Anthony Scaramucci Says Trump Made All the Wrong Moves

The Best People with Nicolle Wallace

In this episode of The Best People, host Nicolle Wallace sits down with former Trump administration communications director Anthony Scaramucci to discuss his new book, 'All the Wrong Moves,' and analyze the structural

Key takeaways

• Scaramucci identifies three 'catastrophic decisions' (China WTO integration, Iraq War deficit spending, subprime mortgage expansion) that destroyed the middle class and created the conditions for MAGA's rise.
• He predicts Trump will immediately pardon himself and family members if Democrats retake Congress, but argues Trump's power will wane as his behavior becomes more erratic and self-serving.

Main topics

• Anthony Scaramucci's book 'All the Wrong Moves'
• Three catastrophic policy decisions (China trade, Iraq war, housing crisis)

Notable quotes

"I think it will end in darkness for Donald Trump," he says. But "it'll end with a brighter horizon for America — cause we're gonna fix this."

Conclusion

The episode concludes with Scaramucci urging Americans to maintain hope and

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Watch Ali Velshi five nights a week in primetime on MSNOW as he hosts the 11th Hour. The Justice Department is facing its own legal obstacles over this case. Putting today's stories in perspective. This one is perhaps one of the more interesting surprises. And tomorrow's headlines in focus. Economists are warning that American consumers are soon going to feel the hurt. The 11th Hour with Ali Velshi. Weeknights at 11 p.m. Eastern on MSNOW. And find more on the MSNOW app. Speaker 4 (0:32) Hi there, everyone. We have something very special for you this week. I recently sat down with Renaissance man, podcaster, financier, former Trump White House communications director, and former Trump advisor turned critic Anthony Scaramucci. Like the rest of us, he's obsessed with the big questions surrounding the future of our democracy. Things like how the heck did we get here? And how do we get out of this crisis? To help answer those questions, he wrote a book. Its title is All the Wrong Moves, How Three Catastrophic Decisions and Years of Shitshow Politics Led to Trump and How We Find a Way Out. We spoke in front of a live audience at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. It's part of a new series called 9-2-N-Y on MSNOW, where we join forces with one of our country's greatest cultural institutions to bring you conversations with some of the country's leading thinkers. So this is The Best People, and this is Anthony Scaramucci. Speaker 4 (1:40) Let me ask you about corruption and then we'll turn to the book. It seems to be that there are folks like myself who've been skeptical of Trump from go. But there were a lot of people that wanted what he was selling, radical change and economic revival. He's the swampiest, most corrupt. politician this country has ever seen. And the economy for the vast majority of Americans is a daily struggle between the price of gas, the price of groceries, cost of housing, access to health care, on and on and on. What is... the limit in terms of what he will steal, what he will grift, what he will profit from, and what he will sell in our name as Americans to adversaries. Speaker 2 (2:25) I don't necessarily think there's a limit. I think there is a melting ice cube of support, though. If you look at the numbers, I Speaker 4 (2:32) was Speaker 2 (2:32) watching your show yesterday, you were reporting a 27 % approval rating on the economy, overall approval rating of 32%. And so the ice cube is melting. If you look at his podcast posse, they have broken from him, whether it's Tucker Carlson, you name the podcaster. Joe Rogan, they're talking about pyramids now. Theo Vaughn, they're all running for the woods because they can't believe everything that he's done. You know, the banner for the Democrats should be, and I'm surprised they're not consolidating on this, is promises made, promises unkept. And you can go through a whole list of things that he's done in the second term, which is the exact opposite of what he was campaigning on. But I think there's a bigger issue. And it's something I tried to address in the book, Nicole, because when I travel and speak or do podcasting, people invariably come up to me and say, what happened? How did we get so tribal? How did we get so partisan? And it took me a while. I did years worth of research on the book, analytical data, historical analysis of other times in American history, a political analysis. And I tried to write a book that is actually nonpartisan. It's addressing three. big catastrophic decisions that were made by Republican administrations, Democratic administrations. I'm not really taking a stab at anybody. If you actually read the book, it is just an overview of what happened. So somebody could say, we're in 2026. Things were going reasonably well at the end of the 90s. We were printing a $240 billion budget surplus. We were talking about a peace dividend. This was pre-911. How do we go from that spirit of optimism in the United States to where we are today? And I think you can trace it through these decisions that were made. And again, guys, I'm submitting to everybody in this room. These are well-intended people, very, very smart people, and they're predicting outcomes and they're making decisions based on expected and predicted outcomes. And guess what happens? It goes completely against them. You know, President... Clinton, I write about him in the book. He's trying to integrate China into the global economy. He's going to make them a permanent member of the WTO. And I write about how I got that wrong. There I was as a 35-year-old smug Wall Streeter thinking that the protests that were led by Ralph Nader and the union leaders up in Seattle in November of 1999 were misguided. Here we are. We're going to open up this market, 1.3 billion consumers. Any manufacturing or labor will shift into the service economy, and these people will get sort of white-collarish pay. This is going to be a halcyon era for the