He lasted 11 days in Trump’s White House. Now the Mooch has a warning

When I eagerly put up my hand to review Anthony Scaramucci’s All the Wrong Moves, I was anticipating a juicy read. As a podcaster and TV pundit, Scaramucci – aka “the Mooch” – always provides good value. He’s a foul-mouthed, straight-shooting New Yorker who, after briefly serving in Donald Trump’s first administration, came to view his dalliance with Trump as a grave moral error. Ever since, most of his foul-mouthed straight shooting has been aimed straight at Trump.

Trump’s sidekicks have always flamed out at a farcical rate. Even by those standards, Scaramucci’s stint as a Trumpian lackey was brief. In 2017, he was sacked as Trump’s communications director after just 11 days in the job. “I became famous as an epic failure,” he writes now.

The immediate cause of Scaramucci’s dismissal was a phone call to a New Yorker reporter that he incorrectly assumed to be off the record. In it, the Mooch denounced Reince Priebus, Trump’s then chief of staff, as a “f---ing paranoid schizophrenic”. He also suggested that Steve Bannon, Trump’s right-hand man, was in the habit of celebrating his self-love by performing a physically improbable act that, in Bannon’s defence, he looks way too unfit to accomplish.

If you pick up Scaramucci’s book expecting a detailed account of his time in the White House, you’ll be disappointed. The chapter dealing with that “eleven-day fiasco” lasts only 15 pages. This book doesn’t belong to the tell-all genre. It is, for the most part, one of those big American books that look to diagnose the nation’s ills, then lay forth a positive program for change. It’s a self-help manual for the republic.

In Trump’s White House, Scaramucci learnt that Trumpian rule is strictly “a one-man show”. It has room for only “one spotlight”. And the man in the spotlight hates everyone, including himself. He wants “nothing but to inflict pain, thanks to his own miserable, raging self-hatred”.

Knowing Trump as he does, Scaramucci fears that the president won’t give up the national spotlight easily, and might well find “ways to subvert, override, or nullify the 2028 election” – or perhaps “not even have a 2028 election” at all.

What, if anything, can be done abut this? According to Scaramucci, you can’t solve the problem of Trump without first grasping that Trump isn’t really the problem. The problem is that millions of Americans were willing to elect such a man as their president, not just once but twice. Only an electorate vexed by “real, widespread economic grievances” would take such desperate measures.

The roots of the electorate’s rage lie, Scaramucci believes, in Three Catastrophic Decisions that America’s political elites made in the 1990s and early 2000s. The first was Bill Clinton’s successful push to admit China to the World Trade Organisation, on terms far more favourable to China than American workers. The second was George W. Bush’s initiation of long unfunded wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which ordinary Americans are still paying for today. The third was Barack Obama’s public bailout of Wall Street in 2009.

Put together, these bipartisan blunders left American voters feeling anger that is, according to Scaramucci, “totally justified”. Trump instinctively gets this anger, and panders to it, but has neither the inclination nor gumption to solve the problems that are fuelling it.

Unless serious politicians from both major parties address those problems, Scaramucci believes the national rage will persist, and “the threat to the republic that we face today” will deepen. “Even if we survive Trump,” he writes, “we won’t survive the next Trump unless we change.”

Scaramucci’s book ends with some practical suggestions for reform. He wants to rethink the tax system, and make gerrymandering unconstitutional. He believes that tariffs should be “surgically” deployed to protect American workers. And so on.

The trouble with Scaramucci’s book is that the chapters detailing the roots and nature of America’s malaise are far longer and more persuasive than the chapters containing his proposals for reform. By the time you get to the optimistic bits, you feel you’re reading about a nation that’s beyond repair.

Even Scaramucci himself, in his glummer moods, concedes that the American republic might simply be doomed. Democracies perish all the time, he admits. There is “no magical, existential reason” why America won’t go the same way as all the world’s other extinct democracies.

Nevertheless, Scaramucci has hope. “This is America: our beautiful mess,” he writes. Scaramucci, the pugnacious and learned working class kid from Long Island, is as American a phenomenon as Trump. And with can-do people like him on the case, America may yet pull out of its political death spiral. He’s a good man to have in your corner. Even Trump, at one point, was capable of seeing that.

All the Wrong Moves by Anthony Scaramucci is published by Bodley Head ($37).

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