Former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci, besides engaging in an increasingly nasty Twitter war with President Trump, is renting himself out on video for $100 per hit.
At Cameo.com, you can hire Mr. Scaramucci to record birthday greetings for your Trump-hating friends, help organize your fantasy football league or say just about anything else within reason.
In a video message last week for two lawyers named Peter and Art, Mr. Scaramucci said into the camera: “Both of you guys are anti-Trump. Let me tell you something. I did my best to try to support this guy. But he’s, you know, off his rocker.”
Mr. Scaramucci confided about the president to the two strangers, “He doesn’t take any counsel. He’s now blowing up the global economy with the trade thing. We will survive that, the economy will be fine. It’s just the racist nonsense. You don’t want to destroy the social fabric of the country. But anyway, I’m giving you guys a shoutout.”
Ka-ching.
Mr. Scaramucci is not the only one from the Trump world available at Cameo.com. Former White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman can be hired for $58; porn actress Stormy Daniels commands $250.
The rest of the world is getting Mr. Scaramucci’s rebellious views of the president free of charge. The man who once proclaimed at the White House press podium of Mr. Trump, “I love the guy,” now is calling the president a crazy, narcissistic “jackass.”
“He’s a paper tiger,” Mr. Scaramucci told Vanity Fair last week. “He can be completely dismantled and defeated. We gotta defeat him.”
Mr. Scaramucci said Monday that he is assembling “a team of people that feel the exact same way that I do.”
“This is not a ’Never Trump’ situation, this is not just screeching rhetoric,” he said on CNN. “This is, ’OK, the guy’s unstable, everyone inside knows it, everyone outside knows it, let’s see if we can find a viable alternative.’ Moreover, I’ve got to get some of these former Cabinet officials in unity to speak up about it.”
Mr. Trump has noticed, and he is counterpunching with tweets of derisive fury.
“Anthony Scaramucci is a highly unstable ’nut job’ who was with other candidates in the [2016] primary who got shellacked, & then unfortunately wheedled his way into my campaign,” the president tweeted Monday. “I barely knew him until his 11 days of gross incompetence — made a fool of himself, bad on TV. Abused staff, got fired.”
Mr. Trump added, “He was a mental wreck. We didn’t want him around. Now Fake News puts him on like he was my buddy!”
There was a time in summer 2017 when the president spoke favorably to aides about Mr. Scaramucci as “the young Italian kid.”
Mr. Scaramucci, 55, a Wall Street hedge fund manager, was one of the president’s most visible and vocal defenders on TV, and Mr. Trump rewarded him with the job of White House communications director in a move that caught some in the West Wing by surprise.
“Anthony is a person I have great respect for, and he will be an important addition to this administration,” the president said at the time.
After 11 turbulent days, Mr. Scaramucci was forced out, a victim of his own theatrics, by then-White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly. Along the way, he threatened mass firings in the press shop for leaking and drew ridicule for a profanity-laced tirade published in a New Yorker interview that, he said, he thought was off the record.
Mr. Scaramucci remained mostly supportive of the president until a few weeks ago. He said the breaking point was what he considers Mr. Trump’s “racist” rhetoric against four female House freshman lawmakers, all of whom are minorities.
White House aides and allies are dismissing his criticisms as self-serving and revisionist.
“I think what’s motivating Scaramucci is that he’s trying to rehabilitate his image in New York with his colleagues who have had a big problem with him being pro-Trump,” said one Republican close to the West Wing. “He is trying to show people, way before the 2020 elections, that he is a changed man. It feels very disingenuous to come after the president after supporting him for so long.”
This Republican said Mr. Scaramucci also might have been feeling ostracized socially in liberal New York City.
“He’s still playing at a really high level on the social circuit,” the Republican said. “I’m sure no one is sitting at his lunch table right now, and he’s trying to make some new friends.”
White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham criticized the media for giving Mr. Scaramucci a megaphone.
“He worked at the White House for less than two weeks and is certainly no expert on this president,” she told Sinclair. “This is all self-serving on his part, and the media plays right into it. It’s embarrassing to watch.”
Former White House Communications Director Mercedes Schlapp said Mr. Scaramucci was “too weak and too much of a loser to survive the stresses of a White House.”
Mr. Scaramucci, who also has a weekly podcast with wife Deirdre called “Mooch and the Mrs.,” acknowledges that he has “eaten crow over the last two or three years.”
“I’m in a Twitter war with the president of the United States,” Mr. Scaramucci said on the podcast last week. “Just think about how surreal and ridiculous that is. But I have been successful in detaching my emotions from it.”
He said of the president, “So far, he hasn’t laid a glove on me.”
In recent days, Mr. Scaramucci has been openly speculating that Mr. Trump will abandon his reelection bid early next year if his polling doesn’t improve.
“There is a scenario — it’s less than 5% — that the president doesn’t run,” he said on his podcast. “I’m not ruling out voting for President Trump. I just wish he would stop — there’s no reason for racist tweets coming from the Oval Office. If he doesn’t cut it out, I do predict that there is a 5% chance, maybe less than that, of an intervention, where a group of senior leadership in the Republican Party says, ’OK, it’s going a bridge too far.’”
He recited for his audience some of the harsh criticisms coming at him from White House aides.
On the podcast, his wife urged him to get off social media.
“You’re spending way too much time online,” Mrs. Scaramucci told her husband. “Why are you wasting your life reading these comments from people who mean nothing to you?”
He replied, “Because I’m stupid. And human.”
• Dave Boyer can be reached at dboyer@washingtontimes.com.
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