President Trump lashed out at former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci on Twitter Monday morning, shortly after Scaramucci finished a segment on CNN.
The president wrote, “Anthony Scaramucci is a highly unstable ‘nut job’ who was with other candidates in the primary who got shellaced, and then unfortunately wheedled his way into my campaign. I barely knew him until his 11 days of gross incompetence – made a fool of himself, bad on TV. Abused staff …”
He continued the attack in a threaded tweet: “….got fired. Wrote a very nice book about me just recently. Now the book is a lie? Said his wife was driving him crazy, ‘something big’ was happening with her. Getting divorced. He was a mental wreck. We didn’t want him around. Now Fake News puts him on like he was my buddy!”
Trump didn’t mention Scaramucci’s CNN interview, during which the Mooch told “New Day” anchor Alisyn Camerota of the president: “The guy’s unstable. Everyone inside knows it. Everyone outside knows it … Moreover, I’ve got to get some of these former cabinet officials, in unity, to speak up about it. They know it’s a crisis.”
Camerota pushed, asking for the names of former cabinet members who are planning to speak up in favor of a Republican primary challenger to Trump.
“This is an organized process,” Scaramucci, who did, in fact, write a book heralding Trump as “The Blue-Collar President” in 2018, said. “Again, it would not be fair for me to bring up their names right now, but I will predict in the middle-to-late fall, there will be a trove of people that will come together in unity and say, ‘OK, look: This is what’s going on. This is how the person’s acting. This is why there is nobody inside the White House that he’s taking any advice from.’”
It’s been a whirlwind few weeks for Scaramucci, who was once one of the president’s fiercest allies, frequently appearing on cable news to defend Trump, even after losing his administrational position after only 11 days. He rebuked Trump’s “racist tropes” and language on two occasions over the summer, first when the president attacked four Democratic congresswomen of color, then when Scaramucci called out a “linkage” between his immigration rhetoric and the mass shooting in El Paso, Texas. After that, he revealed he no longer supported Trump’s re-election bid.
He responded to the president via Twitter Monday morning, quote-tweeting the original tweet with this: “My wife @DeidreScaramuc2 response: ‘I don’t really like being tweeted at by @potus on a Monday morning but at least I had my coffee!’ More to follow . . .”
Trump’s original tweet misspelled “shellacked” and was deleted, then replaced with a tweet containing the correct spelling, so Scaramucci’s response now links to a missing page.
A representative for Scaramucci did not immediately return a request for comment.