by Luxman
Anthony Scaramucci’s most revealing confession may also be the sentence that prevents All the Wrong Moves from becoming a conventional anti-Trump polemic: “I bought into Donald Trump. That doesn’t reflect well on me. Nothing in this chapter reflects well on me” (Chapter 14). The admission matters because Scaramucci is not writing from the moral safety of an outsider who always understood the danger. He is writing as a participant who helped mistake Trump’s political instincts for a remedy to failures he had himself experienced. All the Wrong Moves is therefore simultaneously an indictment of American political economy and a confession of elite misjudgement. Its central proposition is audacious: Trump did not create the crisis so much as inherit and exploit it. Scaramucci’s “Three Catastrophic Decisions”—China trade, the Iraq War financed without corresponding taxation, and the post-2008 rescue of Wall Street—become the book’s causal architecture for explaining how an increasingly insecure American working class lost faith in the political establishment.
The framework is compelling partly because it rejects the comforting mythology of political innocence. “Trump’s not as personally important as he wants to be,” Scaramucci argues. “He’s the result of bad decisions made by others” (Introduction). That sentence is deliberately provocative, but it contains the book’s most consequential analytical wager. Trump becomes consequence rather than origin; symptom rather than sole disease. Scaramucci’s insistence that “this book…is not about right and left. It’s about right and wrong” (Introduction) sounds almost moralistic, yet the subsequent chapters reveal a more interesting ambition: to reconstruct the economic conditions in which political rage became electorally powerful. The difficulty is that the language of catastrophe can itself flatten causation. Trade liberalisation, war finance and financial rescue were not isolated decisions with single consequences. They emerged from competing institutions, interests, assumptions and contingencies. Scaramucci’s narrative gains force by simplifying that complexity, but the simplification is also its principal intellectual vulnerability.
His account of globalisation is particularly sharp when he turns the familiar triumphalist narrative inside out. Scaramucci concedes that “Clinton was right on general principles about letting China into the WTO and wrong on how he did it, with no protections and no course corrections” (Chapter 6). This qualification is important. He is not arguing that international trade itself was inherently disastrous. His target is a political economy that distributed its benefits and costs unevenly while assuming that displaced workers would somehow be absorbed into a more prosperous future. He cites the loss of almost six million American manufacturing jobs between 1999 and 2011, attributing 2.4 million to competition from China (Chapter 6), and immediately insists that such statistics are not abstractions: “That’s a number, but it’s about people—earners and spenders—with families and aspirations” (Chapter 6). This movement from macroeconomics to biography is one of the book’s defining techniques. Scaramucci wants the reader to feel economic statistics as social experience.
Yet the China argument also exposes his tendency to make history conform too neatly to a retrospective moral narrative. He presents the “end of history” assumption as an intellectual error whose consequences became almost inevitable: “there will never be an end of history” (Chapter 6). His criticism of liberal triumphalism is plausible, but the causal chain from trade policy to deindustrialisation to political populism to Trump cannot be treated as self-evident. Scaramucci himself acknowledges that Trump “has no realistic solution” to the problem while crediting him with being “right about it” (Chapter 6). That distinction is valuable. It recognises that identifying a grievance and solving it are different political acts. The book is at its strongest when it makes that distinction rather than collapsing populist diagnosis into populist policy.
The second catastrophe, the decision to wage the Iraq War while cutting taxes, extends the argument from economics into political morality. “So instead of breaking a promise as his father had, the son broke PAYGO,” Scaramucci writes (Chapter 8). The deliberately memorable phrase captures his objection: war was treated as something the public could experience without being asked to confront its fiscal cost. He contrasts mobilisation with consumption, recalling George W. Bush’s appeal to Americans to “Fly and enjoy America’s great destination spots” (Chapter 8). The irony is effective, but again the book’s rhetoric risks compressing a vast and complicated fiscal history into a single moral lesson. The war’s human, strategic and geopolitical consequences cannot be reduced to its financing mechanism. Scaramucci’s argument is narrower and more defensible when he confines it to the political incentives created by spending without an accompanying demand for sacrifice.
His treatment of the financial crisis is more nuanced and, intellectually, more interesting. Scaramucci does not make the easy populist argument that the Wall Street bailout itself was simply a criminal transfer of wealth. “The banks got a huge bailout. OK: How couldn’t they?” he writes, before conceding that allowing the financial system to collapse would have been worse (Chapter 10). His target is what followed. “The ultimate problem was that the Obama administration…failed to do the same thing Bush failed to do” (Chapter 10): provide comparable attention to households facing foreclosure and economic insecurity. The distinction between rescuing a financial system and protecting the people damaged by that system is central to the book. Scaramucci argues that roughly ten million families lost their homes while foreclosure relief remained comparatively limited (Chapter 10). Whether every element of his interpretation withstands detailed economic scrutiny is a separate question; the political insight is that the perception of asymmetry mattered enormously.
