The former White House communications director, who missed the birth of his son while in the administration, looks back in a new book
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NEED TO KNOW
- Anthony Scaramucci went to work for Donald Trump for just 11 days and the experience upended his career, marriage and reputation
- In his new book, All The Wrong Moves, Scaramucci examines how both he and the country got to the current moment
- He also revisits his volatile, very brief stretch as Trump’s communications director in 2017, when his wife filed for divorce and he missed the birth of his son
Anthony Scaramucci somewhat infamously went to work for President Donald Trump for just 11 days back in 2017 and the experience upended his career, marriage and reputation.
“My wife filed for divorce on me. I mean, that’s pretty detrimental, right?” Scaramucci, 62, tells PEOPLE during a recent interview from his Manhattan office.
“She was not a fan of the president,” the financier-turned-political aide-turned-financier recalls of his wife, Deidre Ball.
In a new book, All The Wrong Moves, Scaramucci sets out, he says, to examine how both he and the country got to a place where they could turn to Trump for the answers.
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While much of the book explores decades of policy decisions by presidents of both parties — and offers one man’s pitch for moving the U.S. forward after Trump’s second term — Scaramucci also revisits his volatile and very brief stretch as Trump’s communications director, during which his wife filed for divorce and he missed the birth of his son James.
“I let my ego get the better of me and I went to go work for him and it cost me,” says Scaramucci, who built a reputation among the press for his chattiness (even to his detriment).
“And by the way,” he adds, “that’s another cautionary tale for PEOPLE fans: Don’t let your ego into your decision-making, your personal or your professional decision-making, because when you do that, it could set you up for a disaster.”
Credit: Albin Lohr-Jones/Pool via Bloomberg
In the book, Scaramucci writes that his “judgment was impaired” when he joined Trump after first supporting former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and other Republicans in the 2016 primary.
“When I was on the campaign plane with him in 2016, he told me, ‘I always wanted to do this,’ ” Scaramucci writes of Trump.
Ball, Scaramucci’s wife, “told me not to get involved with Trump,” he says.
On July 24, 2017, she went into labor while her husband was with the president at a speech to Boy Scouts in West Virginia where he recalls Trump saying “almost nothing that’s not completely insane.”
“She was so fed up with my decision-making that during her pregnancy she’d filed for divorce — no half measures, like a separation, but outright divorce,” the longtime Wall Street fixture and GOP fundraiser writes. “I didn’t want that. But if I was trying to make things right, nobody would have known.”
Nine years later, Scaramucci says, he’s done the work to fix things with Ball, with whom he has two kids.
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Another piece of advice from Scaramucci?
“Don’t make your relationships disposable in life,” he says. “Deirdre and I were on the verge of divorce nine years ago. We’re closer than ever. It took a while. We had to work on things.”
“A lot of the things that went wrong were my fault, so I had to own and accept that,” he adds.
Many of the “things that went wrong” were in the disastrous summer of 2017, when Trump appointed Scaramucci communications director amid internal staff feuds.
After less than two weeks, the resignations of the press secretary and chief of staff, Sean Spicer and Reince Priebus, plus an obscenity-laden interview with The New Yorker and a Cabinet Room debate with the president that he says “embarrassed” Trump, Scaramucci was shown the door by retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, who replaced Priebus.
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“It’s nine years since I got fired from the White House and pulled myself out of that bad personal situation,” Scaramucci says now.
“It took a lot of work,” he insists. “I’m not trying to make light of it, but it was valuable work that I’m glad I did.”
Now, after voting for Democrats over Trump in the 2020 and 2024 presidential races, Scaramucci says he wants to help the country do the work to repair damage what guys like him have done.
As ever, he doesn’t mince words.
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“I actually thought I was going to help change the world. It was pride, egocentrism and asinine stupidity. I missed the birth of my son. I almost lost my marriage,” he writes in his book. “It’s all well documented. You can read a lot more about it if you want — some true, some not.”
All The Wrong Moves is out now, wherever books are sold.
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