The brewing feud between President Trump and former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci escalated this week when the former staffer questioned the president’s mental health and denounced him as “worse than racist.”
“I think the guy is losing it, mentally,” Scaramucci told Vanity Fair. “He has declining mental faculties; he’s becoming more petulant; he’s becoming more impetuous. Okay, you see just by the way he’s sweating, his body’s not doing well.”
Scaramucci’s comments erupted in response to President Trump’s visits to El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, following the mass shootings, during which the president’s critics believed he made the trip all about himself.
“It’s obviously not a guy that takes care of himself, right? And he doesn’t listen to anybody. And just think about this, okay? There’s no one — there’s no Jim Mattis; there’s no Gary Cohn; there’s no one to check him anymore. Whatever my differences were with General John Kelly, after he left, this thing has completely unspooled.”
Though Scaramucci, who was disgracefully fired from his job at the White House after giving a profanity-laced interview in which he disparaged several colleagues, has largely supported the president, he told Vanity Fair that he could no longer handle Trump’s alleged racism.
“He can say that he’s not a racist, and I agree with him, okay?” Scaramucci said. “And let me explain to you why he’s not a racist, ’cause this is very important. He’s actually worse than a racist. He is so narcissistic, he doesn’t see people as people. He sees them as objects in his field of vision. And so, therefore, that’s why he has no empathy. That’s why he’s got his thumb up in the air when he’s taking a picture with an orphan. That’s why when someone’s leaning over the desk and asks [Nobel Prize-winning human rights activist Nadia Murad], ‘Well, what happened to your family members?’ — they were murdered — he just looks at her and says, ‘Okay, when are we getting coffee here?'”
As reported by Newsweek, the president’s mental health has been debated publicly ever since he ran for office in 2016. Bandy Lee, a Yale psychiatrist, even told the outlet last year that a Trump friend and White House colleagues approached her with concerns about the president’s mental state.
“My current concern is that we are already witnessing a further unraveling of the president’s mental state, especially as the frequency of his lying increases and the fervor of his rallies intensifies,” Lee wrote at the time. “I am concerned that his mental challenges could cause him to take unpredictable and potentially extreme and dangerous measures to distract from his legal problems.”
White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham told Eric Bolling of Fox News on Thursday that Anthony Scaramucci’s comments about the president’s mental decline were “nonsensical.”
“That’s nonsensical to me,” Grisham said. “His feelings just seem to be hurt. He’s the president. His poll numbers are going through the roof. Our economy is doing better than ever. He’s doing a great job. Anthony knows that and the country knows that.”