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My personal style signifier is a custom-made diamond, ruby and sapphire stars-and-stripes-flag lapel pin. My wife gave it to me and it’s like a representation of our reconciliation, because we nearly got divorced during the Trump thing [when he was White House communications director for 10 days in 2017]. Women like it and men tease me about it. If women like something and men are breaking your balls over it then you know you’re doing something right. There’s also my blue suits. I wear Armani, Loro Piana and Zegna. When you’re short and stocky – which is code for Italian – you need to wear an Italian cut.
The last thing I bought and loved was my 2022 Lamborghini Huracán. When you’re an Italian kid growing up with no money, your dad’s a crane operator and you are thinking about making it through a few classes up to the American dream – if you’re Guido from Long Island – you want an Italian sports car. When I bought that car I was closing in on 60 and it was one of my life’s dreams.
The best book I’ve read in the past year, if we’re talking about fiction, is Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, about a woman chemist working in a research laboratory in the 1950s and ’60s. It’s about sexism, misogyny and the things that happened in the Mad Men era of America. It’s a rite-of-passage book that asks, “How do we seek our true self?” I’m a big-time book nerd. I’d also recommend April 1865: The Month that Saved America by Jay Winik. It’s about the month when Lincoln was assassinated but it’s incredibly timely. I would imagine that 50 years from now somebody could write a similar book about November 2024. To me, 1865 is a book about 2024. Do we have the right calibre of leadership to help the country reunite itself?
The most interesting thing I learned from working for Donald Trump was that you can like or dislike him but he has exceptional political instincts. Pay attention to the little people. I grew up in a blue-collar family, but what I did is I went to Tufts and Harvard Law School and Goldman Sachs and the salons of the hedge funds and Davos and all these elite places, and I started to get the confirmed biases of the people I was hanging out with. What Trump taught me was that we’d turned a very large quadrant of the country to desperation, all working class. And he taught me something that I will keep with me for the rest of my life. Pay attention to everybody. Don’t just pay attention to the people you are hanging out with. Because whether you like it or not, we’re all connected.
Kamala Harris’s number one quality is that she knows how to build a team. She was wholly underestimated. She hadn’t been in the spotlight. The hard right was denigrating her and making you feel like she’s vacuous, but she’s not. People of colour, and women, have to be three times smarter to get into these roles. She’s reached out to people like me where she’s opening the tent. If you want a cute joke: Bernie Sanders, Anthony Scaramucci and Dick Cheney walk into a bar… I don’t have the punchline yet, but you get the point. She’s building this very broad coalition. We don’t want to go back to 1947, before we had African-Americans in professional baseball leagues. We want to go to 2047, where we’re more unified and less tribal.
A way to make me laugh is to make fun of me. When Saturday Night Live called me human cocaine I thought that was really funny. I don’t think anybody eviscerated me more when I was in the White House for that short stint than Bill Maher, so the first place I wanted to show up afterwards was on his show. Trump can’t laugh about anything because his self-awareness is too brittle.
My style icon is Tom Ford. Unfortunately, you’d have to divide my waist in four to fit into a Tom Ford suit. I think the only things that fit me are his sunglasses… and his cologne. I’m not saying Ralph Lauren and all those other people aren’t great, but Tom Ford has intersected modernism and traditionalism better than anybody else in the style community.
I have a collection of vintage comic books that goes back to the 1940s. I am a DC Universe person. In my study I have a rendering that I commissioned from the comic-book artist Mike Grell of the cover of my favourite comic book from the 1970s, which shows Superman boxing Muhammad Ali. I knew Ali and have a good relationship with his widow; he was a truth-teller and a champion. I had it personalised, so I’m in the front row of the audience alongside a host of icons: Batman, Telly Savalas, Burt Reynolds, Lucille Ball, Jack Kennedy with Jackie Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, Johnny Carson, Dean Martin.
On the bookshelves behind my desk you’ll find figurines. When I bought Bitcoin for the first time, I got it wrong. It went from $60,000 to $50,000, so the New York Post had a cartoon of me sinking in a Bitcoin boat. So these are the assholes that I work with: they had this bobblehead made of me sinking in that boat. My kids put up a model of Yoda. And there’s a bulldog like the one M gave 007 in Skyfall and Superman throwing a car.
