Scaramucci Book: Trump Said 'I Don't Want His Filth Tainting You' About His Own Chief of Staff

A Job Offer, a Hotel Room, and Two Guys Trying to Bribe Him With Paris

According to an exclusive extract published by The Guardian, the Scaramucci story starts the way all great disasters do: with a phone call and a lunch invitation. Trump rang him in July 2017, told him to sneak in through the East Wing to avoid the press, sat him down in the study off the Oval Office, and handed him the communications director job essentially because nobody had bothered to fill it after the last guy quit.

Scaramucci admits his first thought was that he had no business taking the job. No experience. No plan. Trump's response, per the book, was basically: relax, we figured out the campaign, we'll figure this out too. Which, sure. The campaign ended with a historically chaotic administration that is somehow still ongoing, so points for consistency.

Here is where it gets immediately worse. The White House operations guy apparently tipped off Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon that Scaramucci was coming in. By the next morning, while Scaramucci was having coffee at Trump's DC hotel, both men were on the phone offering him ambassadorships. Paris was specifically on the table. All he had to do was stay out of the White House.

He told them to go fuck themselves. He then went and told them both to their faces that they were dicks who were leaking on each other and hurting the president. In Washington, this is what professionals call a sub-optimal opening move.

The Filth Comment, Delivered Straight to Priebus's Face

The Guardian's extract includes a moment that deserves to be framed and hung in whatever wing of presidential history covers 'things that definitely happened and are insane.' In a meeting with Trump, Priebus, and staff secretary Rob Porter, Trump announced that Scaramucci would report directly to him, bypassing the chief of staff entirely. Then he turned to Scaramucci and said: 'I don't want his filth tainting you.'

Priebus was sitting right there. He did the 'howdy doody' thing, Scaramucci writes, trying to pretend he wasn't furious at Trump. He couldn't hide how furious he was at Scaramucci. Which tracks, because the president of the United States had just called him filth to his face in front of a subordinate he'd been trying to block from getting hired.

This is how the senior leadership of the executive branch of the American government operated. Cabinet-level officials getting called filth in staff meetings. Ambassadorships offered as keep-away bribes. A brand new communications director who, by his own admission, had no idea what he was doing. Sean Spicer quit that same morning rather than work under Scaramucci, which in retrospect was the single most professionally rational decision anyone made that entire week.

The Silos, the Ratfucking, and the Roosevelt Room Speech Nobody Asked For

Scaramucci's diagnosis of the early Trump White House, as described in The Guardian extract, is actually pretty lucid, which makes it funnier and more painful in equal measure. He walked into a building running three mutually hostile fiefdoms: the Kushner group, the Priebus group, and the Bannon group, all of them 'ratfucking' each other with back-channel leaks to the press. His word. A specific and accurate Washington term for a specific and accurate Washington practice.

He called a big meeting in the Roosevelt Room and laid all of this out bluntly, which is not how you build alliances with people who have been doing this for decades and view bluntness as a threat. He described Trump as someone who had come into the presidency essentially trying to figure out what presidents do all day, getting pulled in every direction by people who hated each other. Which is one of the more devastatingly honest descriptions of the 2017 Trump White House you'll ever read from someone who was actually inside it.

Then came the press conference. Scaramucci writes that roughly thirty to forty million people watched it, and that if you go back and watch it today, it looks like it went very well. He then immediately notes: it did not go well. That sentence is doing a lot of work as a preview of the next eleven days of his life.

Eleven Days Is Apparently Enough Time to Ruin Everything

For anyone who needs the recap: Scaramucci lasted eleven days as White House communications director before being fired. He gave a phone interview to a journalist in which he made comments so spectacularly unhinged that even by 2017 Trump White House standards they were considered too much. General John Kelly had just been named the new chief of staff, replacing Priebus, and one of his first acts was pushing Scaramucci out.

Scaramucci's own framing in the book, as The Guardian reports it, is that working for Trump 'wasn't just a huge mistake' but 'gave me the opportunity to make a lot of other huge mistakes.' Which is, genuinely, a self-aware and funny way to describe a period in your life where your career, your reputation, and apparently your marriage all took serious damage in less than two weeks.

The thing is, Scaramucci has spent the years since becoming one of Trump's more credible critics, which gives the book a different weight than the typical tell-all. He is not trying to rehabilitate himself by attacking someone he still privately admires. He thought this was a catastrophic idea while it was happening. He did it anyway. And he's been living with that ever since.