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'Not sustainable': Trump's ties to Musk 'won't last,' claims former White House comms chief
18 February 2025, 09:05
The former communications chief of the White House believes the relationship between Donald Trump and Elon Musk won't last.
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Speaking on the relationship between the tech billionaire and US president, Anthony Scaramucci told LBC the partnership is "not sustainable".
Mr Scaramucci told LBC: "There's that very famous line in Shakespeare, [the lady] doth protest too much.
"They were on Sean Hannity last [Friday] night trying to impress upon people how much they like each other and how important they are to each other.
Mr Scaramucci also stated that Trump is not going to "jettison" Musk - but that instead he will "fade out over time".
"I've said this consistently. He's not going to jettison him the way he would jettison somebody like me or Jim Mattis or General Kelly.
"But he'll jettison him over time. He'll fade out over time."
As part of the interview with Saxo, Mr Scaramucci continued: “I don't think - and Trump has told people this - Elon is going to get bored. We don't need to worry about Elon.
"He'll get sidetracked. He'll move on to something else."
The former comms chief also highlighted a comment of Elon's that people should "pay attention to".
“I'm going to do this for four more months," he says, citing a quote he claims came from the tech mogul's mouth.
"So sometime in June, Elon's moving back into his companies and he's going to turn over the keys to DOGE.
"So DOGE is a lot of splashing in the water. Not a lot of things are going to happen," he claims.
"No way they could save $2 trillion. Can they cut between $500 billion and a trillion dollars over time from that budget?
"They exploded that budget in COVID and they don't need to be spending that much money, but they'll never do it the way Elon Musk wants to do it with a chainsaw.
"It's just not going to happen. Can they have more than 200,000 people leave the federal government this year, which is what their average is? Yes, they could do that as well.
“So things could get better on the margin, but not significantly.”
"The DPGE thing, which is interesting, is everything else that we've tried in that government when we try to find fraud in the government and we have $2,000 toilet seats and $10,000 hammers and things like that.
"It will make a little bit of a splash. It will save a little bit of money on the margin.”
“Maybe there's 60,000 people that have taken their buyout offer and so it will shrink some of the government.
"The government naturally has attrition of about 200,000 people a year, meaning people are retiring or they leave to go to other jobs and it goes this way.”
Despite the action from DOGE, Scaramucci remains cautious of Trump's progress, admitting: “I'm not impressed yet".
"There's nothing he's done. He's making headlines. He's signing executive orders.
"They haven't deported more people than Joe Biden did.
"They haven't really done anything other than make a lot of headlines.
'Daily reality show'
Mr Scaramucci also believes that Trump has decided that during this presidency he wants a "daily reality show."
"And so, when he first ran and they said, "Okay, this is how a president acts," and you put somebody in the press room to handle the press briefings, and you act presidential and do president things.
"He doesn't like that. He's very much so an attention seeker.
"And so in his second round of being in the presidency, he sits in the chair in the Oval Office and he's literally having a press conference or a reality television show every day.
"So I guess the issue for me is when will the press get tired of that?
"When will the press stop running that?".
