Bougie Nights: Anthony Scaramucci Talks America, Wargames & Extravagant Tastes

Should I worry that Anthony Scaramucci is quelling my fears about an imminent  Russian attack? Is it odd that I put faith in a man who, having famously spent just 11 days as Donald Trump’s Director of Communications, is now a pundit on the outside? But I do – and I’m probably not the only one.

I’ve just binge-watched The Wargame, Sky TV’s ‘constructed documentary’ where a cast of prominent former MPs, diplomats and intelligence officers, including Michael Gove, Harriet Harman, Penny Mordaunt, Sir Kim Darroch and Christopher Steele, act out a high-stakes national emergency set in the near future. Scaramucci plays a petulant US Secretary of State, who basically tells us, ‘We’re on our own’. It’s too close to reality for comfort – and I need reassurance. 

‘When they gave me my role, I groaned,’ he tells me over Zoom, a stack of books his backdrop (he’s a prolific reader). ‘I was like, “All right, I have to be who I’m not. I have to be an asshole like Marco Rubio.”‘ The real Scaramucci, he insists, would never abandon us: ‘I would never treat the United Kingdom like that… We are welded at the hip.’ I give a relieved sigh. 

‘When they gave me my role, I groaned. I have to be an asshole like Marco Rubio.’

But could the scenario actually happen? He thinks not: ‘knowing what I know, the Russians do not want to engage the United States in a theatre war. And even though they have Donald Trump as a lackey, a full-on lackey, which I accept, they don’t have the entire Pentagon as full-on lackeys.’ The Russians – he notes – ‘love their children too’. They have though, he concedes, achieved two of their greatest foreign policies since 1917 already: ‘the election of Donald Trump and the UK Brexiting from the EU’. (And let’s not linger on the march of the AFD in Germany and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France.) His sangfroid perhaps comes from being in the relative safety of superpower America – the view from just over the Polish border might be a little different.

The Wargame on Sky TV

I wonder if he is ever frightened for his own safety with violence seeming to go hand in hand with US politics. They [MAGA supporters] come after him, he says, but as a pundit, not a candidate. Attacking him only grows his following, and Trump knows it: ‘He’s figured out that I’m a fellow New Yorker and I don’t give a you know what. I have no fear… If you want to come after me, that’s fine, but we’re going to have a fight over it and I have enough money to fight you.’ Besides, he adds, persecution can backfire – he points to Mandela, Martin Luther King, and, of course, the 34 felony counts that ‘galvanised [Trump’s] base and helped him win re-election’. ‘You imprison them, they get more powerful.’

I could talk to him forever, there are so many subjects to cover which we won’t get round to (Canada, Botox, tariffs, the Hormuz strait, the ballroom, Taiwan, Melania). I confess that my husband’s worried that – just as I suffer from Trump derangement syndrome – I also suffer from Mooch derangement syndrome but in reverse. The Mooch is in my Instagram feed, I’ve listened to every episode of The Rest Is Politics: US and I even went to see him at the Lyceum theatre in conversation with Tina Brown. When I mention this, he doesn’t hesitate: ‘I’m not saying your husband isn’t right,’ he smiles. Then: ‘You’re deranged because you actually like me, or you’re deranged?’

He’s felt particularly ‘everywhere’ recently because he’s been touting his new book: ‘You got to sell books. The books don’t buy themselves.’ He’s just back at home in Long Island looking chipper and relaxed in a Batman t-shirt, his famous hair perfectly coiffed, after a two-week tour of the UK, where he packed out theatres from Manchester to Bath with a coterie of high-profile hosts from the BBC’s Justin Webb and Katie Razzall to Marina Hyde and Peter Frankopan. 

The book is All the Wrong Moves, his account of the three catastrophic American decisions – China’s entry to the WTO, the post-9/11 wars, the 2008 bank bailout – that, he argues, led directly to the rise of Donald Trump.  

‘I feel like the British audience gets my sense of humour,’ he says. ‘I think they also realise I don’t take myself that seriously. If someone comes in all American, chest thumping, you’re like, “Oh my God, get the hell out of here.” I come in and say, “Look, I was six foot five when I met Donald Trump. Look at me now.”‘  

The Wargame on Sky TV

His self-awareness isn’t performative. Ten days before we speak he recorded Elizabeth Day‘s podcast How to Fail, confessing his three greatest flops as getting fired from his first job at Goldman Sachs, the collapse of his first marriage, and finally the White House debacle. ‘I don’t think I could have been any realer with anybody,’ he says. ‘I’m a Roman Catholic. You go to see the priest and you tell them what’s going on and you ask for dispensation.’ His theory about himself is simple: ‘People in my industry, they put up all this battle armour… I think I like people too much to do something like that.’ Trump, he notes, does not like people.

