Donald Trump has morphed into a maniacal bully since getting hooked on the drug of power, his former communications director Anthony Scaramucci tells The Daily Beast Podcast.
The aging president has pushed the limits of his authority since returning to office in January, aggressively pursuing his agenda and going after his perceived enemies.
Scaramucci, who worked on Trump’s 2016 campaign and presidential transition team before serving an ill-fated 11-day stint as White House communications director in 2017, said “there is something different” about the president in his second term “because he has gotten the power drug.”
Scaramucci told host Joanna Coles that Trump had “smoked... the crack crystal of power—and he’s marveling at the fact that he can bully people that are powerful and they kowtow to him.”
When reached for comment on Scaramucci’s remarks, White House spokesman Kush Desai told the Daily Beast, “After getting caught up in the drug of relevance, Anthony Scaramucci is marveling at the fact that The Daily Beast still takes him seriously.”
Trump, 79, has waged attacks on law firms, media companies, universities, comedians, and political rivals without hesitation—and has often met only limited pushback. Corporate titans have regularly bent over backward to keep the volatile president on their good side.
Scaramucci, 61, argued that Trump is “flexing on everybody successfully” and is increasingly emboldened by the lack of consequences to his audacious moves.
“I know enough about his personality to know he’s marveling at that. He’s laughing. He’s laughing at it,” the SkyBridge Capital founder said.
Trump’s latest power grab is playing out in Oregon, where he has attempted to deploy the National Guard, labeling Portland a “war zone.”
The move—part of his broader effort to use the military as a domestic law enforcement unit to enforce his agenda in Democrat-led cities—has been temporarily blocked by a federal judge he himself appointed during his first term.
The commander-in-chief told 800 of the nation’s top military leaders last week that the country was “under invasion from within” and that U.S. cities should be used as “training grounds for our military.”
After Trump moved to deploy hundreds of National Guard troops to Chicago Sunday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, warned, “America is on the brink of martial law.”
Scaramucci noted that even on the international stage, many leaders are “caving” to Trump, with exceptions like Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney.
He predicted, however, that Trump will eventually hit a wall and that his MAGA movement will implode in a “leadership vacuum,” calling the president the “Wicked Witch of the West Wing.”
“When the witch got hit with the water in The Wizard of Oz, what happened? The witch shrunk down, you were left with the witch’s hat, that’ll be the MAGA hat, the red hat,” Scaramucci said.
Calling MAGA a “full-on personality cult,” he argued that Trump will eventually get “hit with the water” because “a lot of people in the country ... know how bad he is and know what he’s doing is very disruptive to the Constitution and very disruptive to the checks and balances of the country.”
Scaramucci said he is eager to be “part of the debate” over who will replace Trump at the helm of the GOP, hoping someone can “break the populist hold on this party and see if we can return to something more germane and something more relevant that actually helps people.”
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