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Scaramucci: Here's why Trump won’t get re-elected

Despite his ties to the Republican Party, Anthony Scaramucci has been candid about President Trump’s re-election chances. The former White House director of communications, who was fired by Trump after just 10 days in the role, listed several reasons he believes Trump won’t win in 2020 in a new interview with Yahoo Finance at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

“I take great solace in the following thing,” said Scaramucci, founder of the investment firm SkyBridge Capital. “That 85% of these delegates are holding their nose and are embracing him and are telling each other he’s going to be re-elected. And so, that gives me great confidence that he’s not going to be re-elected because the consensus here is generally wrong.”

New White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci takes questions at the daily briefing at the White House in Washington, U.S., July 21, 2017. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
New White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci takes questions at the daily briefing at the White House in Washington, U.S., July 21, 2017. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

Although the stock market has performed fairly well under Trump’s presidency, particularly in recent months, Scaramucci said the key is to look closely at wage data.

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“Good news for the bottom 10% — wages are up,” he said, “but the bad news for the middle class wages in America, they’re actually down over the last three years, and the income gap has actually widened in the last three years.”

Indeed, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta reported in October that wages were growing for lower-skilled professions amid minimum wage hikes. But the middle class does appear to be falling behind upper-income households. A report out this month from Pew Research Center pointed out that the median middle-class income grew from $58,100 to $86,600 from 1970 to 2018 — a 49% increase that was less than the 64% spike that upper-income households saw during the same period.

‘He’s abnormal ... he bullies private citizens’

A Politico/Morning Consult poll from November showed that 56% of voters expect Trump to be re-elected in 2020. But Scaramucci said that Democrats might have a chance to beat him with either former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg or former vice president Joe Biden as their nominee.

“Mike Bloomberg would have money,” Scaramucci said. “Mike Bloomberg knows how to handle a bully. Mike Bloomberg’s a great business leader. Mike Bloomberg has the technical skillset and the street smart skillset to beat him.”

He added: “Joe Biden is tough… He has stayed as the proverbial frontrunner… They like him in Pennsylvania. He could beat Trump in Pennsylvania.”

Scaramucci acknowledged Biden’s stutter, but said this could be a way for him to connect with average Americans and make him more relatable. In comparison, he described Trump as “unstable and so erratic.”

“He’s abnormal — he acts abnormal, he says abnormal things, he tweets abnormal things,” Scaramucci said. “He bullies private citizens. He has a bellicosity of rhetoric that’s shocking for an American president and so, what’s happened is the bell curve of normalcy has shifted and the delegates here have accepted some hypernormalisation.”

U.S. President Donald Trump holds a news conference at the 50th World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, January 22, 2020. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
U.S. President Donald Trump holds a news conference at the 50th World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, January 22, 2020. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

“It’s like if you have a crazy uncle,” he added. “He’s acting crazy. You’re at the dinner table and you’re trying to ignore some of the things he’s saying and hope that the spasm of crazy goes away. But it’s not going away and that’s the big issue.”

Trump’s current approval rating sits at 42%. It could be higher, Scaramucci said, but the problem is that there is so much disdain for him among Americans.

“Trump is a demagogue,” he said. “And demagoguery, if you really study it, it has a life expectancy of about four to five years. So we’re in the four-and-a-half year period of this demagoguery and when Joe McCarthy’s demagoguery ended, there were many great political leaders who said, ‘My god, why didn’t I speak up? Why didn’t I recognize the idiocy of this? Why didn’t I recognize what this person was doing to the great institutions of our country?’”

Adriana is an associate editor for Yahoo Finance. She can be reached at adriana@yahoofinance.com. Follow her on Twitter @adrianambells.

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