‘Yes, he is lying’: Scaramucci’s extraordinary Trump admission

THE Mooch is back at it again. The former Trump staffer has popped up with an embarrassingly frank assessment of his old boss.

US President Donald Trump. Picture: AFP

OCCASIONALLY, someone in Donald Trump’s orbit gets a little too honest.

That someone is often named Anthony Scaramucci.

You might remember Mr Scaramucci, or “The Mooch”, as the guy who lasted just 11 days as Mr Trump’s White House communications director before spectacularly selfdestructing and forcing the President to fire him.

RELATED: Scaramucci’s 11 embarrassments in 11 days

His most memorable mistake was unleashing a profanity-laden tirade during a phone call with New Yorker reporter Ryan Lizza, calling White House chief of staff Reince Priebus “a f***ing paranoid schizophrenic”, accusing political adviser Steve Bannon of trying to fellate himself and saying he was going to “f***ing kill all the leakers”.

Like I said. Too honest.

‘Was it something I said?’ Picture: AFP

Now Mr Scaramucci has popped up again with an inconveniently frank assessment of his former boss.

It started yesterday, when Mr Scaramucci appeared on the CNN morning show New Day to promote his book Trump: The Blue-Collar President. Host John Berman asked about Mr Trump’s arguably tenuous relationship with the truth.

In response, Mr Scaramucci said Mr Trump spreads lies “like a rascal, like a scoundrel”.

“There’s a smirk on his face when he’s doing it, and there’s an entertainment aspect to it,” he said.

“When he goes to a rally, there’s a level of embellishment there, because he’s playing to the crowd and playing for the laughs. You know, that has been his persona and style.

“We both know that he is telling lies. If you want me to say he’s a liar, I’m happy to say he’s a liar, but I am telling you that the people I wrote about in the book and the research that I did on it … they care way less about that.”

I should point out that Mr Scaramucci clearly intended this argument to be a defence of the President.

Eventually he turned to look down the camera and addressed Mr Trump directly.

“Nobody should lie. But you know, you’re a politician now, so politicians lie when their lips are moving, and so all these people lie. But you should probably dial down the lying because you don’t need to. You’re doing a great job for the country.”

Ex-White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci says President Trump "is a liar" https://t.co/aqEQDh335C pic.twitter.com/VylJGQjH8r

— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) October 24, 2018

The former White House staffer’s book tour started to double as a clean-up act today as he appeared on several more TV programs, having realised that calling out the President for lying was not exactly helpful.

First, Mr Scaramucci told Fox News he didn’t really admit Mr Trump was a liar.

“They asked me if the President tells mistruths or lies. I said he does intentionally lie to create a dog whistle and create some atmospherics. So they go and put a little tagline, ‘Scaramucci calls President a liar.’ That’s not what I was doing,” he said.

“I didn’t really say the President was a liar. I said the President is using a methodology of mistruth to create that level of tension and anxiety. He’s like, pushing the mainstream media and the left, and he’s trying to galvanise his base, and it’s a media device.”

Over on Bloomberg TV, he said Mr Trump was in fact a liar, but not a “liar-liar”. What does that mean? I’m not certain.

“He’s an intentional liar. It’s very different from just being a liar-liar,” Mr Scaramucci said.

“Yes, the President is speaking mistruths. Yes, the President is lying. He’s doing it intentionally to incite certain people, which would include left-leaning journalists and most of the left-leaning politicians.”

As far as I can decipher, Mr Scaramucci was arguing that Mr Trump’s lying doesn’t really count as lying if he is doing it to make the media and his political opponents, the Democrats, angry.

He said there was no point getting worked up about the President’s untruths, because it would only feed his support.

“If someone’s taking your lunch money in the cafeteria, if you call the hall monitor, it’s not going to help you,” he advised the media.

“You’ve got to defeat the person at the table with your peer group.”

Again, I’m not sure Mr Scaramucci had quite thought through his argument, given he likened the President of the United States to a school bully stealing other kids’ lunch money.

‘Is that a Vegemite sandwich? I love Vegemite. Hand it over, loser.’ Picture: AFP

Mr Trump’s honesty, or lack thereof, became a subject of intense debate this week as he spoke out about a migrant caravan heading towards America’s border with Mexico.

He said “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners” were among the 7000 migrants slowly travelling north, implying some of them were terrorists.

He provided no proof, and a senior counter-terrorism official in his own administration told CNN they “did not see any evidence” to support the explosive claim.

Mr Trump also fuelled the conspiracy theory that George Soros, a billionaire donor to the Democrats who routinely features in such theories, was paying the migrants in an effort to hurt him politically ahead of next month’s midterm elections.

“A lot of money has been passing to people to come up and try and get to the border by election day, because they think that’s a negative for us,” he told supporters at a rally in Montana.

That was the context for Mr Scaramucci’s initial interview.

Aside from calling Mr Trump a liar, Mr Scaramucci urged the President to tone down his words on the migrant issue.

“I think we’ve got to calm ourselves down, we have to dial back some of the rhetoric and get out a little bit of a decoder and get people to relax,” he said.

“You’re not having mums with their kids riding hundreds of miles to get to the US border because George Soros is paying them. That’s a bunch of malarky, and we all know that.”