In the summer of 2017, Anthony Scaramucci was a fist-bumping, name-dropping, “front-stabbing” (his word) 53-year-old Long Island hedge funder who joined the first Trump White House as communications director against his better judgment and became Washington’s favorite suit-and-shades-wearing greaser in the precious time he had, which turned out to be a week and a half.
He spoke third-personally (“The swamp will not defeat him,” he said of himself), missed the birth of his son (while the new boss addressed Boy Scouts in West Virginia), conceded defeat to the swamp upon his firing (on Day 11) and quickly booked himself on late-night television to prove that Anthony Scaramucci — the Mooch, as he self-identified — was in on the joke of his own life.
In the summer of 2026, an ocean and approximately 11,000 news cycles away, Scaramucci is the least changed forever-changed man in politics: a fist-bumping, name-dropping, front-stabbing 62-year-old Long Island hedge funder who gets to sit inside the Royal Box at Wimbledon for reasons that still seem to astound him, mingling with high-living agents of monarchy and Benedict Cumberbatch.
He is the host of a podcast about American politics, “The Rest Is Politics: US,” with an audience that can eclipse one million per episode (much of it outside the United States) and a self-described life coach and therapist for European leaders seeking to understand President Trump, whom he now condemns.
He is touring Parliament as a distinguished guest, patiently defining the term “Long Island Guido” for the locals and grinning in fan selfies from the streets of London.
“You turned me into a vaudeville act,” Scaramucci has told Tony Pastor, a founder of Goalhanger, the British podcast company that produces his show, according to Pastor.
Scaramucci does not seem devastated by this outcome.
Co-hosted by Katty Kay, a longtime BBC journalist based in Washington, “The Rest Is Politics: US” has become one of the most influential current-affairs podcasts on the British charts, with an elite following — royals, heads of state, lawmakers, intelligence officials — among America’s nominal allies across the Western world.
The show toggles between self-flagellating introspection about political fame-seeking — “Your ego is always talking to you,” Scaramucci has counseled, second-personally — and prolific news-of-the-day take-slinging: that Trump does not actually respect excessive flattery, according to Scaramucci, even if he craves it; that Vice President JD Vance has been set up to fail from the start; that Secretary of State Marco Rubio would be wise to leave before Trump turns on him.
“That’s the Trump decoder ring, OK?” Scaramucci said of himself in a 90-minute interview at his Manhattan hedge fund office. “I know exactly how these” — his noun was unprintable, as ever — “think.”
Mr. Scaramucci’s return to political prominence is a testament to many things: the power of performative self-awareness in modern media; the durability of a certain kind of New York character from Trump 1.0 (Mr. Scaramucci, Michael Cohen, Donald J. Trump); the professional survival skills of a man who, incidentally, also sold 30 percent of his company to Sam Bankman-Fried in 2022, a few months before Mr. Bankman-Fried was exposed as a fraud. (A bobblehead in Mr. Scaramucci’s office recreates a New York Post cartoon of him commanding a sinking crypto boat, the S.S. Mooch.)
No doubt there are second acts in Trump-era American lives.
What is harder to square is this first act for Scaramucci as a major public figure on another continent.
“The whole thing is accidental,” he said, credibly.
Yet these are disorienting times with disorienting headlines, across the algae-plagued capital and the befuddled world it shapes, with zigzagging tariff pronouncements and straits that open and close.
Maybe it almost makes sense that Scaramucci — no stranger to disorienting headlines and capital plans gone mad — would evolve into one of the era’s almost-sense-making international narrators.
“Even as a Republican, the Mooch speaks to many of us on the left,” Samantha Niblett, a Labour Party politician, said by email this summer after dining with Scaramucci and showing him around Parliament, where her calls for national sex education (and a planned on-site sex-toy display) have earned her the nickname of “sex M.P.” in the British press. “He translates what’s happening.”
Pastor, the podcast executive, said that the British simply cannot understand how America reached this point politically.
“We require explanation,” he said, allowing that it was likewise preposterous to see Scaramucci watching tennis with British aristocrats. “I haven’t heard it explained better than by Anthony Scaramucci.”
It has helped that Scaramucci understands the president far more than his 11 days would imply. They were donor peers during Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign — New York rich guys who liked seeing themselves on television.
Both have a history of win-some-lose-some deal making that netted out a pile of money (though Scaramucci, the son of a crane operator, had less of a head start).
Both are veterans of reality competitions — Scaramucci has appeared on “Celebrity Big Brother” and something called “Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test.”
“Dude, you have my phones?” he asked a (female) associate at one point during the interview. “Let me show him the picture of me getting pushed out of the helicopter.”
