Scaramucci says he thinks Trump will lose, won't try to foment insurrection
Anthony Scaramucci, who briefly served as White House communications director under former President Trump, said Wednesday he expects Trump to lose the presidential election but does not expect him to foment an insurrection.
“It's too close to call,” Scaramucci told host Dean Obeidallah on his SiriusXM show when asked how he thought the election might end for Trump. “I think she's going to win because she's got the money, the organization, and I think there are more good people in the country.”
“I think he loses,” Scaramucci said.
Scaramucci, who has in recent years become a vocal Trump critic, said he disagrees with pundits who worry about the potential for political violence if Trump loses the election in less than two weeks.
The former aide pointed to Trump’s Nov. 26 sentencing in his New York criminal case, which resulted in a guilty conviction for Trump on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records as part of a broader scheme to shield the American public from potentially damaging information ahead of the 2016 election.
“If he loses, I'm in the contrarian view that he will not try to foment any violent revolution or an insurrection because he has a sentencing hanging over him on November the 26th,” Scaramucci said. “So three weeks after the election, 34 felony counts, he's got to stand before a judge and be sentenced.”
If Trump encourages violence after hypothetically losing the election, Scaramucci said, the judge could issue a harsher sentence.
“If he's fomenting violence in the three weeks after the election, they're going to put him in jail. There's no question about that in my mind,” Scaramucci said about Trump. “I think if he doesn't do that, and he says, ‘I'm never going to accept a defeat, but I'm not suggesting violence,’ and he slinks away, they won't put him in jail because I don’t think they want to put a former president, no matter how bad he is, in jail.”
“But if he's out there blowing dog whistles and he says, ‘I want you to shoot your neighbors that didn't vote for me,’ and you have violence in the streets in the United States, he's going straight to jail,” he added.
Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung responded to the interview by knocking Scaramucci's historic 10-day tenure in his post.
"Nobody is going to listen to someone who barely lasted more time than an expired ham sandwich as White House communications director," Cheung wrote.
Updated at 2:30 p.m. EDT