Trump’s deportation plan will crash the economy
Anthony Scaramucci is sitting in his New York study wearing a green Christmas T-shirt. Millionaire financier, as a one-time Trump backer and co-host of a successful podcast, he looks relaxed and remarkably youthful with a boyish grin and thick thatch of hair that he ruffles throughout our conversation.
Today Donald Trump’s former, and short-lived, communications director is feeling more optimistic than he did on the day after the 45th President of the United States was re-elected. He becomes the 47th Potus in less than two months’ time.
The reason for his improved mood is not the fall of Matt Gaetz, Trump’s controversial pick for attorney general who stepped back from the role last week as sexual crime allegations continue to swirl around him.
“Gaetz I knew was a non-starter and the Republicans flexed on Gaetz,” says Scaramucci, also known as the Mooch, who famously served just 11 days in Trump’s first administration before being fired.
Does he think Fox News presenter and former National Guard recruit Pete Hegseth, the nominee for Secretary of Defence, could go the same way as Gaetz? Hegseth has been the subject of a sexual misconduct allegation he insists was consensual and Scaramucci is, for now, giving him the benefit of doubt.
“So, the Hegseth thing and the allegations being made about him, I don’t want to be too aggressive on because I don’t know what is true and what isn’t,” he says. “I think he could get through if those allegations are ill-founded.”
In fact what has improved the Mooch’s mood is that Trump’s cabinet appointments are becoming less outlandish. Especially his pick for Treasury Secretary, billionaire hedge fund boss Scott Bessent.
“The stock market is the number one most important thing to Trump. And so, Scott Bessent is a very middle-of-the-road pick. He’s a very smart guy, very safe pair of hands at Treasury.
“The US stock market is saying that Trump’s going to run the country like a centrist, moderate, centre right, Republican president. That’s what the US stock market is saying. The US stock market is not taking the rhetoric around tariffs and deportations seriously. So, some of the picks have helped me become more optimistic.”
Three key players in Trump’s White House team have given Scaramucci reason to be optimistic about the next four years. They are Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, a retired Army National Guard officer and war veteran.
“He picked Susie Wiles. She’s a moderate. He picked Marco Rubio, who’s friends with Susie from Florida. Waltz is obviously a traditionalist. These are clever, sensible picks.
“To staff the White House you need 5,000 people, and it’s going to be very hard to staff the 5,000 people with 100 per cent Trump loyalists. There’s going to be some moderate Republicans in there as well.”
Some would suggest his optimism is more of a hope. Asked how he feels Trump would like to run his second administration, his response is somewhat darker. A month ago he agreed with Kamala Harris that Trump is a fascist. He still believes this but hopes the people around him will control his tendencies towards the extreme.
“I’m sticking with John Kelly, who observed him over 18 months and then read out the definition of fascism to the journalist. The reason that he hasn’t been a fascist is that he’s been curbed by the checks and balances in the system.”
Yet the border tsar Tom Homan has been tasked with Trump’s top priority of deporting up to 20 million people, potentially even including those born in the US of illegal immigrants, to begin as soon as the 47th President is sworn in on 20 January.
“If they start to do that, it’ll be heartbreaking for me to see, because it’s going to require an awful lift. It’ll be armoured vehicles, there’ll be [deportation] camps. This country has had a welcome mat out for 200 years.
“If they pull the welcome mat away, I think it hurts the economy too. The market is saying he’s not going to affect it. You know, I’m hoping that the market’s right. If the market’s wrong, though, it’ll be a disaster.”
On Monday Trump promised to hit China, Mexico and Canada with new tariffs on day one of his presidency, in an effort to force them to tackle illegal immigration and drug smuggling into the US. He announced he would sign an executive order imposing a 25 per cent tariff on all goods coming from Mexico and Canada, and an additional 10 per cent tariff would be levied on China until its government cracked down on the deadly fentanyl trade blighting so many American cities.
Again, Scaramucci is hopeful this is another empty threat from his former boss. “I think Trump’s barometric pressure of how well he’s doing is the stock market. So, if you’re telling me he’s going to start to deport people and ratchet up tariffs, we’re going to have a stock market crash.”
Scaramucci talks with a laid back Italian-American accent with an echo of the late actor Joe Pesci – a little bit movie mobster. But in truth the Mooch is more Gordon Gekko than Goodfellas. A hugely successful financier who drives a black Lamborghini.
Born into a middle-class family – working class in the UK – on Long Island, New York, in 1964 his mother, Marie, ran the house and his father, Alexander, was a crane operator.
He was the first generation of his family to attend college, studying economics at Tufts University then on to Harvard Law School, where contemporaries included Barack Obama.
But he never practised law, instead joining Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs’s investment banking division in 1989, where he remained until 1996. He then co-founded Oscar Capital Management, which he later sold in 2001, before going on to set up his current firm Skybridge Capital in 2005.
Scaramucci was an early adopter of Bitcoin and plugs his latest book – The Little Book of Bitcoin: What You Need to Know that Wall Street Has Already Figured Out – between his political observations.
Following the election result, Bitcoin’s value hit an all-time high. “We’re having a top year for us,” he says. “I own a lot of bitcoin, so would imagine we’re up 45 per cent.
“I owe Donald Trump before he deports me,” he deadpans. “Perhaps I owe him a Christmas gift. I don’t think he’s going to deport me, I’m just kidding. But the point I’m making is I’m doing well in business.”
