Former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci gave some advice to former National Security Advisor John Bolton on how to get over “Trump Employment Syndrome.”
In an op-ed published in The Washington Post on Thursday, Scaramucci said he knows “very well” what Bolton is going through in light of President Donald Trump’s attacks on him because “he did the same thing to me.”
“After I criticized him, the president started calling me a ‘nut job’ and said I ‘wheedled’ my way into his campaign,” he said.
Anthony Scaramucci is a highly unstable “nut job” who was with other candidates in the primary who got shellacked, & then unfortunately wheedled his way into my campaign. I barely knew him until his 11 days of gross incompetence-made a fool of himself, bad on TV. Abused staff,…
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 19, 2019
Scaramucci lays into Trump, arguing that he’s either “incapable of managing and working with the ‘best people,’ or he is not hiring them.”
Or, Scaramucci says, Trump’s pushes out “the best,” and the remaining administration officials are “intimidated sycophants.”
Additionally, he suggests that Trump’s behavior has “hobbled the executive branch” and made it “extremely difficult” for government agencies to operate by leaving positions unfilled and creating an environment full of fear that he will “come hunting for their heads” if someone makes a mistake.
“Nobody feels empowered, and they worry if they make a mistake, the president will come hunting for their heads.”
He claims that “if Trump were the head of a public company, its board would immediately terminate and replace him,” but he has remained in office because “politics is different.”
Scaramucci also suggests that people who work for Trump suffer from “Trump Employment Syndrome” — where people “rationalize” his behavior by focusing on his accomplishments — noting that many of his Cabinet officials and strongest supporters at one point opposed him during the 2016 Republican presidential primary.
However, as Scaramucci says, after a while of trying to focus on the positives, people decide that they can’t “mitigate the worst outcomes or moderate the president at all,” and they must choose to either “disavow your self-worth and personal integrity or else stand up and speak out.”
And some of those who choose to leave, Scaramucci says, don’t want to deal with the attacks from Trump and his supporters and choose to “remain compliant.”
Finally, Scaramucci suggests to Bolton that it might help to speak out:
“I, for one, never felt more alive than when the president of the United States called me an ‘unstable nutjob’ on Twitter. His bullying and intimidating methods have frozen many in his party, but when I began receiving them myself, I realized I was finally free. Bolton might learn that speaking the truth is the best method of recovery for Trump Employment Syndrome.”
Bolton has been on the receiving end of Trump’s tweets attacking him after The New York Times reported that a manuscript of his upcoming book says that Trump connected a freeze on military aid to Ukraine to investigations of Democrats.
