Weekend Interview
Anthony Scaramucci: My Wall Street Buddies Regret Voting for Trump
For a brief moment in 2017, Anthony Scaramucci became a unit of time — his roughly 11-day stint as White House communications director was so fleeting that it entered the political lexicon. Nearly a decade on, he has proved more durable than the joke. The Trump loyalist-turned-critic, Wall Street financier and podcast host remains a fixture in American political culture. He is still parsing the president he once backed and the bets — on figures like Sam Bankman-Fried and on crypto — that have shaped his career.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. You can listen to an extended version on The Mishal Husain Show podcast.
We’re six months out from the midterms. I’m curious to get your reading of the political landscape and what you think is going to happen in November.
November’s still a long time off, so it’s very hard to make predictions.
If you look at Kalshi or Polymarket, it looks like the Democrats will win the House, 1 but the big problem in American politics is gerrymandering. Political leaders have the opportunity to redistrict or to cut the congressional districts in a way that could favor their party. We have 435 congressional districts. Approximately 8% of those are up for contest. I think that’s unfair to the American people.
1 It’s interesting that Scaramucci turns to prediction markets over opinion polls — these platforms have grown in prominence, but face scrutiny over concerns about insider betting. Meanwhile, redistricting remains a live fight, with recent escalation driven by a Supreme Court rollback of Voting Rights Act protections.
I would just say this rhetorically: Are we in a real democracy where the politicians are picking the voters? I thought the voters were supposed to pick the politicians. We’re in sore need of reform.
Could the Democrats end up taking the Senate as well as the House, or are you cautious on that?
I’m a little bit more cautious on that because [of] the red states that have less population in them. If you’re telling me James Talarico is going to turn the state of Texas purple, where there’ll be one Republican and one Democrat from the state, that’ll be a watershed in American politics. 2
2 Democrat James Talarico, a self-described “progressive Christian,” appears to be within striking distance of a Senate seat in Texas, where Republicans have long been dominant. Overall, Democrats face an uphill battle to win control of the Senate, but a majority in both chambers would give them immense power to block President Trump’s agenda and to initiate investigations.
These machines, they have created a cartel. They have a duopoly now.
The two parties, you mean.
The two parties, yeah. They control the landscape. They’ve tightened up their ability to get incumbents reelected. Just imagine you and I opening up a restaurant and our food is terrible. We’re getting one-star Yelp ratings, but we can never get the restaurant closed. We always stay as the two chefs in the restaurant. That’s what’s going on in Washington right now.
You are still a registered Republican, right?
I am. Donald Trump hijacked that party. He decapitated what was once known as the Republican Party and did this M&A transaction where he installed this right-wing populist party. It’s called the Republican Party, but it’s really the MAGA party and the personality cult of Donald Trump. When his political personality extinguishes, sometime in 2028, there will be an ideological battle for that party again.
Why are you not more active in trying to find that next Republican? You voted for Biden and then Harris in the last two presidential elections.
Trump is too dangerous. It’s funny, all my Wall Street buddies voted for him and now they’re regretting the fact. 3
3 Scaramucci knows the Wall Street world well, having worked for Goldman Sachs before founding his own financial services company in 1996. In 2005, he founded SkyBridge Capital, an alternative asset management firm.
Are they all regretting that they voted for him?
Most people are.
A lot of them have done well out of the markets.
I’m of the belief that prices are higher. 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. 4
4 Only tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, were struck down by the Supreme Court in February — a question we explored in a Weekend Interview with Peter Navarro. Refunds were not directly addressed, but US Customs and Border Protection has started allowing companies to submit requests.
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.
That’s why I’m asking: Why are you not more actively searching for the Republican that you would like to succeed Donald Trump?
It’s early. We have to get through the midterms.
One of the biggest things you need to be president is name recognition. Remember the electorate you’re dealing with. People that are watching your show are very sophisticated. The average voter is really not.
I think the war is going to hurt people that are close to Donald Trump. [Marco] Rubio and [JD] Vance are going to be victimized by Trump in ways they haven’t totally predicted yet. He’s already started with Vance, with the attack on the Pope, because he knows Vance has a book coming out on his conversion to Catholicism.
He doesn’t want to build Vance up into the next president?
No, of course not.
You have to understand the nature of Donald Trump. He wants the Democrats to succeed him, with 100% certainty. 5 We [still] try to normalize him: He’s a Republican, he’ll want a Republican to succeed him. He’ll want Vance or Rubio. He doesn’t want those guys to succeed him.
5 We asked the White House for comment on this. A spokesperson said, “Anthony Scaramucci lasted 11 short days in the White House. He makes lightweights look credible.”
Let’s say he has a successful remaining two years of his presidency — which seems unlikely. He wouldn’t want those guys taking credit for anything that happened in the administration.
