“I dreamed the American dream,” Anthony Scaramucci writes in his memoir, “Trump, the Blue-Collar President,” a work of Trump hagiography that also recounts the Mooch’s rise from working-class Long Island to Goldman Sachs to, for eleven fun-filled days, the White House communications department, before he was canned for suggesting to a New Yorker reporter that Steve Bannon was, metaphorically, “trying to suck [his] own cock.” No hard feelings about the firing, though. Trump is a “genius,” Scaramucci insists in his book. Watching him on television is “like watching Joe DiMaggio play for Schreiber High School’s baseball team.” (The diamond serves as one of many Moochian touchstones, as does F. Scott Fitzgerald, “one of my early favorite authors.”) For Scaramucci, the President incarnates Jay Gatsby, surrounded by glittering wealth yet attuned to the forgotten strivers of the past, back when the Catskill Mountains were taller than the Himalayas and “primitive versions of the vampire bat—a distant ancestor of Steve Bannon, I believe” hung “upside down in the caves.” If all this sounds grandiose, too bad. “Have you ever met a successful person who didn’t have an ego?” Scaramucci, a man once characterized as “the human embodiment of a double-parked BMW,” writes. “When you combine just enough ego with self-worth, and you add my personality, which some have categorized as ‘wacky,’ what’s produced is a supercharged sales machine who might drive you nuts or charm you, or both,” he explains.
On Monday night, the eve of the book’s release, SkyBridge Capital, Scaramucci’s investment firm, convenes a group of celebrants to drink wine and nibble on hanger steak served from large gleaming buffet dishes at Hunt & Fish Club, the midtown steak house once described by the New York Post as the spot “Where Beauties Trawl for Sugar Daddies.” The venue has a power-lunch ambience, even at 7 p.m. (One realizes that the “power lunch” vibe is achieved by importing a dusky, after-hours luxury into the middle of the day.) Plastic candles hang upside down from the ceiling, shedding a soft glow on a room packed with Brooks Brothers suits, millennial-pink ties, and beefy, grinning faces. The women wear flowing “out on the town” hair and sheath dresses. A d.j. stands at the back, next to a bar adorned with red and white roses. Young people pose in front of a photo screen beside leaning towers of “Trump, the Blue-Collar President,” pointing to the books and then to themselves and then to their drinks and then at the chandeliers. In addition to wine and liquor, the bar offers a specialty cocktail called When Life Gives You Lemons. “Trump, the Blue-Collar President” aspires to be a comeback narrative, with Scaramucci in the role of Rocky “when the music starts to swell and Balboa is getting up from the mat . . . when Apollo Creed starts looking worried.”
Everyone here appears to work in finance. “Do you work in finance?” I start asking. I talk to a guy from Long Island, one of the best friends of Scaramucci’s cousin Augie. He and Augie have just launched a business venture together. Augie’s friend seems tickled by the banker-fancy décor. Though he hasn’t yet read Tony’s book, he wanted to show up for the neighborhood kid who made good, the “character” whom he acknowledges is “fun to talk to, very colorful.” I ask how he feels about the President. “No comment,” he says, grinning. Then he looks concerned: “Maybe I shouldn’t be here.”
The energy in the room knots and condenses. The Mooch has landed, and a cloud of admirers descend with their unsigned copies and their iPhones. A woman pushes her date toward the epicenter with an exasperated hiss: “He’s your pal. Support him!” I approach the cumulus of designer watches and Dolce & Gabbana. “Are you friends with Tony?” I ask a blond woman, her striking eyes hooded in indigo shadow. Her partner beams: “She’s the beautician for the whole family!” For a moment, I think he says “mortician.” Upon a white-shrouded table, someone has placed a blue collar with Scaramucci’s name stitched across it. I talk to Chris Windle, the operations manager at Allied/All-City, a utility and pipeline-services company. He’s wearing a bejewelled crucifix on a gold chain and chatting with his friend George Sigelakis, who is revolutionizing the fire hydrant. Sigelakis, a former firefighter, has designed an extra-durable, tamper-proof hydrant that resists both rust and corrosion. We look at pictures on his phone. Windle says that he likes talking to people who disagree with him—the important thing, he says, is that we can talk to each other. I think of the aptness of the fire hydrant as a metaphor for dousing our inflamed national discourse. I also think of the passage in “Trump, the Blue-Collar President” where Scaramucci ventures that Trump may be uniquely suited to bridging political divides because he doesn’t care about anything but himself.
At around eight o’clock, the three-tiered cake—topped with a meringue Resolute desk, a meringue Donald Trump, and a rictus meringue Mooch—disappears and reappears as pale slices ribboned with cannoli cream. It tastes faintly of pumpkin. “Do you taste pumpkin?” I ask a finance bro. “No,” he says, and walks away. I sit down with Curtis Ellis, a Republican operative who first met Scaramucci on the Trump campaign and now works for America First Policies, a Trump-supporting super PAC. He tells me that the President is playing nice. When Trump is reëlected, in 2020, the reign of niceness will end. “It will be the Night of the Long Knives,” Ellis prophesies.
For now, it is the night of the swaying plastic candles. I should have left a half hour ago, but the servers are bringing out chocolate-chip cookies, and a woman’s voice is spilling from the speakers like the ghost of a hundred forgotten Americans. Here is one Gatsby-an dream: a steak house, white tablecloths, white partygoers, glinting cufflinks purchased with Goldman Sachs salaries. The Long Islanders part the phantasmic Manhattanites with their hands. The meringue President wears a white collar.