But beneath a “Guido exoskeleton,” as he calls it, one through line in his biography had been mostly concealed.
“I have a love affair with the U.K.,” Scaramucci said.
He spent a semester at the London School of Economics during college and ran the 1992 London Marathon. He traveled there often in a career that took him from Goldman Sachs, where he overlapped with Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada (“He came to my wine party at Davos”), to a hedge fund life that exposed him to all manner of British characters (“Michael Milken introduced me to Tony Blair”).
His infamous 2017 line about “front stabbers,” which he compared favorably to Washington-style backstabbers, came in an interview with the BBC.
Even the bullpen at his office, SkyBridge Capital, where Winston Churchill’s stern visage greets employees, is decorated with wartime propaganda recovered from a London tube station.
“DESERVE VICTORY!” reads the framed sign, purchased by Scaramucci amid the global financial crisis.
“When I have a rough moment in my life, I always go out and buy something resilient-related, you know what I mean?” he said. “This guy, to me, is the symbol of resilience.”
And so, the Mooch fights on the beaches (from a home podcast space in the Hamptons).
He fights in the hills (of Davos, Switzerland).
The swamp may have defeated him, but could it really have the last word if Anthony Scaramucci never stopped talking?
11 days in 2017
Day 1 was instructive.
“I’ve seen this guy throw a dead spiral through a tire,” Scaramucci said of Trump from the White House briefing room on July 21, 2017, hastening to add (four times) that he loved the president.
“I took trial advocacy at Harvard Law School,” he volunteered in one non sequitur. “A little name-dropping there, if you don’t mind.”
He blew a little kiss on the way out.
“Purebred New Yorker,” former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, another Trump ally, said approvingly at the time.
Maybe that was part of the problem.
Before long, Scaramucci was going full New Yorker (while in conversation with a reporter from The New Yorker), exploring pathbreaking frontiers in profanity to disparage White House colleagues like Stephen K. Bannon and Reince Priebus.
The incoming chief of staff, John F. Kelly, did not let Scaramucci reach August.
“No WH chaos!” Trump wrote on then-Twitter the day of the firing, less than persuasively.
Scaramucci still begins some stories with flourishes like “Trump said something really funny to me once — this happened on Wednesday — I know it was a Wednesday because I was only there for one Wednesday.”
And Kelly, now a fellow Trump critic during a second Trump administration, has become a friend.
“I’m not so sure he was quite prepared for working with the Trump family,” Kelly said in an interview. “I know I wasn’t.”
By his account, Scaramucci hired a crisis communications expert upon his dismissal, ignored that expert’s advice to disappear to Tuscany for a few years, and busied himself with leveraging his peculiar new celebrity and reconciling with his Trump-averse wife, Deidre, who had filed for divorce shortly before he took the White House job.
He appeared as a host on “TMZ Live.” He ballparked his speaking fee at around $40,000. (It is now in the $50,000 to $75,000 range, his manager, Ron Xepoleas, said. “Lot of London,” he added.)
He started a podcast with Deidre, “Mooch and the Mrs.” (Scaramucci has five children from two marriages.)
He introduced a befuddling social media project called “The Scaramucci Post,” which attracted outrage after posting a Twitter survey asking how many Jews died in the Holocaust — without his knowledge, he said. (“You’ve got to have a zero-tolerance policy on Nazis,” he explained at the time.)
He became a completist in the canon of late-night sendups of Anthony Scaramucci.
“I was being called Tony Soprano on the Potomac. I was called a ‘Jersey Shore’ cast member,” he remembered. “‘Human cocaine.’ I liked that one.”
Still, Scaramucci stayed mostly loyal to the president.
After having raised money for Trump in 2016 (once his preferred candidates, Scott Walker and Jeb Bush, fell away) and assisted with the presidential transition, Scaramucci retained some affection for the administration, he said, despite his own debacle.
He was a reliable defender on Trump-skeptical cable networks like CNN and MSNBC for another two years, before declaring the president “off the rails” in August 2019.
“The honest people in the room know that he is crazy,” Scaramucci said then.
The two began tweeting mean things at each other, only enhancing Scaramucci’s reputation at those Trump-skeptical cable networks.
Unlike some apostates like Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer who has lately returned to praising him, Scaramucci has remained broadly consistent in his assessments of Trump for the last seven years, while maintaining contact with many people in the president’s orbit. (“Relationships are fluid,” he observed, accurately enough, on Cohen’s new radio program recently.)