You met him years ago, didn’t you? In the ’90s in New York.
He would not have remembered that. I was a young man working at Goldman Sachs. My boss took me to see him during the casino restructuring and some of the bankruptcies. [Trump] was looking for financing.
I looked up to him. I read The Art of the Deal. The rappers sang songs about Donald Trump. We admired his bravado, his risk-taking and image-making.
Years later, I was working at CNBC as [a] paid contributor. I got invited to the Apprentice parties, we did a couple of fundraising events together and then we started to develop a relationship.
When he brought you into the White House as his communications director in 2017, were you a true believer? Team MAGA?
I wasn’t [initially] Team MAGA. I had worked for [Wisconsin Governor Scott] Walker, who was running for president. When Scott dropped out of the race, I went to work for Jeb Bush.
In March of 2015, Donald Trump called me. I had breakfast with him. He said, I’m running for president. I looked at him like he was crazy. I said, That’s just like a publicity stunt. He said, Oh no, everybody thinks that, that’s why I’m so low in the polls. But when I announce I’m running, I’m going to go right to the top of the polls. When Jeb comes out of the race, will you come work for me? Right then and there, I shook his hand. Jeb got knocked outta the race in South Carolina, Trump called me, we did our first event in Albuquerque, New Mexico. That’s when I got MAGA fever.
What was MAGA fever to me? Donald Trump was talking to my dad. My dad was born in 1935 in a coal-mining town in northeastern Pennsylvania. He wasn’t college-educated. He went on to become a crane operator on Long Island, spent 41 years in the union, but he had a high-paying job. We had a tiny little house and we lived a good part of the American dream. I would never dishonor my dad by telling you we grew up poor.
That once economically aspirational, blue-collar family doesn’t exist in America anymore. These families went from economically aspirational to economically desperational. We blighted these towns. Trump sees something about America that we need to fix. 6
6 In his book, From Wall Street to the White House and Back, Scaramucci reflects on his childhood in the mid-1970s: “I vividly remember coming home one day to find my parents arguing at the kitchen table… I would later learn that my father had just heard that his hours were being cut.” By age 11, Scaramucci had started as a paper boy, “hustling and bringing the money right to my mother.”
Seeing how hard your father worked, and the community around you — had you never thought along these lines before you saw Donald Trump and voters respond to him?
I left that neighborhood. I went to Tufts University, Harvard Law School and Goldman Sachs. I built my own hedge fund business. I got invited to the World Economic Forum. I started hanging out in the salons of the wealthy. You pick up the collective biases of those people.
You forgot where you came from.
Right. There was a man [Trump] that lived adjacent to the Tiffany store on Fifth Avenue, in a triplex apartment that looked like Louis IV smoked crystal meth and decorated. He saw the problems in the neighborhood I grew up in. I missed it.
You also owe your media and podcasting career to him, after those days you were in the White House. 7
7 Scaramucci was appointed White House communications director in July 2017, much to the dismay of then-chief of staff Reince Priebus and then-press secretary Sean Spicer. Days later, Scaramucci called Priebus “a f—ing paranoid schizophrenic” in an interview with a New Yorker reporter, though he subsequently said he made a mistake trusting a journalist. He is now co-host of The Rest Is Politics: US and his own podcast, Open Book.
That’s a little bit of a silver lining, I guess. The truth is that was the most brutal experience of my life. In the campaign, we were two New Yorkers and two entrepreneurs taking risks. In the White House, he wanted sycophants. I had taken constitutional law. I had a thought process about the institution of the presidency: I’m not working for you. I’m working for the American people.
Eleven days later, I got fired. I blamed myself. I never blamed anybody else. I had a crisis PR person, God bless the guy. He told me, Buy a villa in Tuscany and go dark for five years.
So yes, I do have a podcast business, but I paid the price for those things. My 34-year-old son says, Dad, you’re killing me. You’re killing my networking opportunities. Republicans hate you because you were once with Trump, and you left. Democrats — forget it. You’ve got me in purgatory.
So it helps and it hurts. You’re going to get some people and you’re going to lose some people. That’s life.
Is the other really hard moment you’ve had over your association with Sam Bankman-Fried? He’s now been sentenced for defrauding investors and customers. You believed in him. You were business partners. You were close to him.
I liked him. Sam had 25 investors that had given approximately $1 billion to fund FTX — sovereign wealth funds, venture capitalists, billionaire investors, billionaire family offices.
I had a rapport with Sam. I had a rapport with Sam’s mom and dad — professors who knew some of the faculty at Harvard Law School [who] taught me. While Sam was somewhat odd, I thought he was brilliant. I thought he was ethical. His father was a tax attorney and his mother taught ethics. I made false assumptions. Remember, he gave me money. I didn’t give him money. 8
8 Sam Bankman-Fried co-founded FTX, one of the world’s largest crypto platforms, whose collapse in late 2022 — amid misconduct allegations and a wider crypto downturn — affected Scaramucci’s firm. Bankman-Fried is currently serving a 25-year sentence after being convicted of fraud and conspiracy.
