Anthony Scaramucci is much like my parents’ friends from Orange County.
They’re only a generation or two removed from immigrants and nevertheless wildly successful. Although they’re proud of their BMWs and Ivy-bound progeny, they remember the vestiges of the working class. They had no patience for the Obama administration’s relentless attacks on job creators and capitalism, but they consider themselves pro-immigrant, pro-marriage equality, and ambivalently libertarian on most other social issues. And they desperately wanted a woman president, but definitely not “Crooked Hillary.”
Plenty of those people either bit the bullet and voted for President Trump in 2016 for economic reasons or became part of the 4% of Orange County voters who voted third party. But for the first time since World War II, the county’s overall vote share went to a Democratic presidential candidate.
Other suburbs, such as those around Atlanta and Austin, hung on in 2016, holding their breath that a President Trump would act like, well, a president, and that Twitter trolling was an acceptable price to pay for tax cuts. But two years into Trump’s tenure, they turned, handing Democrats the House.
Although plenty have shellacked the former 11-day White House communications director as an opportunist, Scaramucci has always made his political calculus clear. A self-made financier from Long Island, the Mooch considered himself politically liberal until the Obama-era assault on market forces. He turned on the president’s push for a “state-controlled society” and promptly befriended Mitt Romney, then came to back Scott Walker and Jeb Bush.
Like plenty of the successful suburbanites who held out hope for Trump’s GOP until the midterm elections, Scaramucci’s strategic embrace of the president seemed to stem from the latter’s willingness to come around to conservative economic reforms. Although Scaramucci, a Harvard Law and Goldman grad who built SkyBridge Capital from scratch, lambasted Trump as an “inherited-money dude” during the 2016 primary, he joined Trump’s team shortly thereafter, focusing on promising positive financial policies.
Although the Mooch’s recent coziness with Donald Trump, Jr. has been parroted as a point against the authenticity of his revolt, he makes a fair point in the pages of the Washington Post: If his change of heart was purely driven by personal humiliation, wouldn’t the time to bash the president have been when he was fired after 11 days of serving as Jared and Ivanka’s hired hammer?
Far more likely is that what’s driving Scaramucci is what drove the upper-middle-class suburbs of Dallas and Denver. The cost of supporting Trump is simply greater than the benefits of his presidency. Sure, we’ve gotten tax cuts and conservative judges. But to the average American inclined to vote red for the economy, what does it matter if Trump’s trade war and bullying of the Fed threatens the growth those cuts granted us? And will those justices be able to withstand the authoritarian impulses of a generation of Democrats empowered by a youth vote horrified by the past few years? And for a while it seemed that we had adjusted to a new normal of a theatrical presidency, but the tweets are getting worse. The comments are getting worse. The petty vengeance is getting worse, and anyone who refuses to admit that it is all getting worse is lying to you.
So, the Mooch is done with Trump.
Trump can scoff at my Orange County friends all he wants. In his mind, the OC is just a bunch of Left Coasters that will never vote for him rather than the state’s bulwark of support for a Congress he needs to advance his agenda. But what about Delaware County, Philadelphia’s neighbor that nearly went for Trump in 2016, handing him the White House, but that voted 62% for Democrats just two years later? Or Washington County in Minnesota, which Trump desperately wants to win, that went from minority Democratic in 2016 to majority Democratic in the midterm elections? And how about supposedly blood-red Texas, where Joe Biden is beating Trump in head-to-head polls and bleeding pivotal suburban support for Republicans?
All of these areas tolerated Trump’s dumb tweets and racially insensitive remarks in the hopes that he’d man up and deliver American greatness. We got some of the goods, but with all of the bad and more. As much as the media may speculate on the palace intrigue regarding the Mooch, perhaps Occam’s razor applies here: self-made entrepreneurs and professionals who hated the financial punishments of the Obama era took a chance on Trump, in spite of his failings, but now the ask is too great, and they’re simply backing down.
