A former top aide to Donald Trump says the president has descended into “five-stage denialism” over his deal with Iran as he attempts to outrun the reality of his “abject failure.”
Leaked copies of the 14-point peace plan have revealed the extraordinary concessions Trump made to Iran in order to bring an end to the war he started more than four months ago.
Under the phased framework, which has not yet been finalized, Trump would reportedly allow temporary coordination of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, ease certain U.S. sanctions on the repressive regime, and permit access to billions in frozen Iranian assets, while backing a proposed $300 billion reconstruction fund.
The 80-year-old president’s goal of eliminating Iran’s nuclear capabilities has been kicked down the road to future talks, while his hopes for regime change never materialized, let alone his previous demand for “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!”
Still, Trump has sought to cast the agreement as a victory for the United States.
“On Sunday, we reached an agreement with Iran that achieves everything we set out to accomplish—everything and much more,” he claimed in a speech at the G7 summit in France on Wednesday.
But the president’s former communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, said on The Daily Beast Podcast that “in his quiet moments in his mind, he understands that this has been a disaster.”
Scaramucci worked on Trump’s 2016 campaign before joining the first Trump administration as a presidential assistant. He later served a 10-day stint as White House communications director in July 2017, after which he became a vocal Trump critic.
“I’ve been part of that,” he told host Joanna Coles. “I know how his mind really works. And inside there, he knows that this was an abject failure.”
Scaramucci, who runs the investment firm SkyBridge Capital, continued, “He spent several hundred billion dollars prosecuting the war. He’s exposed a seam of weakness in the American military doctrine. He’s hurt our allies in the Gulf. He’s probably caused, by our estimates here at SkyBridge, $700 to $800 billion of global economic damage in terms of higher prices, less consumption, energy supply shock, ensuing inflation.”
But Scaramucci, 62, argued that the president will never admit that his war was a mistake, and will instead insist on his own version of events long after reality has moved on.
“The lacquering part of Trump and the denialism of Trump, which has been the cornerstone of his success for his entire public life, is now what’s kicked in,” he said. “You’ve heard of five-stage clingers? He’s gonna go into five-stage denialism. And he’s gonna triple down on this. And he’s gonna start saying things to people that are absolutely not true.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Scaramucci argued that Trump settled for the short end of the stick with Iran because he was desperate to “get out of this situation and get the prices lower in the United States and the Strait semi-opened.”
Speaking at the G7 summit, Trump outlined his fear of becoming “the next Herbert Hoover”—the U.S. president widely blamed for the Great Depression of 1929.
“I didn’t want to see economic catastrophe. If you kept this going, that could have happened,” the octogenarian commander-in-chief told reporters, later adding: “It could have caused an international depression.”
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