“I think he wasn’t sure,” Scaramucci continued. “I think he was trying to get to the bottom of it, and to persuade Trump not to do this, that this was a mistake. And so he figured that by the morning he would have Trump talked out of it, and he and Bannon were obviously working overtime to try and convince Trump not to do it.”

At the Trump Hotel, it was Stephen Bannon on the line. “Oh, it’s Steve Bannon! This is a guy I thought was a friend. This is a guy who I wrote a 10-point memo for when he joined the campaign. And I was working alongside of him throughout the time during the campaign, right? O.K., so now I’m in the Trump Hotel. The phone is ringing and Steve says, ‘How are you?’ ‘How am I? What do you mean how am I?’ He says, ‘Hey, you want to know something? You want to know what your chances are to become the comms director this morning here at the White House? You want to know what your chances are?’ I said, ‘What are my chances, Stephen?’ [Replied Bannon]: ‘Zero! You got that, man? Zero. You got it? Zero.’ I said, ‘Zero, O.K., I didn’t realize that the word ‘president’ was in front of your last name, Stephen, because if it was, if ‘president’ was in front of your last name, my chances would be less than zero.’ I said, ‘But the guy who has ‘president’ in front of his last name, I kind of have 100 percent. Now what do you want to do? Do you want to continue to fight with me, because we can fight all day and all night now that I’m in the White House with you? Or we can declare peace and work alongside each other to help the president with his agenda. What do you want to do?’”

Bannon tried to convince Scaramucci that he wasn’t up to the job. “He says to me, ‘You’re not equipped. This Russia thing, you won’t know how to handle it properly, you won’t know how to communicate it. Reince and I want to offer you a number of different jobs. Come and see us at 9:30 in the morning in the chief of staff’s office.’

“I tell Bannon, ‘O.K. I’m happy to go see you at 9:30.’ I go to the White House—I have my badge. I go upstairs and say hello to Ivanka. [She says,] ‘Are you ready?’ I say, ‘I’m totally ready, no problem.’ I go downstairs. I have a 30-minute meeting with Reince and Bannon. And Priebus is now, he’s pulling the Howdy Doody, Richie Cunningham delivery and ‘Oh golly gee shucks, we’re friends.’ I’m like, ‘Reince, we can spare the ceremony. I know that you dislike me. I now dislike you. You can spare the ceremony.’ I said, ‘I’m looking at the two of you jamokes. If my network took a shit it would be the combination of the two of you. I’m very, very frustrated with the two of you, I’m going to tell you right now.’”

At 10 A.M. on July 21, they headed into the Oval Office to see Trump. “He’s hot. Jared is in the office, Ivanka, me, Sarah [Huckabee Sanders], Hope [Hicks], and the two jamokes. The president is hot. He says, ‘Scaramucci is going to come in, he’s going to be the comms director.’ He’s dictating a press release to Sarah who is writing it all down, and then he turns to Priebus and he says, ‘I don’t want him reporting to you. He’s going to report directly to me. I don’t want him tainted with your stench. I know the two of you guys have been leaking on me and leaking on other people in the administration, and I want it to stop, and this guy’s in charge now. He’s going to fix the Comms Department; he’s going to fire the leakers.’ They are now super pissed. They walk out. I go the other way with Sarah, and then Sarah’s as white as a ghost. I’m getting the stern looks of anger and hatred from Sean Spicer. I’m like, ‘I don’t know why you’re looking at me like that for. If you want to work with me that’s great, and if you don’t that’s fine too.’ He goes into the president’s office and he resigns. He comes back and he announces that he’s resigned, and I said, ‘O.K., that’s great.’ Trump’s irritated. He says, ‘These guys are unbelievable. I gave them the job of a lifetime, they’re letting everybody down. They’re letting me down.’” (Spicer could not be reached for comment.)

The Mooch took a deep breath, and then reflected back on his days in the White House—11, according to his math, rather than 10, as many in the media had reported. “Now I told Colbert I thought I’d last longer than a carton of milk in your refrigerator,” he said. “But if you called me on July 22, that Saturday, and said, ‘Mooch, what’s happening here?’ I would have turned to you—and this is not revisionist history by the way, this is me literally saying it during that period of time—I would have said, ‘This is going to be very difficult because I’ve got the chief of staff and the chief strategist, they hate my guts. They’re now dumping on me in the press, they’re dumping anything that they can find. So I go back in to see the president. We agree that Sarah is going to be the press secretary. He then turns to Sarah and says, ‘Let Anthony do the press conference today. You O.K., you comfortable doing the press conference?’ I said, ‘Yeah, no problem, sir.’ [Trump says,] ‘O.K., what time is the press conference?’ [The Mooch replied,] ‘It’s at two o’clock.’ We were a little delayed.