“He’s an intentional liar. It’s very different than just being a liar-liar.”
That was Anthony Scaramucci’s outlandish defense of the president’s frequently misleading statements.
The president speaks mistruths, the former short-lived Trump comms director claimed, to "incite certain people,” including Democratic lawmakers and the media.
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“Yes, the president is speaking mistruths, yes the president is lying but he is doing it intentionally to incite certain people which would include left-leaning journalists and most of the left-leaning politicians,” he added in the Thursday morning interview with Bloomberg.
While promoting his new book, Trump: The Blue-Collar President, the dedicated Trumpkin couldn’t help but defend the president, seemingly as damage control one day after he told CNN that the president “should probably dial down the lying.”
“If someone is taking your lunch money in the cafeteria, if you call the hall monitor it’s not going to help you OK? You got to defeat the person at the table with your peer group,” Scaramucci explained to Bloomberg, using schoolyard analogy to explain away why Trump so frequently deals in falsehoods. “That was the point I was trying to make yesterday.”
Scaramucci continued on with other metaphors and analogies to explain what so many of his allies already believe: Trump acts in certain, often unconventional ways simply to own the libs.
"Trump has this like Twitter insect light and he vaporizes everybody once he gets inside their melon,” he said of the way the president uses his favorite social-media platform to battle his political foes.
Later, speaking directly to the camera, Scaramucci advised Democratic leaders to read his book to understand how “how Donald Trump hijacked your base.”
“They have ten bowling pins of candidates and the president is an orange bowling ball and he's going to bowl a strike on those guys," he said, referring to Democratic presidential hopefuls.
Scaramucci famously left the White House in July 2017 after just 11 days on the job after his expletive-laden interview with The New Yorker, in which he insulted many top Trump officials by name.
Since then, Scaramucci has fought to remain a relevant media figure, now frequently appearing on national TV to defend the president, though sometimes straying from his message to make public appeals about curtailing his dangerous rhetoric.
Like when he appeared on CNN’s New Day on Wednesday morning, and pleaded with the president to “dial down the lying.”
The comment came after Scaramucci was questioned on the president’s penchant for spreading conspiracy theories about his political opponents.
“OK, well, we both know that he’s telling lies. So if you want me to say he’s a liar, I’m happy to say he’s a liar,” Scaramucci told CNN host John Berman. “Nobody should lie. I’m not a big believer in lying. But politicians happen to lie.”
“You want to say that to the camera? To the president?” Berman asked.
“Nobody should lie,” Scaramucci replied, turning to look directly into a camera. “But, you know, you’re a politician now, so politicians lie when their lips are moving, and so all these people lie. But you should probably dial down the lying because you don’t need to. You’re doing a great job for the country. So dial that down, and you’ll be doing a lot better.”
