The Mooch's bully 'Pulp' it
Axed aide cites flick, rips Bannon
Anthony Scaramucci, who was fired last month after just 11 tempestuous days as President Trump’s communications director, likened himself on Sunday to Harvey Keitel’s Winston Wolfe character in “Pulp Fiction” and blasted White House strategist Steve Bannon for dragging down the administration.
“I saw it more as like Mr. Wolfe from ‘ Pulp Fiction,’ ” Scaramucci said on ABC’s “This Week,” addressing characterizations of himself as a “political suicide bomber” for Trump.
Played by Keitel in the 1994 Quentin Tarantino flick, Winston “The Wolf ” Wolfe was a criminal underworld fixer who is called in to cover up a grisly shooting.
Scaramucci said he never talked directly with Bannon, the former executive chairman of the alt-right Breitbart News site, about his views on racism.
“I’ve never sat down with Steve Bannon and said, ‘Are you a white nationalist, a white supremacist?’ But I think the toleration of it by Steve Bannon is inexcusable,” he recalled.
Asked whether Bannon should be fired, Scaramucci, who railed against leakers during his short tenure, said, “I think the president knows what he’s going to do with Steve Bannon,” before suggesting the strategist was among those in the White House releasing sensitive information.
“At the end of the day, I think the president has a very good idea of who the leakers are inside the White House,” Scaramucci said. “The president has a very good idea of the people that are undermining his agenda that are serving their own interests.”
The Long Island native and former hedge-fund exec said Bannon, who along with former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus objected to Trump naming Scaramucci to a White House post, is dragging down Team Trump.
He said that aside from Trump’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner, few people in the West Wing can talk bluntly to the president.
“But you also have this Bannon-bart influence in there which I think is a snag on the president,” Scaramucci added, conflating Bannon with Breitbart.
“If the president really wants to execute that legislative agenda that I think is so promising for the American people, the lower-middle class and the middle-class people, then he has to move away from that sort of Bannon-bart nonsense ... The whole thing is nonsensical.
“It’s not serving the president’s interests. He’s got to move more into the mainstream. He’s got to be more into where the moderates are and the independents are . . . that love the president.”
In a profanity-laced conversation with a New Yorker reporter last month, Scaramucci said he wanted to “f- -king kill all the leakers” and blasted Priebus as a “f- -king paranoiac.”
He was even more profane about Bannon.
“I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own c- -k,” he said. “I’m not trying to build my own brand off the f- -king strength of the president.”
Scaramucci, who was fired on July 31 by then-newly minted Chief of Staff John Kelly, said he still stands by Trump.
“I went in there with my heart and soul,” he said. “I’m a straighttalking person. Did I make mistakes? Absolutely. But I enjoy being a straight-up guy today and in the future.”