I found the secret to surviving in finance in a book called The Richest Man in Babylon by George S Clason. I read it in my 20s and now give it out to kids. Everything you need to know about finance is in there. It says be patient. Save a little bit every day, pay yourself first. I don’t care what your salary is. There’s enough room in there for $10. There’s room in there for $20. And so from my early 20s to today, every single paycheque I have chipped off a piece and put it in the stock market. If you do that for 40 years, you develop wealth because the principle of compound investing is probably the most ingenious part of mathematics. If I can get a seven per cent return every 10 years, I’ll double my money. This book single-handedly made me independently wealthy, irrespective of my career.
The best gift I’ve given recently is a Maserati for my mother’s 85th birthday. I’d previously bought her a Mercedes, but it was getting old. I said, “What do you want,” and she said laughingly: “A Maserati, but you don’t have to do that.” I bought it.
And the best gifts I’ve received are sunglasses. I’m the Imelda Marcos of sunglasses. I have two eyeballs and 2,000 sunglasses.
In my fridge you’ll always find Mountain Valley spring water in glass bottles, White Moustache yoghurt, black cherries, fresh and frozen blueberries, and half-and-half milk for my coffee. I don’t have a clue about cooking. I’m an Italian mamma’s boy, OK?
The thing I couldn’t do without is my pair of New Balance 990 trainers. My children call them the Grandpa 9000s. I have to get a workout in: it makes me feel better about myself, clearer-headed.
My grooming guru is my dermatologist, Dr Joel Kassimir. Vain and pain rhyme for a reason and I’ve probably taken more Botox needles to my forehead than any 60-year-old I know. I got blessed with a good head of hair, so I want to make sure I keep it. You’ve got to go for PRP injections in the back of your head. Does it work? My brother’s bald. Do I look bald? I’m a vain SOB. I have a colour rinse every three weeks. But I get it professionally dyed. Don’t go to the Rudy Giuliani school of hair dye. You can’t do it yourself. I don’t know what she’s using, but I love Erika at the Arsen Gurgov salon; she’s probably the best colourist in Manhattan.
What I learned from my neighbourhood was to live life without fear. Donald Trump’s going to attack my wife on X after I gave him $1mn and hundreds of hours of media advocacy. He’s got to be ready for the fight: I’ll bring it back to him. I’m supposed to be afraid of him? You got to live your life with no fear. What do you gotta lose? Relax. None of us is getting out of here alive.
In another life I would have been in the entertainment industry. I didn’t have the balls, but I would have enjoyed it.
The music I’m listening to is by Billy Joel. You can’t live on Long Island without loving Billy Joel. If you download “The Downeaster ‘Alexa’”, you’ll know everything you need to know about Long Island in four minutes. As Bruce Springsteen is to New Jersey, Billy Joel is to Long Island.
I’m not looking for another job in the White House. I just told Kamala and her staff that I want one more day there. I can cook and clean if I have to. I can wash dishes. Just one more day. I’m kidding. I don’t want to go back. I have had my fill. I got an education of a lifetime. I love my country, but I also like my family. I want to stay married and happy.
The last items of clothing I added to my wardrobe were Valentino T-shirts. One of them has a white rose on it. Again, the Italian stuff fits me better.
Working with Katty Kay on The Rest is Politics: US is like John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John doing a podcast, but in character. I’m driving her crazy with my poor manners and my New York Italian accent.
When I need to feel inspired, I go to the gym or for a run. The other thing I do is write. I have notes all over the place. I think you manifest your life through your thoughts. I wrote a book, From Wall Street to the White House and Back, last year. I was inspired by Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, one of my favourite books. It’s a lesson for people on not giving up on things. When I got my ass fired from the White House, my wife had filed for divorce, I missed the birth of our son… My wife and I have repaired our relationship, but it was a very bad time.
The podcasts I’m listening to are The Rest is Politics (UK); The Rest Is History; All-In, which is a business conversation, based in San Francisco – I like it because generally I don’t agree with them politically, but I think they’re very sharp on business; and The New York Times’s Ezra Klein Show: he’s incredibly smart on politics.
