Short-lived White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci said his former colleague Steve Bannon has the "tendencies" of a white nationalist while on "The View" Friday.
Scaramucci was fired after a 10-day stint as communications director after he excoriated then-White House chief strategist Bannon in a phone call to New Yorker reporter Ryan Lizza. During the conversation, which was later published, he accused Bannon in vulgar terms of using President Donald Trump to advance his brand, among other things. Hosts of ABC's "The View" asked Scaramucci whether Bannon is guilty of the charge by some that he is a "white nationalist." The former Trump advisor answered with some hesitation.
"Is he a white nationalist?" he said. "I would say that he has those tendencies. If you read Breitbart there's a lot of that white nationalist economic fervor."
"Well he's white and he's a nationalist, put both together," host Joy Behar said with a laugh.
White nationalism holds that white people should maintain a distinctly white national identity, and Bannon has called those who espouse the ideology "losers." Scaramucci differentiated himself from Bannon by emphasizing social inclusion and economic growth.
"My whole thing is, [it] doesn't matter; we're a rainbow, let's grow the pie, let's share the pie together," Scaramucci said.
Bannon became the topic of conversation when the show's hosts asked Scaramucci about his former White House colleagues. When asked who the most annoying and unlikeable person in the White House was, Scaramucci said he had to name two.
"How do you think I got along with [former chief of staff] Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon?" he said. "You thought we were a triumvirate, the three of us? I mean, that was rough."
The hosts took an interest in Bannon and asked Scaramucci to elaborate on his qualities.
"His is best quality is he's a great speechwriter, he's got great linguistic skills," Scaramucci said. "His worst quality to me was that he had a little bit of a Messianic complex. He got very mad at me for going to Davos, Switzerland, to speak at the World Economic Forum."
"Because he was an anti-globalist and he was hitting that economic forum at Breitbart for so many years, that put me in disfavor with him," Scaramucci added.
"People that have Messianic complexes, they think they're the answer, they think they're the solution," Scaramucci continued. "What we know about our country, what we know about our government, thank God, it's set up as a system of checks and balance where it has to be a collaboration."