“The No. 1 thing for me is that I grew up a Republican,” Anthony Scaramucci was telling me last week, inside the Bellagio Hotel and Casino, in Las Vegas. Scaramucci, who is known affectionately on Wall Street as “The Mooch,” is a man of many talents. The former Goldman Sachs private-wealth manager runs the successful hedge fund SkyBridge Capital. He’s also an owner of the Hunt & Fish Club, a Midtown Manhattan restaurant that caters to Wall Street types who neither hunt nor fish. (It does, however, feature a nice kosher ribeye for $61.)

The Mooch also throws the annual SALT Conference, which is fast becoming the hedge-fund industry’s equivalent of the Allen & Co. Sun Valley confab. SALT is set, almost too perfectly, in Vegas. Scaramucci and I were speaking after a dinner with SALT grandees including John Boehner, T. Boone Pickens, Ken Griffin, David Petraeus, Larry Summers, and, somewhat curiously, Will Smith. (I was part of the festivities; this year, I interviewed my Vanity Fair colleague Michael Lewis.)

But the Mooch’s latest trick may be his newfound political flexibility. Two months ago, I attended a luncheon at the Hunt & Fish Club to which Scaramucci invited the renowned pollster Frank Luntz in order to show a number of videos illustrating Donald Trump’s strength as a candidate. The Mooch, who had initially supported Scott Walker before turning to Jeb Bush, was noticeably chastened by the presentation. “I’m going to say one last thing to the Democrats here, because I really don’t want Trump to be president, so I want you to listen very carefully, O.K.?” Scarmucci declared that afternoon. “He was underestimated by Walker and his team. He was mis-underestimated—which is a George W. Bush word and which doesn’t exist—he was mis-underestimated by the Jeb Bush team. Now he’s been completely mis-underestimated by the entire Republican Party. And when she”—referring to Hillary Clinton—“talks about him, she sounds and smells like she’s already underestimating him. So I’m just giving you guys a heads up. Do not underestimate the guy.”

Two months later, Scaramucci had decided not to underestimate the guy, either. He had now made his peace with Trump. In fact, he had made two pilgrimages in the past eight days to visit the candidate at his lair in Trump Tower. When I asked the Mooch if he saw any contradiction in his behavior, he simply demurred. It was all business, he insisted. “I’m a very loyal Republican, O.K.?” he said. “It wasn’t my first choice or my second choice.” Then he recalled a moment from one of his conversations with the candidate: “What I said to him was, ‘You’re the people’s choice and out of respect for our democracy and the representative system, I’m here to help you. Tell me how I can help you.’”

Donald Trump wasn’t at the Bellagio during SALT, but there was no mistaking his looming presence—and the sound of the furious scurrying among the deci-percenters to alight by his side now that all the other choices are gone. The kicking and screaming was almost palpable. But money men are nothing if not a practical lot, and it was apparent that the time had come for many Republican Wall Streeters to hold their noses and get on the Trump bandwagon.

Scaramucci was, in many ways, leading the charge. But he insisted to me that his conversion to Trump was completed only after he expressed “his concerns” to the candidate about his hot rhetoric, presumably on topics ranging from immigration to his comments about Muslims. Scaramucci also said that he warned that he didn’t want the “intellectuals of the establishment” to leave the Republican Party because of the “inflammatory Donald Trump.” The Mooch did not share with me the specifics of his conversations with Trump, but it was pretty easy to imagine how it went. “He rebutted these things in a very analytical way,” he said of Trump, “with a lot of clarity, which gave me the impression that he is thinking about this thing differently than the way he has expressed so far. I think he has the analytical depth to pull this thing off. I really do believe that. Now will he win? I don’t know, but I’m a team-oriented Republican and so I do what I have to do.”