This becomes the book’s theory of populism. “Populism arises,” Scaramucci argues, “because of real, widespread economic grievances” (Chapter 12). But he is careful enough to admit that populism is not intrinsically virtuous. It can “connect with racism”, “sentimentalize the past”, become anti-intellectual and defend hierarchies (Chapter 12). This is a significant qualification because it prevents the book from becoming an apology for populist politics. Scaramucci’s claim is instead that elites cannot complain about populism while refusing to examine the conditions that nourish it. “If you don’t like populist movements,” he writes, “then maybe don’t spend thirty years carrying out a bipartisan process of creating precisely the conditions from which populist movements inevitably arise” (Chapter 12). It is one of the book’s most effective formulations because it forces the reader to distinguish explanation from endorsement.
Trump himself, however, remains an object of extraordinary hostility. Scaramucci declares that “Trump’s ideology doesn’t exist” and that his “political instincts are dedicated to himself” (Chapter 13). He portrays Trump’s politics as a fusion of personal ambition, nationalism and grievance, arguing that the Republican Party became vulnerable to a political entrepreneur because its institutional structure had already weakened. His own experience makes this section more compelling than it would be as ordinary partisan commentary. “I was seeing the world the way they see it,” he recalls of the elite circles surrounding him. “I had made a very big swing and lost touch with reality” (Chapter 14). The admission is unusually valuable because it identifies elite groupthink not as a pathology belonging exclusively to one ideological camp but as a social phenomenon.
That self-indictment is also the book’s most persuasive answer to its own theoretical weakness. Scaramucci acknowledges that he mistook Trump for the blue-collar candidate because Trump articulated grievances that Scaramucci himself had failed to understand. “How could he have seen it, when I, who had grown up with American workers, missed it?” he asks (Chapter 14). The question destabilises the author’s authority in a productive way. He is simultaneously insider and unreliable witness, participant and critic. “I got intoxicated by power,” he admits. “I went into Trump’s world for what I thought were the right reasons but were the wrong reasons” (Chapter 14). This is far more interesting than a standard political conversion narrative because it makes personal vanity part of the explanatory model.
Scaramucci’s treatment of the Democratic Party is correspondingly unsparing. He argues that Democrats became so focused on opposing Trump that they failed to develop “cogent, comprehensive policies” capable of reconnecting with working-class voters (Chapter 15). His claim that the party “kept fulfilling people’s suspicions by showing itself to be anything but democratic” (Chapter 15) is rhetorically explosive, but it also reveals a recurring tendency in the book: institutional criticism is sometimes presented as a settled diagnosis when it would be more rigorous to distinguish between evidence, interpretation and polemical judgement. His discussion of Kamala Harris is similarly compressed into the larger argument that party institutions often prefer continuity to genuine reconstruction. The book is more convincing when analysing structural incentives than when assigning moral meaning to individual political figures.
The deepest contradiction in All the Wrong Moves is therefore also its greatest strength. Scaramucci wants to explain Trump without excusing him, condemn the political establishment without romanticising populism, defend capitalism while demanding a greater share for labour, and speak as a Wall Street insider while attacking the economic arrangements from which insiders have benefited. “If capital wants to survive,” he writes, “it needs to give up some economic rent to labour” (Chapter 2). His proposed fifty-fifty division of economic rents between labour and capital is explicitly presented as “in my opinion and experience” (Chapter 12), revealing that the book’s solutions are less developed than its diagnosis.
The result is a political memoir disguised as a theory of American political economy—or perhaps a theory of political economy written by a memoirist who knows that his own mistakes are part of the evidence. Its greatest achievement is to refuse the fantasy that Trump appeared from nowhere. Its greatest weakness is its tendency to turn a complex history into three principal errors and then read the subsequent decades through them. Nevertheless, the book’s most serious challenge is not to Trump alone. It is to the political and economic class of which Scaramucci himself was once a conspicuous member. “What I did about it was” the mistake, he writes after recognising the systemic problem (Chapter 14). That distinction gives All the Wrong Moves its intellectual bite. America, in Scaramucci’s telling, did not simply choose Trump. It accumulated enough unresolved economic grievances, institutional failures and elite misjudgements to make a figure like Trump politically consequential. Whether the author’s three catastrophes constitute the complete explanation is doubtful. That they form a provocative framework for asking how a prosperous democracy lost its confidence in its own bargain is the book’s more durable contribution.
