WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump lashed out at his former communications director Anthony Scaramucci on Monday morning, calling him a "highly unstable 'nut job'."

Trump distanced himself from Scaramucci, who had been the White House communications director for 11 days in 2017, saying that "I barely knew him until his 11 days of gross incompetence."

Trump added that Scaramucci "made a fool of himself...abused staff, got fired."

Scaramucci had been dismissed from his position in July 2017 after a brief but colorful tenure.

Referring to Scaramucci's book "Trump, the Blue-Collar President," Trump added that Scaramucci, "wrote a very nice book about me just recently. Now the book is a lie?"

Trump later deleted the tweet and replaced it with a new one with "shellacked" spelled correctly. The first version of the tweet has spelled it as "shellaced."

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Trump has recently escalated his rhetorical war with his former staffer and has called him "totally incapable of handling" his White House job. Scaramucci, for his part, has called for the Republican Party to drop Trump as its nominee, anhe was noncommital on future support for Trump.

Earlier Monday morning, Scaramucci had appeared on CNN's "New Day" to say he was assembling a coalition of Republicans to oppose the president.

"I've got to get some of these former cabinet officials in unity to speak up about it. They know it's a crisis. It goes back to things like the Caine mutiny court-martial," Scaramucci, making a reference to a 1954 movie about a mutiny aboard a U.S. Navy ship.

Scaramucci did not respond when asked who the former cabinet officials were, predicting instead a "trove of people" would come together.