Anthony Scaramucci calls Trump a lawless criminal: ‘If he is removed it would be like Fourth of July’

Removing president from office like ‘killing the Night King in Game of Thrones’

Donald Trump’s former director of communications Anthony Scaramucci has described his old boss as a “lawless criminal” whose removal from office would be celebrated like the Fourth of July.

Mr Scaramucci, who was fired from his post after just ten days in July 2017, said should Mr Trump be convicted in his Senate trial following impeachment in the House of Representatives, the “personality cult” which has built up around him will collapse.

“The fever is breaking,” he said in an interview on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4. “All that false idolatry of a personality cult will dissipate and so at the end of the day people will look around and say ‘What were we doing?’”

The president was impeached in a vote in Congress on Wednesday which went almost exactly along party lines. All Democrats bar two voted for two charges, of abuse of power and obstructing Congress, while all Republicans voted against.

As the Republicans have a majority of seats in the Senate, it is highly unlikely two-thirds of senators will vote to convict him after his trial, which is the majority required by the Constitution to remove him from office.

But Mr Scaramucci said the prospect of Mr Trump being removed, however, remote, would be “like the Night King being killed in Game of Thrones”.

“We would probably have to have a national holiday, it would be like the Fourth of July. The minute he is removed from office, there will be some pockets of anger, but there will be in general relief around the country.”

But there was also the danger of the situation spiralling out of control, he warned. “When you have a full-blown demagogue it usually ends in the tears of nihilism and destructiveness.

“Whether it’s David Koresh telling people to kill themselves and end their lives or Jim Jones telling people to dink Kool-Aid, full-blown demagogues that operate the way Donald Trump operates, they don’t go down easily. It always ends in tears with some level of mania and craziness.”

Mr Scaramucci previously hailed Mr Trump has a “winner” after been given his short-lived White House position.

“I don’t see this guy as a guy that is ever under siege,” he told reporters in July 2017. “He’s a very, very competitive person. But he’s a winner. We will do a lot of winning.”

Since his firing, Mr Scaramucci, who previously worked as an investor on Wall Street, has become more critical of the president.

In the interview with Today, he said Mr Trump had a “a level of shamelessness about him that I find horrifying”. “This isn’t even early stage fascism any more this is like mid-stage to full-blown fascism.”

“When it flames out people will look around and say ‘Where was I, was I nuts?’ I have to say this to myself, because I was supporting him. I have to own the fact I was supporting him, but at least I was smart enough to say ‘This is crazy’.”

It was vital fair-minded Republican senators such as former presidential candidate Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse and Lamar Alexander ensured there was a fair trial in the Senate, and the Republican majority did not simply let Mr Trump off the hook, he also said.

Neither Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, and John Bolton, his former national security adviser, were prepared to go to jail on behalf of the embattled president, Mr Scaramucci argued, so it was important they were called as witnesses in the Senate trial.

Both men have played a pivotal role in the Ukraine-Biden scandal which precipitated the impeachment process in the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives.