New York financier Anthony Scaramucci, aka the Mooch, had his 15 minutes of fame back in the summer of 2017 when he spent 11 days as Donald Trump’s communications director in the White House. Even after John Kelly, then the chief of staff, fired him in the aftermath of his profanity-laced diatribe against other members of the White House staff that appeared in the New Yorker, Scaramucci stayed loyal to Trump, defending him publicly on TV spot after TV spot. But now, nearly two years later, the Mooch has soured bigly on Trump—and vice versa.

It all broke into the open a week ago during the Mooch’s appearance on the Bill Maher show. Trump retaliated with a stream of tweets directed Scaramucci’s way. But the Mooch says that the president has met his match. A Harvard Law School graduate with working-class roots from Port Washington, Long Island, he’s not one to back down and is happy to go toe-to-toe with the most powerful man on Earth. I’ve been reporting on the Mooch for years, and so was curious about just what he is up to this time. What follows is a lightly edited and condensed version of our recent conversation, now that Scaramucci has decided to throw cold water on the man he calls “The Wicked Witch of the West Wing.”

William D. Cohan: You’ve had quite the last few days.

Anthony Scaramucci: Oh my god, this jackass. You know, it’s all good. I mean, it could be the best three or four days ever, actually.

You were on the Trump train for more than three years. Now, in the last week or so, you’ve very publicly gotten off. Why? Was there a catalyst?

Let’s go back, okay? I had always stated very clearly where I was with the president, okay? When I joined his campaign—I could send you a copy of my book, if you haven’t read it—I had an epiphany. He was talking to blue-collar people that have felt left out. They have felt a vacuum of advocacy from establishment politicians on the left and right for probably three decades. So when he descended in those areas to talk to them, he didn’t say they were deplorable; he didn’t say they were misfits; he didn’t say any of those things. He said, “Hey, you got a problem, and I’m gonna try to help you.” Okay? And he also identified and crystallized three or four things that have to be fixed.

Number one, we hollowed out our manufacturing, and we allowed these asymmetric trade deals which helped the global system to hurt a large percentage of people in our own country. We have to fix that, and we’re capable of fixing it. Second thing that he recognized—you may disagree with me on this, but I believe this—is that we have to have a propitious balance between regulation and releasing the animal spirits of the system. The third piece, which frankly he gets an incomplete on, is you had to reform the tax code. You had the highest corporate taxes in the industrial world. You had to reform the code. Now you could’ve scored it differently, and you could’ve put more middle-class incentives in there, and, you know, you didn’t—you don’t need to be doing this level of deficit spending, ’cause what you find about this level of deficit spending, it’s not necessarily increasing growth. So he didn’t get everything right, but at least he was trying to move in the right direction, okay? Those are the positives.