In 2024, he endorsed Kamala Harris, marveling aloud at the oddity of an anti-Trump tent that included him, former Vice President Dick Cheney and former New York Mayor Bill de Blasio.
“Strange coalition,” de Blasio said in an interview. “But in the moment, it made sense.” (The two intersected ahead of a “Paisans for Kamala” video fund-raiser that de Blasio helped organize.)
By then, the most conspicuous legacy of Scaramucci’s White House chapter was probably a long-running bit that enshrined his surname as a unit of time.
“All right, folks, it’s 11 days out,” he said knowingly into a camera at his office last month. He was shooting a promotional video to be published on social media 11 days before the release of his coming book (“All the Wrong Moves”) about the “catastrophic decisions” that facilitated Trump’s rise.
“You’ve got one ‘Scaramucci’ left to preorder.”
A ‘vaudeville act’ abroad
During a recent visit to Britain, Scaramucci was explaining the courtship rituals of Long Island to a former Conservative member of Parliament, lapsing into what sounded like Danny Zuko fan fiction.
Wearing a gold chain with his hair blown back, Scaramucci recalled, he would do push-ups in the parking lot of a local hot spot. Once inside, if a young woman rejected him, he would return to his car, change shirts and try a fresh pickup line: “It had to be the shirt. What about now?”
“I tell you,” Scaramucci told his host, Gyles Brandreth, “that worked.”
Decades later, adjusting his political profile has not been entirely different.
The uniform might change — he is with the president; he is against the president; he is gently taunting his new supporters by celebrating America’s first president (“It’s Only Treason if You Lose,” his George Washington T-shirt read for a Fourth of July video) — but Scaramucci does not, exactly.
He has a talent for “taking the piss out of himself,” said Pastor, the podcast executive, repeating a Britishism that other admirers also invoked. And he has a way of wearing down whatever constituency he is courting.
In person, he is relentless and contradictory and plainly amusing in the way that people who know Trump (including Scaramucci) often describe the president’s private bearing.
He will say he is not one of those guys who gratuitously display famous faces in their offices before lingering on photographs of Warren Buffett, Josh Brolin and Oliver Stone (“I did ‘Wall Street 2’ with those guys”) and a framed cartoon of himself from “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.”
He will share Tony Blair’s contact information with a reporter (when asked) and toss in a personalized copy of “From Wall Street to the White House and Back: The Scaramucci Guide to Unbreakable Resilience” (when not asked).
It is not lost on Scaramucci that he calls working for Trump the biggest mistake of his life but would register as another mostly anonymous big-money political gadfly without his Washington blip.
When Kay, a veteran BBC broadcaster with an accent to match, was looking for a podcast co-host ahead of the 2024 presidential election, she eyed Scaramucci in part because he was once an insider but also because of the strange symphony they might produce regardless of the subject.
“Podcasts are so much about voices,” Kay said. “The sound of my voice and the sound of Anthony’s voice are so different. And I couldn’t think of another podcast, particularly on politics, that had two people that sounded like that.”
Scaramucci can sound most authoritative when discussing the personal and professional incentives of those around the president, particularly when they seem to mirror his own from a former life.
After the sudden death last month of Senator Lindsey Graham, a onetime Trump antagonist who became an unbridled booster, Scaramucci recalled watching Graham, an acquaintance through the years, as Trump commandeered the party.
“Everybody in the Republican Party goes through that carousel, myself included, so I stand also accused of some of that hypocrisy,” he told Kay. “But I think it cost Lindsey in the end. I think that that was soul-tearing for Lindsey Graham.”
At his most diagnostically ambitious, Scaramucci has labeled Trump a “humiliation ritualist” who is best explained by his own insecurities or perhaps a tortured relationship with his father.
Even some who like Scaramucci have tweaked his qualifications for such appraisals.
“He made it 11 days!” said John Catsimatidis, a New York billionaire friend of the president who has known Scaramucci for years. “At least he has something to talk about for the rest of his life.”
He also has what he has always seemed to want: an audience, no matter how far-flung.
More than two-thirds of his viewers and listeners come from outside the United States, according to podcast statistics, with major followings not only in Britain but across Canada, Australia and Ireland.
“There’s only five million people, but it’s, like, the most popular political podcast in Norway,” Scaramucci said. “We had the prime minister on from Davos.”
Yet as Scaramucci has reinvented himself internationally, some America-first instincts have persisted.
After England squandered its early advantage in the World Cup semifinal, Scaramucci could not resist trolling viewers the next day with another George Washington T-shirt.
“The British,” it read, beneath Scaramucci’s perma-smirk, “Blew a 13 Colony Lead.”
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