After a 10-day stint in the White House, former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci is “cool” with President Donald J. Trump after being fired back in late July.
“I’m cool with him, I hope he’s cool with me,” he said when asked about the status of their relationship.
“Hey, let me tell you something — politics is totally different than business,” he added. “But it’s similar to business in one way — when a decision is strategically made to change management, what typically happens is other personnel go alongside the management change. I’m a very big boy. I ran two companies. I’m an entrepreneur. I had to make those types of decisions in my life. They are painful to make. And firing a friend is sometimes a painful thing to do, but if you think it’s the right thing to do for the government and therefore the country and therefore the Administration, I’m totally cool with it.”
Scaramucci acknowledged that he’s spoken with Trump since leaving the White House, though he declined to give any insight into those discussions when asked.
“The truth of the matter is, is that’s like attorney-client privilege,” he said, “I respect the president. I sort of have a friendship with him, and we’ve had conversations. For me, you know, I just wouldn’t talk about it.”
Scaramucci, or “The Mooch” as he’s called, is already on to his next venture. On Monday evening, he unveiled The Scaramucci Post while sporting a sling on his right arm following shoulder surgery and surrounded by a throng of reporters at an event held at The Hunt & Fish Club, an opulent Midtown steakhouse he co-founded.
It’s not immediately clear what The Scaramucci Post is, though.
“You want to describe it right? Say ‘Scaramucci has absolutely no idea what he’s doing and he has absolutely no idea where The Scaramucci Post is going,’” he told a group of reporters.
“We’re going to roll out content and product on those three venues,” Scaramucci told Yahoo Finance. “And over time, if I have the right proof of concept, we’ll start selling advertisement, which I’ve already done. And we’ll start creating a full-blown website. I don’t want to do that yet.”
He owns the domain ScaramucciPost.com, but isn’t using the website as a landing page at the moment. He didn’t purchase other domains either. Instead, he expects “trolls” and “opposition research people” to snap up the other domains and “do their typical B-S.”
“So that’s why I didn’t buy it,” he said. “Let someone else buy it. Because there’s like too much ‘Scar’ in there, it makes me think of ‘Lion King’ and the bad guy, right? So I got to stay away from that. But like, to me, I only bought one website. Let the other people go crazy on the other websites because I’m going to make a mockery of them. Like the guys that were running opposition research trying to dislodge me, it was laughable.”
He told one reporter in a group last night that one thing he learned in D.C. was “not to talk to you.”
“That’s what I learned. Obviously, I didn’t learn it enough because I’m still talking to you,” he said, adding, “I love talking to reporters. That’s actually what I was trying to do. Open up that system.”
At this point, he has no plans to hire a newsroom of journalists.
“I’m not sure if we’re hiring journalists yet,” he said. “We may be an aggregator. We may be asking for guest contributors yet who are not even journalists. They may be business people, or they may be ordinary business people, you know what I’m saying?”
Anthony Scaramucci, Founder of SkyBridge Capital, speaks during the SALT conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S. on May 17, 2017. REUTERS/Richard Brian/File Photo
Mooch’s next act
Prior to making a splash in D.C., the life-long Republican had been one of the more visible figures on Wall Street. A former CNBC contributor, Scaramucci also made frequent appearances on Fox Business Network where he also previously co-hosted “Wall Street Week,” the financial program he resurrected. He’s also known for hosting the SALT Conference, a star-studded hedge fund event in Las Vegas that brings together billionaires, politicians, and celebrities.
A Goldman Sachs alum and Harvard Law graduate, he founded SkyBridge Capital, a fund of hedge funds, in 2005. He raised money for Trump during the campaign and then served on the transition team. In January, Scaramucci sold SkyBridge to Chinese conglomerate HNA Capital on the expectation that he would take a job in the White House. That didn’t immediately happen. In June, Scaramucci was appointed the chief strategy officer for the U.S. Export-Import Bank. In July, he was offered the Communications Director role. He lasted 10 days.
So who is Scaramucci now?
“I’m the same guy that I’ve always been. I’m a tinkerer,” he told Yahoo Finance. “Some people are entrepreneurs. Some people are capitalists. And other people are capital artists. So right now, my ejection from the White House has given me this fresh canvas to paint on. So I’m painting. I have no idea what the painting will look like when I’m done, but I’m painting. The same way I painted on SkyBridge’s canvas and painted on Oscar Capital’s canvas. I’m painting. And I want a couple of things to go on that canvas, so I’m working on it. And I’ve also got an eraser. That’s why God made erasers on the other side of pencils. So some of it will get erased. Who knows?”
“I still think that’s true,” he said. “I think that he’s discovered — and we’ve all discovered — that the permanent political class and the calcification of that permanent political class, is way more difficult to disrupt and bust through than he originally thought. But he’s a very adaptive, very creative guy, and he will do that. And he will get a large swath of his legislative agenda passed. He’ll go on to win reelection, and he’ll be a very successful president.”
Scaramucci thinks that a “form of health care and a form of tax reform” will happen.
Asked if he intends to return to Wall Street, he said that he would likely do “something in the asset management space.”
According to Scaramucci, the 2018 SALT Conference in Las Vegas will happen.
“We’re doing that,” he said. “I will 100% be there. I hope to host it. Remember, myself and my family; we own 51% of it. Skybridge and the entity associated with Skybridge owns 49%. And so, I fully intend to be there. I think it’s going to be spectacular. I’m already working on the slate of entertainment and guest speakers.”
—
Julia La Roche is a finance reporter at Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter.
