Scaramucci promotes book, talks Trump at signing in Huntington

Anthony Scaramucci, whose 11 days as White House communications director last year made “the Mooch” a household name, said Sunday that his Long Island roots help him understand the “blue collar” appeal of President Donald Trump.

As he said after a book signing on Sunday at the Book Revue in Huntington: “There’s a lot of lunatics who grew up on Long Island. Let’s talk about some of them. Sean Hannity, myself, Bill Shine, the current White House communications director, Bill O’Reilly.”

All of them grew up in blue collar enclaves of Long Island, he said, or, in his case, a middle-class area of Port Washington, to a homemaker and father who started working on the sand and stone docks.

“I’d say the critical ingredient is we had an unfiltered upbringing. We grew up in the age before helicopter parenting, so we were doing a lot of things ourselves. We were very, very independent. That’s why guys like us relate to and form a reasonably close bond to the president,” he said.

Scaramucci, who lives in Manhasset, was promoting his book, “Trump, the Blue-Collar President,” which was published late last month. He gave a short speech to a standing-room-only crowd and then took questions and comments from the audience, which resembled a neighborhood block party and family reunion, with a sister, uncle and cousins included.

A former Goldman Sachs banker and founder of the investment firm SkyBridge Capital, Scaramucci recounted his short stint at the White House, which ended when he gave an expletive-laden interview with The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza, giving explicit descriptions of senior administration officials.

Joe Martino, of Seaford, said it was “great to see a paisan from Long Island” at the White House.

“That was one of the problems,” Scaramucci, a Harvard Law School graduate, responded. “The president said, ‘Man, I need more Harvard Anthony, less street Anthony.”

“Sometimes the street Anthony is fun too,” Martino said.

Dominic Mavellia, a real estate developer from the village of Huntington, questioned Scaramucci for calling for Trump to “dial back” his speech.

“Isn’t that what really made him what he is today?” Mavellia said.

Scaramucci said if Trump “calms it down a little” he’d win a “resounding re-election.”

Clinton won the popular vote by about 3 million people, he said, and Democrats, “were totally ill-prepared for him. They are not ill-prepared for him now,” he said.

“I’m not talking about taking it down to first gear if you’re in fifth gear. But taking it down to fifth gear…” he said. “Pushing a little harder for the middle, and getting those independents.”

He said that Republicans have only a “very outside” chance of keeping control of the House on Tuesday.

Scaramucci said he wrote the book to explain how Trump “captured the imagination of a very large group of blue-collar people in the United States.”

Democrats, he said, “lost the connection to that base” while campaigning against plastic straws and “melting polar ice caps. I’m not saying that’s not a big issue — it certainly is — they left out of their narrative what policies are they going to bring to help the middle class and the lower middle-class families.”

By David M. Schwartz

dschwar1@newsday.comschwartznewsNY

David Schwartz covers environmental issues. A native Long Islander, he's worked at Newsday since 2013.