way he spun that, and the way he created that he put himself in the minds of every single business person in the world, every single media person, every single journalist”. The fact that (we) are talking about him, he would absolutely love that. He wants his name, his persona, his psyche infecting your brain.
Scaramucci pauses. “It’s almost like ‘Covid-19’ is like ‘Trump 2025’. It’s like he’s a virus, and he wants to be a pandemic on your brain. If you see him through that prism, and you say, ‘Okay, I see why he did that. I see why he went to 180 (per cent tariff) and now he’s at 30 on his way to zero, frankly, because it’ll go right back to where it was’ … He wants us talking about him.”
On the question of money, it’s how this benefits the Trump family’s investments. Scaramucci says last week’s tour of the Middle East’s richest counties will offer plenty of private investments.
“If you think the interests of the West, leading the free world, helping the MAGA base … if you think any of those things are even on the list, then you really don’t understand the guy”.
After the White House and his moment in the sun, Scaramucci returned to SkyBridge Capital, the hedge fund he founded after leaving Goldman Sachs. The aim of the fund was to connect the biggest-name wealthy clients in the hedge fund industry. SkyBridge has since become a major player in cryptocurrency markets, launching the Bitcoin Fund in 2021.
Scaramucci, who also runs his own podcast with BBC correspondent Katty Kay, will be headlining the 10th annual Sohn Hearts & Minds Investment Conference, which returns to the Sydney Opera House in November. All the proceeds from the conference go to medical research, with nearly $80m donated over the decade it’s been running in Australia.
(When he is in Australia, The Mooch is hoping to take a side trip to Melbourne: “I love that town. It has the best coffee in the world.”)
Market turmoil followed Trump unleashing his Liberation Day tariffs early last month, with a share market sell-off pushing Wall Street into bear-market territory. But as the turmoil spread to bond markets just over a week later, Trump started to back away. He outlined a three-month pause in punishing reciprocal tariffs and opened a window for negotiations. He held firm with China for several weeks. Two weekends ago, there was a dramatic walk back from both sides. Trump slashed his 145 per cent tariffs on China to 30 per cent for a three-month window. China also agreed to cut its retaliatory tariffs on US goods.
There’s good reason for the walk back, the former White House adviser says. While Trump initially shrugged off turmoil in equity markets, even he couldn’t ignore the warning signs in bonds.
Sharemarkets may have rebounded; there’s doubt still in bond markets. Over the weekend, Moody’s stripped the US of its rolled-gold AAA credit rating.
“Donald Trump does have a ruler, and that ruler is the bond market,” Scaramucci says.
“Which is why by April 9 he caused a pause (in tariffs)” and this month de-escalated with China.
No doubt the tariff execution was botched. Scaramucci gives the President credit; his political instincts are often right.
“There are some trade imbalances with China that we in the West should rectify,” Scaramucci says. “We did have a problem on our southern border. Don’t go by me – 70 per cent of the Americans felt that we had a problem on our southern border.
“If you have an obligation to spend 2 per cent of your GDP on defence, and you’re a member of NATO then you’re under that number … there are kernels of truth in what he’s saying.”
Why does it go wrong? “What I always say is there’s a good angel on Trump’s shoulder,” he says. “He can identify things, and he can say these things. You look at him, say, ‘okay, that’s actually true’. But then there’s a bad angel in terms of the implementation of policy and the need for attention. And he’s literally got the bad angel or the devil on his shoulder saying, ‘Hey, you might be able to rake in $200bn for your family here’.
“In Trump-1 he was fearful and insecure about the presidency. He had a lot of establishment people in the mix with him that were stopping him from his worst instincts. In Trump-2. He doesn’t have that.”
Whereas son-in-law Jared Kushner was a calming force during Trump’s first administration, he is no longer in the circle of power of the new administration. Instead, his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, the Trump family’s biggest backer of MAGA, is the President’s new spirit force.
“This is why Trump-2, in my humble opinion, is way more dangerous than Trump-1,” Scaramucci says. “You asked ‘what is he doing?’ They don’t know what he’s doing as of tonight. He’s not actually sure what he’s doing tomorrow. He’s not sure because he wants to get attention.
“He wants to do some things that will potentially enrich his family, and so when he figures out what they are, he’ll start doing them. And that’s, that’s him”.
There’s a big figure who looms over all this: Elon Musk. Scaramucci admits he got it wrong, thinking Trump and Musk would flame out earlier. Earlier this month, the multibillionaire effectively handed in the keys to the controversial Department of Government Efficiency and returned to his role as Tesla chief executive.
The Musk relationship comes back to one of the core Trump drivers. “Elon’s loaded; Trump loves money,” Scaramucci says.
However, he says it was clear the multi-billionaire overstayed his White House time and was starting to get on Trump’s nerves.
“It’s the old Ben Franklin thing,” he says. “House guests are like fresh fish – they last three days. And so Elon, he wanted him out, but he’s too rich to push him out the way he pushed out me or (former adviser) Steve Bannon. Elon will be in the mix from a distance for quite some time because of the money associated with him”.
This is a good point to ask about Scaramucci’s own flame out with Trump. Their 20-year friendship was over following Scaramucci’s frenzied 10-day stint as White House communications director. The public line was Trump fired him (via then chief of staff John Kelly) for the Wall Street banker’s colourful criticisms of Bannon, the Trump loyalist and champion of the far-right. (Bannon was sacked as chief strategist a few weeks later.)
Scaramucci counters that his own fate was more than what has been written. He was pushing back on the President too much.
“I got fired because I was fighting with Trump,” he says.
“Trump told me that I was a Deep Stater. I’m like, ‘Dude, I haven’t even been to Washington on a f..king field trip. I’m definitely not a Deep Stater’.”
Still, taking the job was the “biggest mistake” of his life.
“If you want me to be brutally honest with you, it was the wrong job for me,” he says. “My wife hates Trump, almost as much as Melania (Trump) hates him. My wife told me, ‘Don’t go work for him. He’s gonna burn you. He’s gonna hurt you. Blah, blah, blah’. But the kid from Long Island … this was an egocentric mistake".
“It’s actually a very good lesson for investors. When you put your ego, and you put your pride into your decision-making, you make colossal mistakes. That’s true in investing. It’s true in your personal life. It’s true in your career”.
It’s now nearly 7pm as Scaramucci’s Uber slowly pulls up out the front of Rao’s. Perfect timing.
“When Bill Clinton left the White House, he got himself an office right by this restaurant,” he says. “He tried to get a reservation. They told him: ‘Look, sorry. We don’t care’. The only way you can get in there is you got to know somebody that owns one of the tables in the restaurant’.
Scaramucci simply can’t miss that table.
Anthony Scaramucci will be headlining 2025 Sohn Hearts & Minds conference in Sydney on November 14
This article was originally posted by The Australian here.
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