The new head of communications at the White House brought up Abraham Lincoln’s struggle to end slavery when asked about the difficulty Donald Trumphas faced in trying to repeal Barack Obama’s healthcare legislation.
In his first UK television interview, Anthony Scaramucci said Trump would push through the abolition of the healthcare plan, despite opposition in Congress.
He told BBC Newsnight’s Emily Maitlis: “If you’ve read Team of Rivals, it took Lincoln three or four times to get what he wanted from the Senate and the House of Representatives, which was the full abolition of slavery – that was a much tougher thing to get done than what we’re working on right now.”
When Maitlis addressed the difficulty Trump was facing from his own party, Scaramucci added: “It took 22 months for President Obama to get what he wanted from the legislature. We’re in the six months of the president’s presidency. So think about the things we are trying to accomplish inside of one year … If we get Obamacare repealed and replaced, which I predict will still happen, and we get a level of tax reform that we haven’t seen since 1986 and we do that inside of a 12-month period of the presidency, I think that will be remarkable.”
When asked to set a date for these accomplishments, he replied: “Do you live here in Washington? … People say one thing to your face but they don’t really mean it, and they something else behind your back. What I like about the president, it’s actually good leadership to say the things to people’s faces.”
