At first glance, Anthony Scaramucci and Dominic Sandbrook make an unlikely duo. One – known to friends and detractors as ‘The Mooch’ – is a silver-tongued businessman with quiffed hair and an Italian-American twanged voice, whose 11 day stint as Donald Trump’s communications director in 2017 in his first term as President makes Liz Truss look seasoned. The other is an Oxford educated historian with a roster of BBC documentaries under his belt and an RP accent.
As with seemingly everything these days, the link is Gary Lineker. Sandbrook is one half of Goalhanger Productions’ podcast powerhouse the Rest Is History, while Scaramucci co-hosts the Rest is Politics US alongside the BBC’s Katty Kay.
They also have a common obsession with presidential assassinations. “It's such a great theme of American history. It's fun – obviously not for the people who are assassinated,” Sandbrook tells me over Zoom.
In keeping with the increasingly tenuous bastardisation of the The Rest Is… name, the pair are getting together for a one-off live show called The Rest is Assassinations in the West End on Mother’s Day.
I cleave very strongly to the view that it was Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone
Sandbrook explains that the inspiration for the event came after a vehement disagreement over who killed Kennedy. “I cleave very strongly to the view that it was Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone, and Anthony reacted with such incredulity and scorn when he heard this,” he says. “And derision,” interjects Scaramucci, who believes that “when you’re doing something like that, there’s a squad of people”.
Scaramucci hired a “person from Columbia University” to pore over the 80,000 government documents released by President Trump about Kennedy’s assassination, though it bore little fruit and he believes there’s still “a lot of obfuscation” around the documents. “Frankly, there's stuff that I know about that hasn't been released yet, and so we'll have to see if they actually do release them, but I would say that we have as high a likelihood of knowing and learning the real story of the JFK assassination as we do the Epstein black book,” he says.
Who is Anthony Scaramucci?
- Anthony Scaramucci was born in Long Island in 1964
- He was trained at Harvard Law School before his career in investment banking, beginning at Goldman Sachs
- In 2005, Scaramucci founded global hedge fund SkyBridge Capital
- He sold the company in 2017 in preparation for his new role as the White House’s Communications Director
- Scaramucci lasted just 10 days in the role, after a strongly worded attack on Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, in which he called him a "paranoid schizophrenic"
- Since his exit from the White House, Scaramucci has been involved in several ventures, including hosting the Rest Is Politics US
According to Sandbrook, The Rest is History listeners have “a natural fascination with the extremes of human behaviour”, and they always get “very good audiences” for the shows with darker themes. “With any historical subject there’s a slight element of voyeurism to it, and that’s a very human thing,” he says. “It can be quite distasteful, maybe, but we all have it.”
America’s obsession with killers like Mangione and the Menendez Brothers
That distastefulness came to the fore last December, when 26-year-old Ivy League graduate Luigi Mangione was accused of shooting United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in the back outside a hotel in Midtown Manhattan. Suspected murderers usually don’t enjoy the best PR, but Mangione was held up as a vigilante hero, fighting the good fight against America’s broken healthcare system.
It helped that he was conventionally attractive. He became known as the “hot assassin” online, while during his trial, crowds of young women bearing “Free Luigi” placards have gathered outside a New York court to cheer him in.
“I find the whole thing to be very tragic,” says Scaramucci, whose office is right round the corner from where the murder happened. Was he surprised by the reaction? “Any time somebody cold bloodedly kills somebody, and then there's a large group of people that have crushes on them, I think that's going to surprise me,” he responds.
It reminds him of the Menendez brothers, the “good looking young kids” who were jailed for killing their parents in 1989, and both wound up getting married in prison to girls who they had struck up letter correspondences with. “I’m not saying I’m a prude or anything, but I’m probably not going to marry a murderer,” he shrugs.
The gleeful online reaction to the Mangione case felt familiar: earlier that year, the attempt on Donald Trump’s life had been met with irreverent memes and glib humour.
Scaramucci was fired by Trump in 2017 after he attacked fellow White House staffers like Steve Bannon in a profane rant published in the New Yorker. Since then, blood has been bad. “The guy stinks and he’s a racist,” the Mooch has said of Trump, while the president reserves his favourite insult for his former Chief of Staff: “major loser”. Nevertheless, Scaramucci was “appalled” by the assassination attempt. “Political violence in a democratic country, to me, is never warranted,” he tells me.
Assassinations compel us to think in the counterfactual. “It’s the divergence – what could have happened if Caesar had lived, what could have happened if Kennedy had lived,” says Scaramucci. Yet even a failed one can change the course of history: Sandbrook believes that the attempt on Trump’s life helped to ensure his victory, while Scaramucci thinks it’s why he chose his Vice President, JD Vance.
Donald Trump was ‘not in best decision mode’
“He did not want Vance to be his Vice President, if you talk to his staff,” Scaramucci explains. “But there was a 72-hour period there where he had to make that decision, and he was, I think, stunned by that bullet and dealing with some post traumatic stress, as you would imagine anybody would be from a near death experience like that.”
I don't think the President was in his best decision-making mode right before the convention
He believes that the decision to go with Vance was “pushed on him by his kids”, in particular Donald Trump Jr, as the pair are friendly. Was it a mistake? “I don't think the President was in his best decision-making mode right before the convention and right after what happened in Butler, Pennsylvania.”
Sandbrook and Scaramucci’s star turn on the West End won’t be the first time they’ve collaborated. The latter was a guest star on a special Rest is History episode about presidents, which turned into a two-part series owing to his garrulousness. “They said ‘alright, we're gonna get through this in 50 minutes’. Two shows later, I was still talking. I think they shut the camera and the microphone off,” Scaramucci says.
“I never thought I'd be in a conversation where I'm trying to hurry along and the other person is saying, ‘there are five more things I'd like to say about Gerald Ford’,” adds Sandbrook. The pair can talk for England, and will no doubt be bickering about why Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t have a getaway car when the lights come up and the exit music plays on Sunday.