Scaramucci recently added a new string to his bow, joining US political broadcaster Katty Kay to launch The Rest Is Politics US, part of Gary Lineker’s ever-expanding Goalhanger podcast stable.
The show is the fastest-growing political podcast around the globe, with an average of four million downloads a month. It’s something he’s particularly proud of, especially as he wasn’t Kay’s first choice as her sidekick.
“I was her second choice,” he says, adding that first choice was Michael Lewis, the best-selling author of books including The Big Short and Moneyball. “He didn’t want to go to the dance with Katty Kay. Sometimes it’s nice to be number two.”
When Kay approached him to join her in the studio, he hadn’t heard of Goalhanger, but he had heard of Lineker. “Obviously, everyone in the world knows Gary,” he says. Lineker’s success with the podcast business, which he runs with Tony Pastor and Jack Davenport, led to the former England footballer quitting his 26-year stint hosting the BBC’s Match of the Day to focus on expanding his media empire in the US.
“These guys are incredibly ambitious and they want to grow,” he says of Lineker and his co-owners. “My guess is they’ll add more podcasts. I’ve been very impressed with the culture that Gary has inspired at Goalhanger.
“My old boss, when I worked at Goldman Sachs said ‘hey, we have the same pencils, we have the same computers, we have the same telephones as everybody else in this industry. What’s going to make us differentiated is our culture’.
“Gary and Tony and Jack understand that about as well as anybody that I’ve met in my business career.”
Scaramucci’s podcast career puts him firmly in the ‘new media’ camp, alongside Trump’s new best friend Elon Musk. Did Musk’s support via X and his million-dollar giveaways to newly registered voters win it for Trump?
“I’m gonna go as far as to suggest that I think he could have won without Musk, because I think that the sentiment was overwhelming,” he says. “But would it have been a more narrow victory? Yeah, certainly it would have been more narrow. He helped him immeasurably.”
He’s less sure Musk will stick around. “We’ll see if that relationship holds, because he [Trump] doesn’t like other people in his orbit, getting any type of intention. So, a couple of articles saying President Musk and, you know, they’ll be fighting with each other. It’s just the nature of Donald Trump.”
Scaramucci puts Harris’s and the Democrats loss to Trump down to three main reasons. The first being that Harris only had 107 days for the American people to get to know her, and cites the Google question that spiked on election day: “Did Joe Biden drop out”. The second problem is that both her and President Joe Biden failed to explain the economic successes of their administration.
But for Scaramucci the third reason is the biggest failure of both Harris and her party. Neither, he says, recognised that the mood in the country had turned against so-called “woke” policies and instead of talking to the people, they were talking down to them.
“They don’t like the pronoun use culture,” he explains. “They don’t like the cancel culture.
“People are like ‘hey, you know, we’re tired of this stuff, and you better figure it out now’.”
He goes on to tell a story about the New York Democrat Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, known as AOC, who made efforts to understand her voters better following the election result.
“She did something very clever. She went out on X and said ‘hey, a lot of my constituents voted for Donald Trump, and they voted for me’. They split their vote. ‘Could you guys please tell me why?’.
“And after she got the feedback, she took her pronoun designation off of her Twitter profile. So, the American people are signalling that they don’t like this aspect of our culture, and so hopefully the Democrats will reform themselves.”
He reveals that he even offered to work with the Harris campaign to get the economy messaging right, but was rejected. “There were progressive handlers of Vice President Harris who said ‘no, you can’t have this guy. He was once a Trump supporter, can’t have this guy anywhere near you’.
“I can tell you for sure the vacuum of an economic narrative from the Harris campaign hurt them, because polling was immigration, polling was the economy, polling was culture, and that’s the reason why he got two-and-a-half million more votes than her.”
Another reason was an electorate tired of war, and tired of paying for wars in far-away countries. Trump has claimed he will bring peace to Ukraine within 24 hours of taking office and that can solve the crisis in the Middle East.
Scaramucci believes Trump could bring about a peace deal in Ukraine on terms that might surprise people – including Vladimir Putin. “Trump’s said privately that he doesn’t want people to think he’s Putin’s lapdog. You know, he is 78 years old. He did win an election as the president of the largest economy and the most powerful military.”
“And whatever dirt Putin supposedly has on Trump won’t bother him now. “”I think if there’s a pee-pee tape or something like that, he’s almost impervious to it at this point. So, he may flex on Putin. You know, it’s possible.”
Speaking the day before Biden announced a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon, Scaramucci was optimistic for Trump’s chances of ending the war in Gaza, and calming the prospect of a region-wide conflict in the Middle East.
“I think the Middle East stuff does get resolved,” he says. “I think Trump has got a close relationship with some of the Sunni Muslim leaders. I’ll be hopeful there maybe, maybe we can get a recognition of Israel by Saudi Arabia.”
For many, that will be Scaramucci’s most optimistic view, but while he may not be warming to Trump again, he is warming to some of the people being gathered around him and their potential to control both the president-elect as well as the likes of Putin and Israel’s hard line Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
If Scaramucci’s fresh-faced looks are anything to go by, he’s going to be around commenting and influencing the US political debate for years to come. And despite entering his seventh decade he has the complexion of someone 20 years his junior. What’s his secret?
“I’ve got a lot of Botox in my forehead,” he says without an ounce of shame or embarrassment. “And I’m lucky that I got my mother’s side. My dad was bald. So is my older brother. I got my mother’s hairline.”
