Ex-White House aide Anthony Scaramucci is calling on Republicans to speak out against President Trump’s “depredations” in a scorching new opinion article in The Washington Post.
Scaramucci, who for a little more than a week was the White House communications director in 2017, challenged Republicans to “summon the nerve” to speak out against Trump.
{mosads}”Defy the culture of fear he has created, and go public with the concerns you readily express in private,” he wrote. “Hold on to your patriotism, and help save the country from his depredations.”
He also said critics of Trump should give room to former Trump advocates to turn on the president.
“And to members of the so-called resistance, please leave room on the off-ramp for those willing to admit their mistakes,” he wrote.
Scaramucci has stepped up his criticism of the president in recent weeks, and Trump has responded in kind, arguing his former aide is a “dope” who had little to do with his presidential campaign or White House.
“Anthony Scaramucci is a highly unstable ‘nut job’ who was with other candidates in the primary who got shellacked, & then unfortunately wheedled his way into my campaign,” Trump wrote in one recent tweet. “I barely knew him until his 11 days of gross incompetence-made a fool of himself, bad on TV. Abused staff, got fired. Wrote a very nice book about me just recently. Now the book is a lie?”
Scaramucci wrote in the Post that it took longer for him than it should have to disavow Trump.
He said the final straw came when Trump said that Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) should “go back” to where they came from even though all four are U.S. citizens and three of them were born in the United States.
He also said he was “appalled by the administration’s child-separation policy” on the southern border and described his ranting about the news media as the “enemy of the people” as dangerous.
He called his break from Trump “difficult and embarrassing.”
In previous comments Sunday on Fox News, Scaramucci called for longtime critics of the president on the left to help give former Trump officials and supporters “space” to “allow them to change their mind.”
“I would ask the left to let’s create an off-ramp for those people because when you’re trying to deprogram people from a cult, one of the first things you have to do is allow them to change their mind, and you have to allow them to have the space to change their mind,” he said.