Ex-White House aide Anthony Scaramucci ripped into President Trump on Thursday, invoking the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) and his former chief counsel Roy Cohn to criticize the president.
“If he is criticizing me, he is a full-blown demagogue,” said Scaramucci, who served as the White House communications director for a little more than a week in 2017.
“It is literally like Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn got together and had a baby and the baby was Donald J. Trump running the country,” he added.
Hill.TV has reached out to the White House for comment.
It is the latest shot in Scaramucci’s ongoing feud with Trump that has intensified in recent weeks.
During an interview with CNN on Tuesday, Scaramucci said the president is in a “meltdown,” warning that his behavior will likely only get worse.
“I’m not a psychiatrist, I’m not going to clinically evaluate him, but just as a voter you’re saying, ‘look, the guy’s obviously in mental decline,’” he told the network. “What I find sad and troubling about the whole thing is he’s got a group of people around who are supposedly loyal to him and like him who are not addressing it.”
Scaramucci also previously characterized Trump’s response to the mass shooting in El Paso as a “catastrophe,” prompting Trump to say that the former aide “knows very little about me.”
The former aide insisted in his interview with Hill.TV that this criticism is not personal, adding that he could no longer stand by the president’s rhetoric.
“The red line for me was the full-blown racism against the four congresswomen,” he said referring to Trump’s attacks on Democratic minority Reps. Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) and Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) in July.
Scaramucci said that Trump telling the congresswomen to “go back” to where they came from was not only racist but also out of line.
“I’m a Republican, I don’t agree with them — I don’t agree with their policies but they do have standing to live in the United States,” he told Hill.TV, noting how all four were U.S. citizens and only one was born outside the country.
—Tess Bonn
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