Does he feel, as I do, that life’s gone thoroughly ‘meta’? At the Lyceum, the audience clutched huge tubs of popcorn and mini prosecco bottles while he and Brown discussed the collapse of the American republic. In The Wargame, Britain is left swinging in the wind, while presumably viewers turned off the TV and went back to washing the dishes (and perhaps, in my case, checking the inventory of their apocalypse stash and wondering whether six cans of chickpeas is enough). Terrible news is being packaged up as entertainment – or do the powers that be think that’s the only way to get through to the hoi polloi? 

‘We’ve put [reality television] in the political system,’ he says. Trump was ‘arguably one of the best reality television stars’, and American elections are now ‘a popularity contest and “who is going to entertain me more”, way more than it is a hiring decision’. Was it always so? A little, he concedes – ‘Jack Kennedy had a great smile. He was telegenic. It probably helped him. Barack Obama probably had the best smile in American politics since Jack Kennedy’ – ‘but it’s gotten worse’. Farage’s smile, anyone? 

Scaramucci has long been fond of Britain, even before he teamed up with the cut-glass tones of BBC broadcaster Katty Kay for the extremely popular podcast The Rest is Politics US (‘a British accent’s worth like 15, possibly 20 IQ points,’ he says). He first arrived, aged 21 with no money, to attend the London School of Economics, which he chose over a term at Tufts in Massachusetts because ‘it was $8,000 cheaper’. He lived in Paddington and took the Bakerloo line to lectures. ‘I know that people probably don’t realise this because they think I’m bougie today [he is], but I know the Underground really well in London.’  

‘Claridge’s understands Americans. You have air conditioning, ice cubes, and shower pressure. That’s the holy trinity of American consumerism.’

His bougieness manifests itself in everything from hotels – in London, you’re likely to find him hanging out at Claridge’s (‘they understand Americans. You have air conditioning, ice cubes, and shower pressure. That’s the holy trinity of American consumerism’) to packing – ‘I’m bringing a walk-in closet. Lucy, I got hair products, girl’ – to fast cars. He even bought his mother a Maserati when she was 85. ‘My sister was like, “You’re ridiculous.”‘ Yet he doesn’t live in a huge golden-gated mansion, you might be surprised to hear. ‘I’m a study in contrast,’ he says. ‘I think for my income level and where I’ve gotten to [after] 40 years on Wall Street, I live in a suburban home. It’s a nice home, but it’s relatively modest because I want to make sure my kids can hang out in a neighbourhood. I don’t want them on some big estate where they feel lonely. But the flip side is I always wanted to have nice cars when I was a kid, so I did manifest that, Lucy.’ His wheels? A Lamborghini Huracán.

His family clearly matters hugely to him and means that running for office himself is off the table. ‘You got to be such an extreme narcissist that you don’t care about your kids, because in this country, if I were to run for office at the highest level, they would go after my kids. They would eviscerate them.’ He learned how the machine works after his one and only White House press conference, when a Republican operative rang him up afterwards to scold him: ‘You got to talk in a way where people don’t understand what you’re saying, so they tune you out.’  

What’s the mood in Trump country at the moment? Living in one of the most Republican-leaning counties in New York state, he says: ‘I can’t go to the Starbucks where someone won’t come up to me and say, “Wow, I wish I had listened to you. This guy’s killing me.”‘ At the arcade with his children on Friday night, two men with a painting business told him the price of paint and petrol was destroying them. Trump’s approval among the under-30s, he says, has gone from minus four on election day to minus 47. Everyone is waiting for the midterms; I relay what Simon Schama said at the recent FT Weekend Festival, warning that America may simply be tangled in litigation for months afterwards. He agrees – and warns that lame-duck presidents are frozen out by Congress and reach for executive orders, tariffs and ‘military adventurism’. ‘He’s going to be even crazier. He’ll be exponentially nuttier.’

‘He’s going to be even crazier. He’ll be exponentially nuttier.’

Does he think Trump ever reckons with himself, alone at night? ‘No reckoning,’ he says flatly. ‘He’s pretty smug, very self-confident, thinks he’s the smartest person in the world, which is why he is trying to wreck everything, because anything that came before him can’t be right… He’s an overcompensator, so he’s overcompensating for something. It’s pretty obvious.’  

For a man with enemies in the world’s most powerful building, he sleeps suspiciously well. ‘I am what I call pronoia,’ he explains – the opposite of paranoia. ‘The universe is bending towards me… generally people are good, and you have to believe that things are going to work out. If you believe that and honestly believe that, you’ll sleep pretty well.’

And for all my derangement, if I trust that the universe is bending towards The Mooch, I should sleep better too. Let me just count those tins again first. 

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