In a puzzling appearance on OWN’s “Dr. Phil” this week, former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci got off easy from a host who typically gnaws on his guests’ eyeballs for breakfast.
Is Dr. Phil getting soft?
Or did Scaramucci do what he often does — which is he somehow cajoles his interviewers into giving him good press. Or else.
With a lot of TV hype, Scaramucci briefly appeared with his wife, Deirdre Ball, who downplayed the couple’s near marital destruction during Mooch’s 11-day stint in the White House. Dr. Phil’s stools showed off Scarmucci’s short stature — his shoes barely skimmed the top rim of the chair’s legs, giving him a dangling effect throughout the show. When Deidre was nine months pregnant with Scaramucci’s second child, she filed for divorce.
Did they even talk about Mooch going to work for President Trump?
No, she calmly told Dr. Phil. “We really didn’t talk about it,” she said.
Dr. Phil said Scaramucci’s inability to keep his job “shook him to the core.”
Clips went on and on with Mooch calling himself a “front stabber,” not a backstabber, as some of his more infamous quotes go.
He spoke about his three stages of failure.
After the 12th day, he said, he woke up in “full-blown humiliation.”
But don’t worry about it. You just gotta go through stages. Scaramucci has advice about failure because he has had a lot of it in his life. “When you fail, first thing you do is take full accountability,” he said. “Number 2, you’ve gotta forgive yourself. And number 3, stay honest about who you are in your life.”
Scarmaucci is nothing if not sentimental. While traveling with Trump, he sent his wife a text to congratulate her on the birth of their child. Deidre said she missed her husband: “Where’s Anthony?” (Read about the tense situation here.)
Astonishingly, Dr. Phil didn’t ask him about that. Nor did he ponder Mooch’s romantic link to Fox News broadcaster Kimberly Guilfoyle while his marriage was on the rocks. “Not true,” he told The Mirror in July, 2017. “We are good friends.”
Deidre, all blonde and glam with perfectly painted red nails, glossy nude lips and a bare shoulder black sweater, appeared calm and relaxed during the easy breezy interview. “It wasn’t, like, major,” she said of their marital troubles.
She talked about Scaramucci’s impulsive nature — a trait she loves about him, but one that can cause, ahem, problems in their marriage.
She said some members of her family aren’t big Trump fans. She likes to keep politics away from family gatherings.
Scaramucci explained his conversation with then-New Yorker reporter Ryan Lizza. He was talking to an Italian guy who was the son of a guy his father had been friends with over the years. So naturally he assumed the whole thing was off the record.
Phil wanted to know about Trump’s tweeting habits. (Who cares?)
Was Dr. Phil on downers? He never called Mooch out for anything. Softball after softball after softball. (“Do you think Donald Trump ever thought he was going to become president?” He asked him to respond to Omarosa Manigault‘s comments from her stint on “Big Brother.”)
A good chunk of the interview was Scaramucci explaining how he and a group of his pals bought a Mets jersey — a relic of New York — and donated it to the 9-11 Memorial Museum.
And get this: He compared 9-11 to his own situation — he got a punch in the mouth and had to dust himself up and get up.
At the end of the brief interview, Dr. Phil asked him to stick around to counsel to another couple in trouble.
“Can a Harvard educated lawyer help a man co-parent with his ex-wife?” Phil asks, segueing into the next story without ever asking the Scaramuccis a single hard question.
To be fair, the man in the next relationship head-butted his ex-wife and threatened to kill her.
Still the whole tone changed: Dr. Phil skewered that couple, asking all sorts of twangy ass-kicker questions that just didn’t happen in his interview with The Mooch and his wife, Deirdre.
Advice for Dr. Phil fans: If you like the host’s typical brash personality, don’t watch this one. You’ll be severely disappointed.