global society. And, of course, I was fueled by what we were doing. The deficit was ending. Francis Fukuyama had said 10 years prior it was the end of history. We think about things a certain way, and they go against us. And then we get to the Bush years. That's the second big one. Speaker 2 (5:27) People may or may not remember Lawrence Wright's book, The Looming Tower, but if you want to go back and read it, what Lawrence Wright said in The Looming Tower is that Osama bin Laden, frankly, understood us way more than we understood him. Same thing's going on with the Iranians right now. They study us. We don't study them. We lack curiosity about their 5,000-year empire, but they study us. And bin Laden said, guys, get your air bases out of the Saudi. sacred land near Mecca and Medina. And Cheney told him to scram. And so on February 26, 1993, he hit the World Trade Center. Everybody remember that? People died in that tragedy. Just it wasn't the big one. In 1998, he hit the two embassies in Africa. Nicole will remember that. Okay, people died in that. In the year 2000, they attacked the USS Cole. Do people remember that? We killed our Navy servicemen in the USS Cole. And bin Laden said, I'm coming for their homeland. I'm going to hit them super hard, and they're going to wildly overreact. They're going to come into my neighborhood. They're going to spill their blood. They're going to spend their treasure. They're going to take away their own prized civil liberties. The Patriot Act was passed six weeks after 9-11. Everybody remember? And so what did we do? We played right into bin Laden's hands. Two wars. I love President Bush. He knows I love him and she worked for him and I know she loves him. You can be a good person and a well-intended person and an American patriot and make mistakes. Two wars, two tax cuts, $8 trillion of deficit spending. And that's not me. That's the Brown University cost of war study. And we blow a hole in our ability to sustain ourselves. We end pay as you go. Bush and Cheney say, you know, people say, should the American people sacrifice? We're going to war. They say, go to the shopping mall. You remember this. But remember, this is all about expectation of outcome. Everybody thought this was a couple of weeks, perhaps a few months. Nobody thought it was going to go two decades. Two decades, two wars, $8 trillion. And now let me tie those two catastrophic decisions together. Speaker 2 (7:43) You're killing the middle and lower middle income people by having China take over our manufacturing and outsuring everything. Now you're going to kill them with inflation. Because our government, our public servants, they want to provide you the services, but they don't want you to pay for it. But you know you're paying for it, right? Because you know this is unfunded deficit. Speaker 2 (8:07) Deficit spending is unfunded tax liability. And so you're going to pay it. And so we end up paying it with the most pernicious and the most regressive form of taxation. And what is that? That is inflation. And who does inflation kill the most? It'd be the family that I grew up in because my dad was a wage earner, didn't have a lot of assets. And now you're eating his ability to spend. And we're killing these people. And then we finish them off with the third catastrophic mistake. The third one is we have good intentions, ladies and gentlemen. The Clinton administration is trying to expand the American dream. And they want more home ownership in the country. And so they're telling the banks, it's OK, let's expand the American dream. And we're going to do subprime mortgages alongside of prime mortgages. And Bush loves this idea. So he takes it with him into his administration. And the home ownership percentage in the country is creeping up. But unfortunately, these people are very sensitive to the economy. And so when there's an economic shock, they can't pay their home mortgages. And they start defaulting on their mortgages. And the earthquake is happening in 07. And then the big kahuna hits in 2008. And now we got to bail out the banks. And by the way, I write about this in the book. You have to bail out the banks. Okay, we had a panic in 1873. We had a panic in 1907. We improperly bail out the banks in 1929. We have to wait for FDR to bail them out in 1933 and create the FDIC. So you have to bail out the banks. I understand that. But the trillion dollars that was given to the banks. went only to the banks. Had they had set this up where maybe $250 billion went to underclass people, middle class people, the distribution of the bailout would have been fairer. But it went to the banks, and banks do what banks do. They paid 5,000 people that year $1 million or more per person in bonuses. And, Nicole, that got people angry. And so you had the Occupy Wall Street movement. You had the Tea Party movement. And those two movements got together, had a baby. They named the baby MAGA. And then came Donald Trump as the godfather of MAGA. And that's my story. And I'm sticking to it. But go ahead, Nicole. Well, so, Speaker 4 (10:33) I mean, what all three crises do is they put so much distance between the politicians who enact. the policies, the leaders, and their base, right? It alienates them. And I remember when I went, my first assignment after Trump wins in 2016 is to go out and interview Clinton, Clinton, Obama, Obama, Trump voters, if they're that age, or Clinton, Obama, Obama, Trump voters, or just Obama, Obama, Trump, or just Obama, Trump. So they were from young to old, and they were people that had voted. For Democrats and then found themselves voting for Trump. So they were the people impacted or their parents were impacted by these policies. And you look at what's happening in our politics right now. Trump seems to be trying to put distance between himself and the things he's doing and his base. Do you see the fourth crisis happening right now? Speaker 2 (11:31) Yeah, this is a big one. I mean, this would be, you know, if the book sells and I'm writing another book about catastrophic decisions, this is a very big one. The return of Donald Trump