WASHINGTON -- Days into his new job as White House Communications Director, Anthony Scaramucci said that voters in Wisconsin love the way the president communicates with the American people via social media
Scaramucci was born on Long Island, to a construction worker father and stay-at-home mother. During their interview, the newly-minted Trump spokesman stressed the importance of the president using social media to bypass traditional news sources.
"You know what the president said to me? I was in his study, off the Oval Office yesterday, and he says 'if I didn't have social media, I'd be dead,'" Scaramucci said. "Because the mainstream media pounds him so hard, because they totally misunderstand him as a person, and they pound him super hard."
"So he has to use the mechanisms of the social media to hop over the mainstream media so he can get directly to the American people."
Scaramucci spoke exclusively to Charles Benson, a reporter from our Scripps affiliate TMJ4 in Milwaukee. Trump's victory in Wisconsin was key in his Electoral College win. Wisconsin had voted Democratic in six prior presidential elections before Trump took the state by just 22,000 out of nearly 3 million votes.
"People in Wisconsin love the tweeting," Scaramucci told Benson in Washington, D.C. Tuesday morning. "Now, people here in these Washington elitist salons, they probably don't like the tweeting. But the people I grew up with - they love the tweeting."
When asked if President Trump could have spoken to Attorney General Jeff Sessions privately instead of attacking him as "beleaguered" on Twitter, Scaramucci deferred to Trump's authority as our nation's leader.
"You know what? He's the president. We're not. And so, if we're going to do our jobs right, we have to serve him, and we have to think about what he wants in terms of the policies. Not what these other people want."