The places that mean a lot to me are my home in the Hamptons near the beach and my small ski home in Windham in Greene County. But my number one place is Hawaii. I’m a big coffee drinker – I think some of the best coffee in the world is in Hawaii.
An artist whose work I collect is the 3D artist Charles Fazzino. I have several pieces he’s made for me, which include all the fun things we like to do as a family, and the places we like to go. I first saw his work at a baseball stadium, because he does a lot of art for major league sports.
The best way to spend $20 is on an iced espresso, a Reese’s Fast Break King Size and a bag of salt and vinegar potato chips. Don’t eat them all at the same time, but that’s 20 bucks well spent for somebody who’s a junk-food eater like me.
The most viewed websites on my phone are Amazon and the Drudge Report. Amazon to buy things of convenience and the Drudge Report to see what it’s curating from a political perspective. But my favourite website/app is Blinkist: I’m a premium subscriber and it gives you a 15-minute summary of some bestselling and great books.
I believe in life after death because I got raised Catholic. Once you’re Catholic you’re always a Catholic, no matter what type of secular world you’re living in.
My favourite room in my house is the sitting room because it’s got sunlight and my wife has done a great job of decorating it. In truth, I’ve only actually been allowed to have my way with two rooms in the house and that’s my study and the gym.
My favourite Italian dish is something with a tomato sauce, meatballs and grated Romano or pecorino cheese. I’m a southern Italian, so I grew up on peasant food.
My favourite building is the Chrysler Building. Walter Chrysler was the Steve Jobs or Bill Gates of his time. He was a maverick. And, of course, it was built before the Empire State Building, so it was a real statement in the city.
The most important thing I learned from my parents was incredibly hard work – and paying your debts. One of the more vivid memories of my upbringing is picking up some shirts from the dry cleaners and my dad getting a parking ticket on Main Street in the town I grew up in. He put the shirts in the car, walked the parking ticket up to the Post Office and said, “I don’t even want to wait. I pay all my debts.” I tell my staff that I could never dishonour my dad.
What Trump is doing is really bad because his three-legged stool is misogyny, racism and anti-immigration, which, ironically, makes him the most un-American presidential candidate. As a country, we’re about knitting together multiple races, multiple ethnic backgrounds, openness to different people’s sexual orientations, to create a country that can see our common nature more than whatever separates us. But he’s hard on the separation. He’s hard on the fear-based division. He’s hard on tribalism. Which will pull America apart at a time when America has to figure out a way to come together.
When we were kids my grandmother would say “the best among us choose not to judge human frailty so harshly”. Good leadership requires a love of people. And it requires righteousness, but it doesn’t require righteousness and wrath. It requires righteousness and forgiveness.
Every person has a rite-of-passage story. Mine was when I bought my first car. It was a 1979 Camaro Berlinetta and the colour was horrific. It was burgundy and it had a burgundy vinyl interior. It was a used car so there were cigarette burn marks all over the interior and I don’t smoke but I bought the car because it was the right price. And I finally had a sporty car. For me it was one of the highest points of happiness a person can have.
You should study rock ’n’ roll bands to understand your relationship with your wife and relationships among politicians, because rock ’n’ roll bands will burn out unless they can manage each other’s egos. The Rolling Stones are still playing together. One minute they hate each other’s guts, then they love each other, then they hate each other. But they can manage each other’s egos. Paul [McCartney] and John [Lennon] couldn’t manage each other’s egos. With Donald Trump you get a team of one, but with Ronald Reagan he had a plaque that said you can get anywhere you want in life as long as you don’t care who gets the credit. Trump lives in a team of one. He’s too narcissistic to share any credit. A good rock ’n’ roll band or a good marriage or a good political relationship is a management of ego.
The best bit of advice I ever received was to keep going. No one ever turned to me and said, “Hey, Anthony, keep going.” But if I look at my grandparents, my dad, mom and at my relatives I respect, you keep going. And the best advice Donald Trump gave me was at a charity event in 2012. We were raising our profile and a reporter wrote a nasty article about me: I had a bad performance in my fund. He looked at me and said, “What are you, a big baby? If you get negative press it’s a sign you are doing something right.”
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