Hedge fund manager and new White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci has never held a press job before. But he has repeatedly demonstrated the key qualifying characteristics: a willingness and ability to carry water for the president.
Scaramucci, a leading fundraiser on past Republican campaigns, was an early financial adopter of the Trump campaign, joining his national finance committee in May 2016. After the election, he became a senior member of the transition team.
Although an expected administration job did not materialize at the time, Scaramucci has remained publicly loyal, regularly praising the president and attacking his enemies on Twitter and on cable news.
- Back in December, Scaramucci defended Trump’s waffling on climate change, saying that “there was overwhelming science that the earth was flat” and that “we get a lot of things wrong in the scientific community.”
- In January, he criticized media hysteria over Trump’s calling NATO obsolete, saying that people should stop “setting their hair on fire” and “don’t need to run around like crazy.”
- In February, he speculated on Twitter that the bombing of a Jewish community center might be connected to Democrats’ “effort to incite violence at Trump rallies.”
- In April, Scaramucci told CNN’s Chris Cuomo that Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner was “like Alexander Hamilton.” “He’s got the trust of the president. He’s very, very thoughtful. He knows how to bring people in,” he said. “That was Hamilton’s great gift at a very young age.”
- In May, Scaramucci defended Kushner’s sister for kicking the press out of a business meeting, saying that journalists were “nosy” and “throw eggs.”
- Scaramucci also shares his new boss’s distaste for the media. In June, after he was the subject of a now-retracted CNN story that attempted to link him to the Russian Direct Investment Fund, Scaramucci said that media organizations everywhere needed to “tighten up editorial standards.” “Once you start to lose your integrity and your reputation as a news organization, people start to get tone deaf,” he said on Fox & Friends.
Mind you, before he was a Trump booster, Scaramucci sang a different tune.
In 2015, he called candidate Trump “anti-American,” “another hack politician,” and “an inherited money dude from Queens County.”
As a private citizen, Scaramucci publicly supported several causes out of step with his new boss’s administration. He regularly tweeted his support for stronger gun control laws, although those tweets were recently deleted. He called the evidence for climate change “pretty much irrefutable” and said that “the fact many people still believe climate change is a hoax is disheartening.” He has previously identified as “for gay marriage, against the death penalty, and pro choice.”
@cda0519 I am not a partisan. For Gay Marriage, against the death penalty, and Pro Choice. I am for social inclusion, fiscal responsibility
— Anthony Scaramucci (@Scaramucci) June 8, 2012
