Anthony “the Mooch” Scaramucci, one of Harris’s guests at the debate tonight, on the dangers of his old boss

Tonight, Vice President Kamala Harris will bring as two guests to the debate, former Trump communications director — short-lived as it was — Anthony Scaramucci and former Trump national security advisor Olivia Troye. This is one of Harris’s ways of getting under Trump’s skin by showcasing two converts to her campaign.

In February of 2018, we ran a story where Scaramucci, the former Trump ally told another outlet that he had been “a gay rights activist my whole life.”

This was after his short-lived stint as Trump’s White House communications director, replacing the infamous Sean Spicer on July 21, 2017, and then being famously fired by a Trump tweet on July 31, 2017. To many, Scaramucci became a joke and punchline.

“It was the wrong job for me, but I had an override switch. I was driven by pride and ego, and I said, ‘Hey, Blue Collar kid went to a couple great schools, made a little bit of money. I'm going to go work for the president,” Scaramucci recently told The Advocate. “I'm going to work in the White House. But it was a mismatched, ill-fated thing to do, but it led to a whole wide range of experiences, life experiences.”

After he was fired, Scaramucci had a tough time, at a crossroads with what he would do next, but it took a conversation with his son to lift him up.

“My son played the parent, and he asked if I was going to be ok, because the whole thing was such a disaster, and something clicked in me, and I said, ‘I will be more than ok.’”

Scaramucci returned to the world of finance, launching his own investment firm, and surprisingly, even to him, he’s become a sought-after political pundit. He makes regular appearances on CNN and MSNBC, and he and British political journalist Katty Kay launched the U.S. version of Britain's biggest political podcast, The Rest Is Politics.

When asked how he felt about being a pundit, he quipped, “We plan, and God laughs.”

But perhaps most meaningful to Scaramucci right now is getting Harris elected president.

“We have to do everything we can to make sure she wins in November,” Scaramucci said several times.

And Scaramucci remembers vividly the inauspicious first time he met Harris. “I was in Israel at the same time that they (Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff) were in Israel on a bipartisan congressional trip when she was a senator,” he recalled. “We were hanging out in the lobby of the King David Hotel, and one of the staff photographers said, you know, Sen. Harris, do you want to take a picture with the “Mooch.” She looked over at him. She looked over at me, and said, ‘I'm not taking a picture with him. I'm not ruining my political career.”

He laughed while retelling the story. “It was one of the best lines I ever heard, and I said, ‘Well, that's very good judgment on your part,” he said.

Fast forward to now, and Scaramucci is all-in for Harris. “I am a supporter of hers. I have donated to her, and I plan on donating my time. I'm obviously providing some level of media advocacy, and I'm proud to do that. I think that she will do a great job. We have got to get her in there. I don't have to agree with everything she believes, but that’s true for any candidate, right? But I do respect that she is fighting for our democracy, And I think the country's ready to turn the page on Trumpism, and Donald Trump, at least. I hope it is.”

One of the things that bothers him the most is that his former elected Republican friends responded to Trump with great cowardice. “They opted for personal power versus protecting this country and our democracy and constitution and that has worked since this country’s inception,” he said. He used a very strong expletive to describe them and their actions.

Scaramucci used a few metaphors to describe the choice facing voters. “If someone worked at a pharmaceutical company, and you came forward and told people one of the pills they’re making would kill you, would you take the pill? Or if someone worked at an automotive company and stepped forward and said, ‘I was on the assembly line, and don’t buy this car because it will blow up and kill people,’ would you buy the car?”

Scaramucci said that not only was he on the inside, but also former Trump cabinet secretaries, chief of staffs, four-star generals, and many others who all served in the administration have said the same thing. “We are all trying to tell you how dangerous and stupid this guy is, and I don’t know for the life of me why some people aren’t heeding our advice.”

There was a time, according to Scaramucci, when he saw a different side of Trump. “Years ago, he was a different person,” he recalled. “I remember going to a Yankees game with him, and my girlfriend at the time who is my wife, and with Regis Philbin and his wife, and we had a great time.”

But now?

“He's got a bunch of weirdos attracted to him. They want to end our democracy, and they want to create this sort of oligarchic ruling class, from a right-wing Christian point of view. Which is great irony, because the Christian right doesn’t like the woke culture, right? They don't want the culture of the left jammed down their throats. But the hypocrisy is they want to jam their culture down your throat. And Trump’s leading the whole thing.”

That’s why Scaramucci said a second Trump administration would be horrifying, and that would be underscored by Trump’s indifference to the presidency.

“I don't think he gives a s**t about being President. He wants the attention. He wants to avenge the defeat of 2020. He wants to rebuke his haters, but I don't think he has any interest in being President,” Scaramucci said.

A second Trump administration will be a version of, “While the cats away, the mice will play.”

Scaramucci added: “He’ll be golfing and watching TV while a group of Narco right-wing Christians, who don't like your lifestyle, and elements of my lifestyle, and they want to persecute people like you and people like me, and they all want a Handmaid's Tale version of the United States. They’ll do as they please because Trump could care less.”

Except, according to Scaramucci, he will care for one person.

“He's a useful idiot for Vladimir Putin. This country is the envy of the world. When Trump is attacking the country, he is staining the legacy of your grandparents and your parents, and so you have to remember that when he's speaking negatively about the country, it's actually an attack on your family. When he denigrates it, he's helping Putin, because he's providing fodder of doubt for the American people and fodder of disunity for the American people, and so we have to rebut that at every turn. All of his lies are sound bites for Putin.”

Speaking of lies, Scaramucci said Trump has one tic that is a dead giveaway when he’s lying.

“The minute he goes into accordion mode with his hands, he's trying to push the truth out of the conversation. And obviously, he does that a lot since he tells a lie every 90 seconds. It would be a mistake for Harris to be the Charlie Brown school teacher and call him out when he's lying. She would be better off to say, ‘Hey, this guy's telling another lie. He tells one lie every 90 seconds. But I don't have the time for his lies. I want to focus on the future of the country and what we're all going to do together to make the country better,” Scaramucci said.

But what frightens Scaramucci the most is the thousands of people who descended on the Capitol on January 6, at Trump’s behest. “They all believed the election was a fraud, because of Trump’s habitual lying, and they’ll do it again if he tells them to, because he can’t stop lying. So, that’s what he’ll do if he loses the election.”

The former Trump official also suggests that if she comes out on top, Harris needs to plan to solidify her win immediately to avoid potential conflict.

“I think that the good news is the American military is on the side of democracy. There may be pockets of the American military or federal agents or local law enforcement that are with Donald Trump and want to subvert the democracy, but I think it's a very small group of people vocal, but very small. And so if she wins, and I predict she will win, she has to organize quickly, alongside Joe Biden and the administration and the military to put down any potential unrest that he's going to call for.”