- Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris in key swing states like Pennsylvania to win the election.
- Harris faced challenges, taking over Biden's campaign 107 days before the election.
Anthony Scaramucci didn't have much time to get his hopes up.
Just 90 minutes after the first polls closed on election night, Scaramucci started to see exit polls that became the writing on the wall. Vice President Kamala Harris was struggling mightily against Donald Trump in pivotal swing states, including Pennsylvania.
The political commentator and vocal Trump critic, who had a famously brief 11-day stint as the 45th president's White House communications director, soon came to a realization that made him uncomfortable: his former boss would defy his expectations and become president — again.
"He won fair and square," Scaramucci told Business Insider in an interview on Friday. "He was democratically elected by the people of this country. He won the popular vote, he won the Electoral College vote, and so he's going to be president of the country."
Although Scaramucci may dread the outcome, he said he's not a sore loser, hence his congratulatory message to Trump and crucial ally Elon Musk.
"I'm an American citizen, and I love my country, and I want him to succeed," Scaramucci said. "I'm not going to whine about it. I mean, it's over."
Hindsight is 20-20, but Harris may be haunted by mixed messages
Unlike many of his never-Trump counterparts, Scaramucci said he's not second-guessing Harris after her loss. He believes she was put in a "near-impossible" position, as she took the reins of the campaign from Joe Biden just 107 days before November 5, which was unprecedented.
"In my mind, she gets an A+ on her campaign," Scaramucci said. He added: "We can criticize her, we can Monday-morning quarterback her, but she went with Biden's team. God only knows what the infighting looked like inside that team."
Harris wasn't a perfect candidate, Scaramucci acknowledged. Though he saw her as smart and qualified, she didn't have President Barack Obama's charisma or Trump's diehard following.
However, Scaramucci still believes Harris made some mistakes on messaging. She told late-night host Stephen Colbert "I'm obviously not Joe Biden," before saying on ABC's "The View" that "there is not a thing that comes to mind" that she'd do differently than the president.
"She probably needed to go a little harder at the economic agenda, and she probably needed to diverge herself from Joe Biden," Scaramucci said. "That was a hard thing for her to do because of the relationship there."
4 reasons why Trump won back the White House
Candid as ever, Scaramucci settled on a quartet of reasons as to why Trump defeated Harris.
"I got it wrong," Scaramucci said. "I got it wrong for lots of different reasons, but I want to give you the four major reasons why I got it wrong."
Arguably the largest anvil around the Harris campaign was also what plagued Biden's tenure: the highest inflation in over four decades. The price growth surge was global and largely caused by supply-chain disruptions during and after the pandemic, but voters didn't see it that way.
"People really do believe that the inflation is owned by Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, even though that was secular and systemic inflation," Scaramucci said. "If you're an economist, you understand that it actually got inducted into the economy during the Trump administration through monetary and fiscal policy during COVID. Again, I wouldn't blame Donald Trump for that either, but that's what happened."
Voters also disregarded much of what Scaramucci referred to as Trump's "menacing" rhetoric.
"People are actually voting for a presidential candidate that they don't expect him to fulfill certain promises," Scaramucci said, listing mass deportation, using the US military against his political opponents, or threatening to pull the FCC license for networks like MSNBC or CNN.
Scaramucci is also convinced that some Americans didn't want to vote for Harris because she's a woman, even though many might dispute that notion.
"There is misogyny in the country," Scaramucci said. "Certain segments of the population are just not going to vote for a woman, OK? Now, you can hate me for saying that, but I'm just looking at the data, and I'm speaking very realistically about the data."
Perhaps on the other side of that coin, Scaramucci believes that Trump's win is a culmination of pushback against what many on the right have criticized as identity politics or "wokeness."
"The average person in America does not like the hard-left culture that's being imposed upon them," Scaramucci said. "So when Trump is running transgender advertising, negative advertising — even though it's a small group of the population, and even though a lot of stuff he's saying is misinformed — it does trigger people."
Now that Trump appears to have won the popular vote, as well as the Electoral College, Scaramucci believes there are no more excuses for Democrats. He believes Trump critics, including himself, must take a hard look in the mirror before the next election.
"Your message is not what the American people want — the majority of the American people," Scaramucci said of Democrats.