He bought a stake in your firm.
Yeah. He came to our conference. He liked our business. He liked our crypto exposure.
You talked about him as the next J.P. Morgan.
In the crisis of 1907, John Pierpont Morgan stepped in and cleared a lot of credit that was potentially defaulting. We were having that sort of crisis in 2022 and Sam positioned himself that way.
Imagine the situation. I’m making an announcement that Sam’s buying a piece of my business. Eight weeks later, I realize he’s committed fraud and I’ve got to face the music. I have to go on television and say, He’s innocent until proven guilty, but I think he’s done some really bad things here. That’s a painful thing to do.
You still today have a high percentage of your personal wealth and business wrapped up in digital assets, including Bitcoin.
I made a decision in 2020 that we were going to flip a portion of our assets into digital assets — a big piece was going to be in Bitcoin. We were buying coins at $16,000. They went to $69,000 by November of 2021. We look like geniuses. They collapsed with the [2022] FTX crisis back to $15,000, but are at $78,000 today. I want to judge it over a five- or 10-year period of time.
The Original Cryptocurrency
Bitcoin traded at $1 in 2011 and peaked around $126,000 in October 2025
Source: Bloomberg
I think this is a transformative technology. You have to take time to understand it. I’m 62. If you’re my age or older, you either don’t have the patience for it or you think it’s absolutely worthless. Who’s doing the homework? 30-year-olds. You know where they’re going to be in 10 years? In positions of power in the asset management business. Let’s see if I’m right. 9
9 SkyBridge’s assets under management were approximately $1.8 billion as of January 2026, down from a peak of about $9 billion a decade earlier.
Can I take you back to the way you grew up? There’s part of your book, which is really sad to read. You are widely known as “The Mooch,” but tell me about how you first got that nickname.
Why is that sad to read?
Because there’s racism in it. It comes from a teacher who doesn’t like the ethnic-sounding names — the Italians, the Irish.
He didn’t like the Polish either. [Laughs]
He decided that if you had a four-syllable last name, that was a little bit too long for him. He took one of the syllables and that’s what he called you. That’s life.
You didn’t like it at the time, did you? 10
10 In his book, Scaramucci writes that he “hated” the nickname, but sought to reclaim it: “I started going by ‘Mooch’ among my friends. I knew that I couldn’t control what this guy thought of me, and so I didn’t try to change it. Instead, I decided to focus on my reaction to what he called me, which was completely within my control.”
I was nine years old. It was a different era. You can’t be a baby. You can’t play victim in life. It’s like playing in the NFL and saying I’m upset now that I got a concussion. Well, guess what? Everybody gets a concussion.
That was life in the 1970s on Long Island. I’m not complaining, just explaining what happened.
The kinds of people who you grew up with, whom MAGA very successfully reached, do you think the Democrats can win them back?
They don’t have the right leadership right now to win them back. The best thing Republicans have going for them are Democrats. [Democrats] have to stop overcorrecting for racism and overdoing identity, gender [and] sexual orientation.
They’re in a circular firing squad. They treat Newsom like he’s further to the right than [former Hungarian Prime Minister] Victor Orban.
Cut it out, guys. Focus on principle. Stop attacking each other. Line up. Republicans line up. Ted Cruz wanted to strangle Donald Trump. He lined up with him. You have got to learn to do that in politics.
But you don’t really like that, about those who’ve lined up under Donald Trump.
I don’t like it because they’re hurting the country. I don’t like it because they’re subverting the Constitution. If you told me Donald Trump was a transformational, healing, regenerative leader seeking an American renewal and was going to reform America and make it better, of course I’d like it.
I am optimistic, by the way. I predict you will see a very surprising American renewal, because it’s a very young country. It doesn’t have an anchored culture. It’s an experiment.
Renewal on the left or the right?
I’m not sure yet. Eighty years after the Revolutionary War, we had the Civil War. Eighty years after that, we had the Great Depression, and the Second World War. Eighty years out from that war, this country is getting dunked.
We’ve lost our generational memory about the institutions and the processes that matter. Now we need a leader to come in and explain that to the people and say, We have to return to the process.
Trump is helping us do that, by the way, because he’s so out there doing the opposite that people instinctively know, This is not right. This is why the approval ratings are way down. Trump is forcing the American people to have a moral and cultural reckoning. Every time we’ve done that, we’ve sought redemption and renewal. I predict that that will happen.
I’m from a family of coal miners, peasant farmers and day workers, but I’m sitting here at Bloomberg talking to you. That is the dream. That is the promise of America.