Wall Street titan. Hedge fund manager. Television personality. Podcast host. Best-selling author. White House Communications Director . Well, technically. The last of those jobs lasted 11 days. Depending on who is counting and how charitable they're feeling, it was somewhere between a brief career and a long weekend. Scaramucci himself insists it was 11 days. The BBC famously says ten. Somewhere a constitutional lawyer is probably preparing a thesis.
Yet what makes All the Wrong Moves such an entertaining read isn't that Scaramucci once worked for Donald Trump. It's that he's become one of Trump's most articulate and persistent critics while retaining some of the same qualities that made Trump successful: supreme confidence, an instinct for headlines, an affection for grand statements, and a distinctly New York belief that no room is complete until someone is talking about you.
Listening to Scaramucci co-host The Rest Is Politics: US with Katty Kay, you quickly realise he is a born raconteur. He has the patter of a fast-talking Wall Street operator who somehow wandered into a Shakespearean political tragedy and came out with a podcast contract. That energy infuses every page of this book.
The premise is simple enough. America didn't get Trump because Americans collectively woke up one day and decided to elect a reality television star with the subtlety of a monster truck rally.
According to Scaramucci, Trump was the result of three colossal blunders by three successive administrations.
The guilty parties are:
- Bill Clinton's embrace of globalisation and China's entry into the world trading system.
- George W. Bush's decision to fight wars while cutting taxes.
- Barack Obama's rescue of Wall Street during the Global Financial Crisis.
Scaramucci argues these decisions, spread across both parties, hollowed out the American middle class, increased inequality, weakened trust in institutions and created exactly the kind of resentment a figure like Trump could exploit.
It's a surprisingly persuasive argument. The Clinton chapter practically crackles with frustration. Scaramucci sees the opening of American markets to China as the moment when policymakers started confusing GDP growth with public wellbeing. The stock market loved it. Consumers loved cheap televisions. Manufacturing towns in Ohio and Michigan were somewhat less enthusiastic.
Then comes Bush. Few politicians have ever attempted the ambitious feat of launching two wars while simultaneously cutting taxes. Normally paying for wars is considered good administrative practice. Bush decided this was more of a guideline than a rule. Scaramucci sees this as the moment America started loading its credit card and leaving future generations to sort out the bill.
Then Obama arrives. This is the section that will generate the most debate. Scaramucci doesn't argue the banks should have been allowed to collapse. What he argues is that millions of ordinary Americans looked at Wall Street getting rescued while their own lives disintegrated and concluded, perhaps reasonably, that there seemed to be two versions of capitalism operating at once. One had parachutes. The other got gravity.
The Mooch's central thesis isn't that Trump caused America's breakdown. It's that Trump inherited it. Or, to put it another way, Trump is less the disease than the symptom. If America were a patient, Scaramucci is arguing that everyone keeps talking about the cough while ignoring forty years of chain smoking.
What makes the book work, however, is that Scaramucci is prepared to include himself among the guilty. Most political memoirs are exercises in selective memory. The authors were always right, everyone else was wrong, and circumstances tragically prevented history from recognising their brilliance at the time. Not here.
Scaramucci describes joining Team Trump as a catastrophic mistake. A spectacular lapse in judgement. An ego-driven exercise in what he calls "Potomac fever". Essentially the political equivalent of believing you can fly because you've had three margaritas and a motivational seminar.
The problem, of course, is that many readers will respond the same way: "Mate, nobody forced you."
By 2017 Trump had already spent years peddling conspiracy theories, attacking institutions and generating more controversy than a season of Love Island. Scaramucci's remorse is genuine, but one occasionally wishes it had arrived before he accepted the office key. Even sympathetic reviewers have noted this weakness.
Still, self-awareness counts for something. And Scaramucci has a valuable perspective because he occupied an unusual position: close enough to see how Trump operated, but not there long enough to undergo complete political fossilisation.
His description of power is wonderfully cynical. Washington emerges as a city fuelled by ambition, ego, money and delusion. Not necessarily in that order. Reading All the Wrong Moves, you begin to suspect Scaramucci sees American politics as a kind of hedge fund with an army attached.
Which brings us to Trump. The book isn't primarily about him, but he hovers over every chapter like a gold-plated ghost.
Scaramucci's argument is that Trump exploited grievances created by generations of policymakers who often mistook market success for social success. When communities felt abandoned, institutions seemed remote and opportunity became concentrated at the top, Trump found his audience waiting for him.
Whether you agree with every conclusion is another matter. The danger of Scaramucci's thesis is that it occasionally understates personal responsibility. Economic frustration matters. Globalisation matters. Financial inequality matters.
But millions of countries experience these things without electing Donald Trump. Still, the book succeeds because it refuses to settle for simplistic explanations. Most Trump books are about personality. This one is about systems. Most books ask what Trump did. This one asks why America was ready for him. That's a much more interesting question.
And it's hard not to admire the sheer audacity of a man whose White House career lasted roughly the length of a Beyoncé concert deciding he's now going to explain modern American history.
The surprising thing is that he mostly pulls it off.
Funny, self-deprecating, provocative and occasionally insightful, All the Wrong Moves is political analysis with the pace of a Wall Street thriller and the energy of a man still trying to make up for the shortest communications-director stint in American history. The Mooch may have lasted less than a fortnight in the White House, but he's written a book that lingers considerably longer.
Scaramucci mentions plenty of Trump's disasters but given that they are such a movable feast, it's going to be the challenge of a lifetime for any historian to get any real handles on the scale and extent of his impact. Here's but a taste from Scaramucci's book for you.
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