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Lionel Barber: You have a unique insight into the way the president’s mind works. He has a brilliant, very effective way of communicating to the public. How do you think the media should try and cover it?
Anthony Scaramucci: He is a reality television producer. He says things with great pomposity and great hyperbole to get people to overreact to what he’s saying.
There’s also a distraction piece to this. If he’s grifting several billion dollars, he’ll throw bombs over there, so everyone’s running over here while he’s grifting the money in the opposite direction.
He’s going to break a record in this term. Last time, he told 30,000 lies, according to the Washington Post. He’s pacing for 40,000 [lies in this term]. He’s going to tell 10,000 lies this year as the president. People in the media hear “well that’s a lie”, and then they set their hair on fire. We’ve normalised his behaviour.
If he’s posting on Truth Social saying that he knows where the ruler of Iran is, but he is not going to kill him “for now”, that’s television production. That’s hyperbole. If I meet a political leader and they ask me what to do, I say, don’t overreact, and remember he’s producing a show. [Mark] Carney gets this better than anybody. He understands: “Wait a minute, I am not going to let him direct me as a B-level actor in this movie. I am now going to be a co-producer.”
Two things with Trump: he loves money and attention. He’s not there to serve the people. He’s not there to make America great again. He’s not there to put America first. He’s put himself first, and he wants to be on the top half of the fold of the FT. If he’s not there this morning, he’s pissed off. He’s going to figure out a way to get there tomorrow.
Lionel: I want to talk about the relationship between Trump and the mainstream media. There’s been a real effort by the administration to change the balance of power, to change the way the White House press corps system works. Tell us about that.
Anthony: Well, he has a brittle personality. He needs to be glorified. I feel like he’s got a lot of things going on that are repressed in his personality. As a result of that, he has to do certain things to get this external appreciation. And so, when they’re denigrating him, he’s a bully and he needs to rough them up.
He doesn’t believe in the free press the way you and I would believe in it. The press is there to hold people in check, but there’s a secondary factor for the press that people should never forget. Our economic and technological innovation emanates from the free press. Why? We tell our second-grade children that they can speak and think freely. If you can speak and think freely, you go on to create Facebook, you go on to create the iPhone, you can create a computer… Today the mainstream media has a rightward-leaning bias. Trump understands this better than anybody in the room. People assume that he’s not intelligent because he talks like a fifth-grader, but he’s incredibly intelligent, he has great instincts, he’s got great communication skills.
The good news is he’s a decaying political asset, but the bad news is we’ve got a very small man making very big decisions, which could be consequential for the world.
Alan Rusbridger: Listening to Trump, it’s a consistent pattern over about 10 years now to denigrate and delegitimise the mainstream press. Is that tactical or does he have genuine contempt for what journalists do?
Anthony: It’s tactical. He’s extremely charming when you meet him. He knows when he’s fooling around. He knows when he’s not fooling around.
His thinking is something like, “If I chant the same thing over and over again: the sky is green, the sky is green. You know the sky is blue. But you know what? Thirty per cent of the people that like me are gonna chant with me that the sky is green”. He understands that and he’s breaking the norms.
Alan: We all know Steve Bannon’s phrase, “flood the zone with shit”. That’s what’s happening. Just explain that as a tactic and why it’s so effective.
Anthony: Well, because you can’t handle all the disinformation. In other words, it’s like a scatter, everyone’s hit with some level of shrapnel. They’re focused on the injury that they’re getting, while [Maga Republicans are] running their Project 2025 and trying to jam it into the system to weaken the judiciary and weaken the legislative branch. There was a biography of Joseph Goebbels that described all of this, how to make the big lie. [Bannon] is incredibly malevolent.
But can I tell the two of you why I believe in God? Alan, you look like an atheist to me.
Lionel: I’ve always thought that.
Anthony: Bannon is articulate. He’s incredibly well read. If you listen to him on the telephone or on the radio, he’s very charismatic. But God has made him so ugly, to save civilisation from Steve Bannon. He’s got the contemporary hobo look. He’s got skincare products by Blotch. He’s all disfigured.
I would love to debate Bannon. He doesn’t want to debate me because he knows I’m going to come with facts, with a grounded understanding of where America could go by bringing everybody together.
They don’t want that. They want a white America, and they want to wall America off from the rest of the world, literally and physically. And that’s the malevolence of Steve Bannon. But the good news is he’s so goddamn ugly, he wants to run for president, but he’ll never make it.
Lionel: Tell us about the new ecosystem in the media with podcasts, and the way Trump, again, is so quick on the new thing.
Anthony: If you and I are broadcasting together, and there are lights and cameras, the audience knows that there are hundreds of thousands of people listening. If they turn on the radio, they know they’re sharing the conversation with the public. But a podcast glues the two or three hosts and guests to the one person listening, and there’s a level of intimacy in that which has changed the landscape of the media.
Trump maybe couldn’t articulate it the way I just did, but he understands it immediately.
Alan: What is the American media doing wrong, in your view, in handling this president?
Anthony: He’s a network television maven, you know. If you pulled the air supply from him—this microphone, that camera and that light are oxygen for Trump—you would literally suffocate him. And so you have to be organised with Trump, you have to team up. This very issue has affected the Democrats because he shoots at them and they scatter, like the press and like the law firms did. The best thing Trump has going for him is the Democrats.
I told them, listen, stop focusing on the picayune policies, work on a unified purpose. You have a very big tent, get everybody in the tent. Be pro-democracy, pro-America, pro-system. Bring the people into the tent that you don’t like… but they won’t do it.
Trump is the Napoleon of the culture war. Napoleon could see the entire battlefield. He knew exactly what was going to happen, four moves before it happened.
Lionel: Until Waterloo.
Anthony: So, you need your Wellington. Which candidate is the Wellington that can take on these jackasses?
It’s not the disunited states of America… it’s the United States of America to me, and we have to figure out a way to unite it.
