IN FOCUS THE MOOCH'S SECOND ACT: ANTHONY SCARAMUCCI'S POST-PARTISAN AMERICAN DREAM

ANTHONY SCARAMUCCI strides into the seaside ballroom of Bermuda's plush Hamilton Princess Hotel, sporting a well-tailored suit, a spangled American flag pin, a Mickey Mouse watch, and plenty of hair gel.

- BY JEFF JOHN ROBERTS

His body pulses with energy, and he talks in a rapid stream, his nasal Long Island accent peppered with F-bombs.

Most Americans encountered the Mooch—a nickname he acquired as a kid—for the first time in 2017. That's when Scaramucci got a gig as first-term President Donald Trump's communications director, only to yap his way out of that job after 11 days. His fleeting tenure became fodder for late-night comics and social media wags, who coined the metric of “a Scaramucci” to measure the length of a failed short-term stint.

That sort of episode is not easy to come back from. Yet Scaramucci has somehow done just that. He has parlayed his disastrous White House foray into a role as one of Trump’s most arch critics, often drawing on his personal knowledge of the man he worked with during the 2016 presidential campaign. With his massive social media following and his cohosting of The Rest Is Politics: US podcast, Scaramucci has won over a legion of unlikely new fans across the political landscape. At the same time, his popular crypto-focused SALT conferences (like the one he was hosting in Bermuda) have attracted leading business figures and, along with his hedge fund, SkyBridge Capital, helped Scaramucci amass a personal fortune of nearly $200 million—much of it in Bitcoin.