Trump, the Blue-Collar President by Anthony Scaramucci

Author:Anthony Scaramucci
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Center Street
Published: 2019-10-22T16:00:00+00:00

BY THE NEXT YEAR, I had secured Bill Clinton as a keynote speaker, and we had to start turning people away. We capped the attendance levels at 1,400, which was still massive for a hotel conference. I didn’t mind. Large parties are often nice and intimate, as Jordan Baker says in The Great Gatsby. At small parties, there isn’t any privacy.

That year, we helped facilitate more deals at the conference than the year before, and the press began to love it. The presence of a former president of the United States, who spoke at length about negotiations with North Korea, didn’t do any harm to that love affair with the press. Just before he attended the SALT conference, Bill Clinton had flown to Pyongyang to negotiate the release of four political prisoners held by North Korea—something Donald Trump would do a few years later over the phone, by the way—and he spoke about the threat that country would continue to pose in the future. Funny how any type of peace deal with North Korea seemed so far away not so long ago. Clinton’s appearance, though, elevated SkyBridge from a small meeting of hedge funds to a place where leaders of all kinds could meet and connect with one another.

Over the coming years, we would book former presidents, movie and sports stars, and titans of business and finance. Before I knew it, I had become the public face of SkyBridge and SALT. Reporters were doing profiles of me, painting me as some Gatsby-esque figure who threw wild parties out in the desert. I took a lesson from Donald J. Trump and let them print what they wanted. When you’re in a tight spot, it always helps to cultivate a good image of yourself. However, you have to learn early with the media that you aren’t going to be able to control the complete narrative. Repetition will eventually paint the full picture, but let’s face it, the media is looking to sketch a caricature. Before long, SALT was a massive hit—“a self-styled Davos meets Wolf of Wall Street that attracts top names from Hollywood, sports and politics,” according to Politico. It became a forum for Democrats and Republicans to come together and discuss their differences outside of Washington and all the nonsense that comes with that place. For a while, it was a paradise in the sand—at least for a few years.

But a strong economy, which eventually came as a result of renewed faith in Wall Street, is nothing if the government is still pushing dangerous policies like the ones that caused the financial crisis. If people in the White House don’t care about what’s going on with the aspirational working class in America—the people who hold no assets and weren’t helped much by the Obama stimulus package—we’re doomed to repeat our failures. All the cool conferences in the world can’t replace a good president who understands the working class and Wall Street at the same time.

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