Trump, the Blue-Collar President

THE DAY AFTER President Trump appointed me to the job as White House communications director, Long Island Newsday, the newspaper I’d delivered as a kid, ran the story with my photograph on the front page. My eighty-year-old mother, who still lives with my dad in the house that I grew up in, bought a dozen copies at Jack’s Stationery down on Main Street. She might have been more excited than I was. My brother, David, joked that she was going to take down the photos of all her grandchildren and replace them with the framed front page.

Eleven days later—and it was eleven days, not ten as widely reported (I’m not gonna let the media steal almost ten percent of my White House experience!)—after I’d been fired from the job because of an embarrassing public blowout with a reporter from the New Yorker, things weren’t quite as heartwarming at the Scaramucci residence. The press descended like wasps on my parents’ house. When I heard, I went over to see how my folks were doing. As I pulled into the driveway, my mother was standing in the front doorway as reporters pointed microphones and cameras at her. My mom had a look on her face that I knew well. It was the same expression she wore when she’d say to me, “Wait until your father gets home!”

“Get the f**k off my lawn!” she yelled at them.

“Ma,” I said, “that’s what got me in trouble in the first place.”

MY BROTHER WAS ONLY half kidding about my mother taking down the photos of her grandchildren. The living room wall of my parents’ house is made of that old-school 1970s paneling. It’s right out of The Brady Bunch. It’s also the Anthony Scaramucci “Wall of Fame.” There are snapshots from high school to law school and everything in between, articles about my first two hedge funds, magazine profiles written well before “the Mooch” became a household name. Italian mothers can go overboard when it comes to two things: plastic-covered furniture and telling you how great their kids are. (My grandmother, my mom’s mom, who lived just a block from us in Port Washington, actually did have plastic-covered furniture, as well as plastic-covered rugs in the hallways and plastic-covered lampshades.) Then, in a blink, I went from the “eighty-fifth most important person in global finance,” according to Worth magazine, to off that list and into the abyss of political purgatory.

Still, modesty aside, Mom’s homage to me sums up a pretty unlikely life, although one that began in an average way. I was born in a small working-class enclave of Long Island, where my father started out with an hourly wage measuring the sand that was poured into barges and shoveling sand and stone from the ground. My mother stayed home and raised her children. I went to college and then a fancy law school on loans and a little cash from my father’s life insurance policy and savings. I followed my older brother to Wall Street, where I immediately got fired from Goldman Sachs, failed the bar exam twice, and was rehired at Goldman, all in about a year. From there on, however, my life went straight up like a rocket. I passed the bar, started a family and two successful companies, witnessed firsthand 9/11, survived the financial crisis, threw a legendary hedge fund conference called SALT in Las Vegas nine years in a row, twice in Singapore, and once in Tokyo, and had my own finance show on television. After all that, I backed my way into presidential politics the way most people get into drugs.

Along the way, I made friends with a billionaire real estate developer from Manhattan, a man who would go on to become the forty-fifth president of the United States. I was among the first people to learn Donald Trump was running for president (although I didn’t believe him at the time), and we ran in the same circles and attended the same charity and political fund-raisers. For a short time, I was even a political antagonist who challenged him to fights on television. Somehow, all that earned me a spot on the political campaign of the century, raising money and stumping for the candidate on TV. It was Donald Trump himself who ultimately gave me my eleven days of fame in the White House; and it was Donald Trump who had to toss me out, like an empty Big Mac box, when the time came.

In one way, this book is the story of my life and my unique friendship with the president, but in the larger view, it’s also the story of an America that changed dramatically during those years.

Both Donald Trump and I had fathers who thrived in the prosperity of the postwar years and benefited from America’s firm belief and investment in its middle and lower classes. One father dug the sand that made cement, and the other poured the cement into the foundation on which the American Dream was built. The America they grew up in was founded on a solid economic footing; it was unafraid to assert itself on the world stage when necessary. As we, their sons, came along, and the twentieth century wore on, some of that prosperity vanished before our eyes. The trade deals we had struck in the aftermath of the war became worse and worse as they were renegotiated by elitist politicians out of touch with the American worker, and our tax system fell far out of balance with what was sensible and necessary. The American government then laid the groundwork for a financial collapse and blamed its most influential financial institutions when that collapse happened. Our leaders became feckless and unable to stand up for the United States of America. The aspirational working class—hardworking men and women who, like Fred Trump and Alexander Scaramucci, had struggled to achieve success—suffered a sharp decline while career politicians in Washington lined their pockets and held Congress in gridlock. With the coming of the internet, vast, powerful companies run by tech oligarchs controlled the content we read and the things we bought. Though these companies professed to be progressive, their actions were actually intrusive, racist, and limiting.

