Anthony Scaramucci, who lasted about eleven days as President Donald Trump’s communications director in 2017, says he finally understands a children’s story that puzzled him as a boy — thanks to the man he once worked for.
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In a post shared with his followers, the former White House aide turned vocal Trump critic offered a blunt assessment of the president’s fitness, writing that Trump “is not well and he’s probably too old for the job.” Scaramucci acknowledged the line wasn’t “politically correct,” but argued it was “probably right.”
The bulk of his post, however, was less about Trump than about everyone around him. Scaramucci described an administration paralyzed by fear, staffed with people afraid of losing their jobs, afraid of being attacked online, and afraid of being primaried by a challenger Trump himself would select to take them out.
“That’s why we’re frozen,” he said.
Then came the epiphany that gives the post its punch. Scaramucci recalled his first-grade teacher reading the class “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” the fable in which a vain ruler parades naked while terrified subjects pretend to admire his nonexistent garments. As a child, he found the premise absurd, wondering why anyone would go along with such an obvious lie.
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“I’m 62 now,” Scaramucci said. “Now I get it.”
The implication was hard to miss: in Scaramucci’s telling, the people surrounding Trump are the courtiers too frightened to say what they plainly see, and Trump is the emperor convinced of his own splendor.
Scaramucci has spent years warning about his former boss, but the fable framing casts the dysfunction less as a policy failure than as a psychological one, sustained by everyone too afraid to point it out.
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