Anthony Scaramucci, former White House communications director and founder of SkyBridge Capital, told CNBC that US President Donald Trump will “lose” Tuesday’s midterm elections.
Appearing on CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Tuesday, Scaramucci said the United States is in the midst of a cultural and economic battle, with the two major political parties fighting to present “two different visions of where the country should go.”
“By the way, I think the president is going to be defeated, and I think he knows he’s going to be defeated,” he said.
According to CNBC’s National Economic Survey, President Trump’s economic approval ratings hit an all-time low last month, with 65% of respondents disapproving of the president’s handling of the economy and 80% rating the economy as fair or poor.
“You have one vote. There’s one customer relationship survey you can run on the president of the United States. It’s in the middle of the midterm elections, and people aren’t happy,” Scaramucci added.
“He promised affordability, he promised no more forever wars, he promised transparency into the Epstein file,” Scaramucci said Tuesday. “There are a lot of people within MAGA who are breaking up with him because he hasn’t done any of those things.”
The White House did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. The White House previously told CNBC that Scaramucci’s relevance “ended almost a decade ago.” Scaramucci served as White House communications director for 10 days in 2017 during the Trump administration’s first term.
Prediction markets currently price in about a three-quarters chance of Democrats winning the Senate majority in Tuesday’s election. Odds and gambling platforms are not replacements for political polls, as they do not use the techniques used in traditional political polls.
Scaramucci is ‘bearish’ on Iran’s progress
Regarding the Iran war, Scaramucci said after the vote that he was “bearish” about the possibility of a diplomatic breakthrough.
“At this point, I do not believe there is alignment between Iran, Israel, and the United States on the possibility of a negotiated solution.” “If the United States is going to step up its military offensive alongside Israel…I’m not sure that’s necessarily going to help the region.”
Overnight, the US launched a “defensive” strike on Iran’s Qeshm Island, a US official told MS Now. President Trump previously said the U.S. military would not attack Iran before the midterm elections.
“War is very bad for business,” Scaramucci told CNBC on Tuesday. “Those are bad for the stock market. So I’d like to have a negotiated settlement, but there’s nothing on the matrix of concentric circles where these three groups would say, ‘Okay, this is an agreement that all three of us are willing to accept.'”
Republican “civil war”
Scaramucci also said the “turmoil” within the Democratic Party was “the best thing that could have happened to Donald Trump.”
“And if he gets defeated here, the bicameral investigation will be the main show, because there’s a lot of things going on in the administration that Democrats want to uncover,” he said.
“In my mind, I think the Republican Party is going to have a huge intellectual civil war. The Republican Party is going to have to reconcile where it wants to go. It’s no longer the party of Ronald Reagan, and it’s certainly not the party of George W. Bush, but will it be the party of Donald Trump after he leaves the stage?”
Scaramucci added that it will take a long time to break away from the so-called MAGA movement.
“There will definitely be elements of MAGA DNA in the next presidential candidate, because looming over that presidential candidate is Donald Trump and hundreds of millions of dollars in his PAC money, so they won’t want to stray too far from Trump in 2028. So there will be elements of MAGA, but I also think there will be a civil war within that party,” he said.
