- Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris in key states like Pennsylvania to win the election.
- Harris faced challenges, taking over Biden’s campaign 107 days before the election.
- Scaramucci cited inflation, Trump’s rhetoric, misogyny and anti-awakening sentiment as factors.
Anthony Scaramucci didn’t have much time to get his hopes up.
Just 90 minutes after the first polls closed on election night, Scaramucci started seeing exit polls that became the writing on the wall. Vice President Kamala Harris was running strong against Donald Trump in key states, including Pennsylvania.
The political commentator and vocal critic of Trump, who had a brief 11-day stint as the 45th president’s White House communications director, soon came to a realization that made him uncomfortable: the former his boss would defy his expectations and become president again.
“He won the right way,” Scaramucci told Business Insider in an interview on Friday. “He was democratically elected by the people of this country. He won the popular vote, he won the Electoral College vote, and so he will be the president of the country.”
Although Scaramucci may fear the outcome, he said he is not a sore loser, hence his congratulatory message to Trump and crucial ally Elon Musk.
“I’m an American citizen and I love my country and I want it to succeed,” Scaramucci said. “I’m not going to complain about it. I mean, it’s over.”
Hindsight is 20-20, but Harris may be haunted by mixed messages
Unlike many of his counterparts who have never been Trump, Scaramucci said he is not second-guessing Harris after her loss. He believes she was put in an “almost impossible” position, as she took over the reins of the campaign from Joe Biden just 107 days before November 5, which was unprecedented.
“In my mind, she gets an A+ on her campaign,” Scaramucci said. He added: “We can criticize her, we can defend her on Monday morning, but she went with the Biden team. God only knows what the infighting looked like within that team.”
Harris was not a perfect candidate, Scaramucci acknowledged. Although he saw her as smart and qualified, she didn’t have the charisma of President Barack Obama or Trump’s die-hard followers.
However, Scaramucci still believes Harris made some mistakes in the messages. She told late-night host Stephen Colbert “I’m definitely not Joe Biden,” before saying on ABC’s “The View” that “there’s nothing that comes to mind” that she would do differently than the president.
“She probably needed to do a little bit more on the economic agenda and maybe she needed to get away from Joe Biden,” Scaramucci said. “That was a difficult thing for him to do because of the relationship there.”
4 reasons why Trump won the White House again
Outspoken as ever, Scaramucci laid out a quartet of reasons why Trump beat Harris.
“I got it wrong,” Scaramucci said. “I got it wrong for a lot of different reasons, but I want to give you the top four reasons why I got it wrong.”
Perhaps the biggest anvil surrounding the Harris campaign was also the one that bedeviled Biden’s tenure: the highest inflation in more than four decades. The surge in price growth was global and largely driven by supply chain disruptions during and after the pandemic, but voters didn’t see it that way.
“People really believe that inflation is owned by Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, even though this was secular and systemic inflation,” Scaramucci said. “If you’re an economist, you understand that it got into the economy during the Trump administration through monetary and fiscal policy during COVID. Again, I wouldn’t blame Donald Trump for that either, but here’s what happened.”
Voters also shrugged off much of what Scaramucci called Trump’s “threatening” rhetoric.
“People are actually voting for a presidential candidate who don’t expect him to deliver on certain promises,” Scaramucci said, listing mass deportations, using the US military against his political opponents, or threatening to pull the FCC’s network license. like MSNBC or CNN.
Scaramucci is also convinced that some Americans did not want to vote for Harris because she is a woman, although many may dispute that notion.
“There is misogyny in the country,” Scaramucci said. “Certain segments of the population just won’t vote for a woman, okay? Now, you might hate me for saying this, but I’m just looking at the data and I’m talking very realistically about the data.”
Perhaps on the other side of that coin, Scaramucci believes Trump’s victory is a culmination of opposition to what many on the right have criticized as identity or “woke” politics.
“The average person in America does not like the hard-left culture that is being forced upon them,” Scaramucci said. “So when Trump is running transgender ads, negative ads — even though it’s a small segment of the population and even though a lot of what he’s saying is misinformed — it triggers people.”
Now that Trump appears to have won the popular vote as well as the Electoral College, Scaramucci believes there are no more excuses for Democrats. He believes Trump’s critics, including himself, should take a hard look in the mirror ahead of the next election.
“Your message is not what the American people — the majority of the American people — want,” Scaramucci told Democrats.