The lives of American citizens declined too, and when those people looked for help, no one was listening. At least not until the most improbable of all candidates came riding out of New York to champion their cause.

FOR MY MONEY, however, the best stories are comeback stories. You know the moment in Rocky when the music starts to swell and Balboa is getting up from the mat? It’s when Apollo Creed starts looking worried, and the camera zooms in for a tight shot of Rocky’s puffy “Cut me, Mick” eye. If you’re like me, that’s when you start getting butterflies. That’s when the story really begins to mean something to you—maybe because, like me, you’ve been down on the mat yourself. You know what it feels like to be counted out and to know at the same time, with absolute certainty, that you haven’t thrown your last punch.

While I was making my way through the Ivy League and the upper crust of New York finance, Donald Trump was down in construction sites with his contractors, slipping hundred-dollar bills to waiters in the restaurants on his properties, and fixing up an ice rink in New York City when the government got too bloated and arrogant to do the job. He would also become one of the greatest brand-builders and businessmen of our time. He existed in a world of stratospheric wealth, and yet somehow was able to hold onto the blue-collar world of his father all at once.

I, on the other hand, let wealth and influence change me. The more I made, the further I descended into the echo chamber of private clubs and wealthy communities until I forgot all about the sand my father dug. It embarrasses me to admit this, but I so wanted to move into the world of financial independence that I slowly became ignorant of the blue-collar struggle that began to surround me.

Then came May of 2016, and a Trump rally in Albuquerque. It was the first event I’d attended as a member of the Donald J. Trump for President campaign. I walked through the crowd that had gathered by the thousands outside a convention center. I listened to story after story of economic strife and pain. I don’t remember if it was after the third or the thirteenth version of the same story when the epiphany happened. All I know is that it did.

Though I was in Albuquerque and the accent was different, I might as well have been in Port Washington on Long Island. The block I grew up on had landscapers, telephone linemen, cops, nurses, and firefighters. My father lost most of his hearing from the blasting at his job. We were the definition of blue collar, and our neighborhood had once made anything seem possible. So too had neighborhoods in Scranton, Beaumont, Santa Fe, and hundreds of other places across the country. We had gone from aspirational neighborhoods to desperational ones.

Those neighborhoods had been victimized by decades of unfair trade policy and anti-working-class legislation, and I, soaring far above the problems on the ground, had paid little attention to them. It took the campaign of a guy who lived in a tower on Fifth Avenue next to Tiffany to show me what was happening to America’s working class.

In the pages ahead, I’ll also show you how Donald Trump is changing that. I’ll deconstruct the beginnings of Trumponomics from an insider’s point of view, tracing the economic and cultural forces that have made it necessary. I’ll show you how his economic policies came about and how they will work for you. I’ll do the same with Donald Trump’s foreign and domestic policy achievements, place them into a historical framework, and look ahead to what they may bring in the future. I’ve always thought of myself as a guy who calls balls and strikes as I see them, however, and this book will be no different. Where I have problems with President Trump’s agenda, or think he made missteps, I’ll say so. And though my missteps could fill a phone book, here you’ll get the Reader’s Digest “abridged version.”

THERE’S ONE MORE thing I discuss in the pages ahead, but for the life of me, I can’t remember what it is… Oh yeah! The old elephant in the room! So if you picked up this book hoping to find out the inside story of my time in, and sudden departure from, the West Wing, don’t worry; I won’t disappoint you. Though short, those days were some of the Trump administration’s most tumultuous and formative, and I will reveal the stories behind the headlines and expose those responsible for much of the administration’s early discord. I hold nothing back (except the profanity), and spare no one, especially myself.

Still, I’ll tell you the same thing I tell everyone who asks about my eleven days in the White House: it was the twelfth day that mattered. That was the day I got up off the mat again, just like this great country of ours is in the process of doing.

As I sat in my parents’ living room that day, the mailbox on my cell phone filled with messages from reporters. Most of them were probably hoping I would trash the president for firing me, lacing my speech with four-letter words, just as I had done on the phone call with the New Yorker writer (more on that later). Wasn’t going to happen. First of all, I hold no anger toward the president. I’d given him little choice. Second of all, if I learned one thing about talking with reporters, it’s that most of them would double-cross their mothers for a story that goes viral. I should have known that before I started in the White House, you’re probably thinking to yourself, and you’re right.

It was as I looked again at the story of my life on the living room wall that the idea of this book began to form. In the days that followed, I went out to California to see my oldest son, AJ. I made a few appearances on television and the radio, including a tough interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and a fun podcast with the guys from Barstool Sports. I answered every question they asked as honestly as I could. I told them the real story. I didn’t, however, have the chance to tell the whole story.

That is, until now.