Anthony Scaramucci compares Trump to Timothy McVeigh: 'The domestic terrorist of the 21st century'
Former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci appeared Thursday on Anderson Cooper 360 and spoke about President Trump’s role in causing the riot at the Capitol last week, when hundreds of his supporters stormed the building in an effort to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s election victory. And Scaramucci compared Trump to Timothy McVeigh, the domestic terrorist who carried out the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, killing 168 people. The deadliest terrorist incident on U.S. soil until the September 11 attacks in 2001.
“He incited a riot. He incited an insurrection,” Scaramucci said. “He's arguably, at least in the 21st century, you could say, Timothy McVeigh for the 20th century, but he is the domestic terrorist of the 21st century, in terms of the history of the 21st century.”
Scaramucci believes that historians will view Trump much in the same way they do McVeigh.
“Fifty years from now,” Scaramucci said, “a presidential historian will look at the situation and say, ‘My god, he didn't accept the election, he signaled prior to the election that he wasn't going to, and he incited an insurrection where people descended on the Capitol building calling for the death of his vice president. So you’ve got to step back, Anderson, and look at it objectively, and look at it from 2071, not 2021.”
Just one day after Trump became the first president in U.S. history to be impeached twice, this time charged with inciting insurrection, Scaramucci said he believes Trump deserves to be convicted, and not just in the looming senate trial.
“He has to be held accountable. He has to be convicted in the senate. The guy really should go to jail,” Scaramucci said. “He's the president of the United States, so we're gonna be cautious about that. But they've got to make this very punitive on him.”
Trump was recently banned, or at least indefinitely suspended, from multiple social media platforms, and Scaramucci believes that’s the only thing keeping Trump from inciting more violence.
“If he could have one more big insurgency, he would,” Scaramucci said. “But I don't think he's gonna be able to get that now because he doesn't have the communication, the direct messaging that was going on on social media and stuff like that.”
Scaramucci also addressed Republicans now calling for unity despite many of them pushing Trump’s false claim of the election being stolen for weeks. Scaramucci doesn’t think unity is possible until the Republican Party is purged of Trump-like ideology.
“If you want unity in the United States, you have to stamp out the venality of Trumpism and the expression of Donald Trump in the last two weeks,” Scaramucci said. “You're not going to get unity unless you de-Trumpify an element of the country.”
Anderson Cooper 360 airs weeknights at 8 p.m. on CNN.
Watch Carl Bernstein say Trump is ‘more of a disgrace’ than Nixon following the president’s second impeachment:
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