Former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci criticized the media for forming an opinion about President Donald Trump’s views on global warming without first asking him.
“I think you guys should ask him directly if he’s a climate change denier or not,” he told CNN’s Dana Bash Sunday. “I think you will find you will be surprised by that answer.”
Scaramucci, a hedge fund millionaire who was unceremoniously tossed from the Trump administration after only a week on the job, was referencing Trump’s tweet Thursday that suggested global warming might help people in the Northeast buried under several feet of snow.
“In the East, it could be the COLDEST New Year’s Eve on record. Perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming that our Country, but not other countries, was going to pay TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS to protect against,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “Bundle up!”
Scaramucci, for his part, lit up the media airwaves during his brief stint in the White House — the man reporters call “The Mooch” managed to hasten the departure of then Press Secretary Sean Spicer, vowed a brutal staff purge, accused then Chief of Staff Reince Priebus of a felony, and called Priebus a “fucking paranoid schizophrenic” during an interview with The New Yorker.
He spent most of the CNN interview Sunday defending several planks of Trump’s climate agenda. Scaramucci supported the president’s 2017 decision to exit the Paris climate agreement, telling Bash that the president was right to believe the deal could hurt American business.
“I think what he’s really saying in that tweet is that deal, the Paris accord, there was something really wrong with that deal as it related to the United States,” he told Bash. “So, he really didn’t want to sign it and go along with the crowd. He’s an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs have the tendency to diverge from crowd thinking.”
Scaramucci, who once called climate change skepticism “disheartening” on Twitter, faced criticism he had become a so-called denier shortly after being put on the presidential transition, saying on CNN “I honestly don’t know” whether humans are affecting the climate.
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