Anthony Scaramucci, who briefly served as President Donald Trump’s White House communications director, predicted Tuesday that Trump is headed for a drubbing in the midterm elections, and that the president knows it.
“I think the president’s going to get trounced, by the way, and I think he knows he’s going to get trounced,” Scaramucci, founder of SkyBridge Capital, said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe.”
Scaramucci said voters are using the election to grade the president.
“You have one vote. You have one customer relations survey that you can do on the American president — that’s at the midterms, and people are not happy,” he said.
He ticked off what he called Trump’s broken promises.
“He promised affordability, he promised no more forever wars, he promised transparency on the Epstein files,” Scaramucci said. “He didn’t deliver on any of that stuff, and so there’s a lot of people inside MAGA that are now also breaking from him.”
Trump’s economic approval hit an all-time low last month in CNBC’s All-America Economic Survey. In that poll, 65% of respondents disapproved of his handling of the economy, and 80% rated the economy as fair or poor.
The White House did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. It previously told the outlet that Scaramucci’s “relevance ended almost a decade ago.” Scaramucci served as communications director for 10 days in 2017.
Scaramucci said Democratic “disarray” had been “the best thing that has happened for Donald Trump.” But if Democrats win Tuesday, he predicted, Congress would quickly turn its attention to the administration.
“And so, if he gets trounced here, there will be bicameral investigations that will be the main show because there’s a lot of things that’s going on in the administration that the Democrats are going to want to uncover,” he said.
He also predicted turmoil inside the GOP.
“The Republicans, in my mind, I think there’ll be a great intellectual civil war. The Republicans are going to have to reconcile where do they want to go,” Scaramucci said. “It’s no longer the party of Ronald Reagan, certainly not the party of George W. Bush, but is it the party of Donald Trump after he leaves the stage?”
Turning to the war with Iran, Scaramucci said he was “bearish” on a diplomatic breakthrough after the election.
“I don’t see any alignment between the Iranians, the Israelis, and the Americans for a potential negotiated solution right now,” he said. “Wars are very bad for business. They’re not great for the stock market.”
His comments came hours after the U.S. launched what a U.S. official described to MS NOW as “defensive” strikes on Iran’s Qeshm Island, CNBC reported. Trump previously said American forces would not attack Iran before the midterms.
Prediction markets give Democrats about a three-in-four chance of winning control of the Senate, according to CNBC.