Former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci said Friday he blames both lawmakers and his former boss, President Trump, for letting the shutdown linger on for three weeks.
“I’m not here blaming the president, Chris. I know there’s a lot of people who want to blame him. I think there’s blame on both sides. But I think that the big thing here now is that you’ve got 20 days, longest government shutdown in history. You’re going to start to affect the stock market and the economy,” Scaramucci told CNN host Chris Cuomo.
Scaramucci, who worked in the White House for less than two weeks in 2017, said Trump should consider how this looks to others not in his position.
“If you were Mr. Trump at the Trump Organization, watching President John Smith and Nancy and Chuck go at it like this, boy, I got to tell you, he would be upset about that. He would probably be on Howard Stern right now saying, ‘Can you believe that these guys can’t get along or bridge the gap or drop their egos to come together?'” Scaramucci said.
Cuomo said Trump could declare a national emergency and possibly come out from it unscathed. Scaramucci joked that that type of executive action was used in an episode of “House of Cards,” but said the precedent it would set for his successors makes it the wrong move to make at this point.
“It’s obviously not right to do it. I would caution him not to do it. I hope he has people inside the room with him who are saying, hey, don’t do this. This is a domino effect. You’ve got so many wins on the board,” he said. “Why give up so many points on the scoreboard for these ego-driven, north-going/south-going acts?”
Cuomo said he never believed Trump was serious in his campaign promise to build a wall the full length of the 1,942-mile U.S.-Mexico border. Approximately one-third of the border has some type of barrier.
Scaramucci said he thinks Trump was being honest, but admitted Mexico’s funding the project “was probably more of the improbability.”
