Anthony Scaramucci, who lasted barely 10 days as Donald Trump's White House communications director before turning into one of his more persistent critics, says there is one thing about the president that his opponents keep getting wrong: they assume he does not understand the culture war he so often wins.
In a post Sunday, Scaramucci offered an unusually admiring read of Trump's political instincts, casting him as a master strategist of cultural conflict. "He is the Napoleon of the culture war," Scaramucci wrote, reaching for a comparison drawn from Andrew Roberts' biography of the French emperor. Just as Napoleon "saw the entire battlefield" and anticipated his opponents' moves "before they even made the decision," Scaramucci argued, Trump does the same with culture, intuitively grasping issues from transgender athletes in sports to the anti-woke backlash to the sensibilities of the Bible Belt.
The heart of the post was a private remark Scaramucci said has stuck with him for years. "He told me something once I've never forgotten," he wrote. According to Scaramucci, Trump described his coalition in terms that cut against the usual partisan labels: "He said my base is socially conservative and fiscally liberal. They are working class people who need the government's help."
For Scaramucci, that line explains one of the more durable features of Trump's politics, his refusal to touch the social safety net. The president leaves Social Security and Medicare alone, Scaramucci argued, not out of compassion but out of calculation. It is "not because he's generous," he wrote, "but because he has extraordinary political instincts and he knows exactly who put him in office."
The assessment is striking coming from Scaramucci, who has spent years warning about Trump's character and predicting his downfall, including recent calls for White House staffers to leak everything they know. His Napoleon framing is not flattery so much as a warning to fellow critics, an argument that underestimating Trump's feel for the electorate is precisely how his opponents keep losing ground. "He gets the culture," Scaramucci wrote, "and his opponents keep making the mistake of thinking he doesn't."
That tension, a fierce critic crediting his target with genius, did not sit well with everyone in his audience. At least one reply pushed back on the premise outright, arguing that Trump does not read the battlefield at all but is simply "fed that information" and acting as a "puppet." It is a common rejoinder among Trump's detractors, who bristle at any portrayal of the president as a strategic mastermind rather than a vehicle for the operatives around him.
Scaramucci's underlying point, though, was less about praising Trump than about diagnosing why the opposition keeps stumbling. In his telling, the president's enduring connection to working-class voters who want government to leave their benefits alone is not an accident or a mystery. It is the product of someone who, whatever his flaws, understood his own base early and has never forgotten who put him in power, even if his critics keep insisting he does not know what he is doing.