Harvard Business School Alums More Comfortable With Trump When They Think He's Acting Crazy As "A Strategy"

A presidential candidate who throws it out there that maybe it wasn't Russia that hacked the DNC's emails, maybe it was "somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds"? Who uses time during a debate to bring up his feud with Rosie O'Donnell? Who proclaims "I'm the worst thing that ever happened to ISIS"? Who announces his candidacy by saying that some Mexicans are good people but most are rapists? Who talks about reporters' menstrual cycles? Who says that the election system is rigged and he'll only accept the outcome of November 8th if he wins? Who goes on 3AM Twitter rampages against ex-beauty queens? The notion that Donald Trump would say these things just totally stream of conscious is disturbing to a lot of people, Harvard Business School grads included. But the idea that he's doing it as a well-thought out strategy, with like charts and stuff? Now that's something HBSers can get behind. Respect, even.

Scaramucci continued. “This isn’t just intuitive reactionary stuff,” he said. “The strategy is, he is trying to galvanize a movement of disaffected people that enjoy the flamethrowing because they are so upset with the political class in Washington. They want to send a Molotov cocktail into Washington with a rhetorical flamethrower. Now you may not like that about him, and to be honest, I don’t like that about him. But he is looking at the math. Let’s talk about Pennsylvania. There are about two million white voters registered in Pennsylvania that did not vote in the 2012 election. The president won that state by about 350,000 votes. If Mr. Trump gets half of those people to the polls, his path to the American presidency becomes way easier and much clearer. And in order to get those people out, many of those people, the reasons why they are not voting is that they are disaffected from the system. They don’t like what is happening in Washington. And by the way, I say candidly, I don’t agree with all of the bellicosity of the rhetoric. But it is a defined strategy to bring out the vote to make him become the American president.”

The idea of a wealthy white man purposely inciting fear and anger in disaffected people merely to fulfill his own agenda of amassing personal power wouldn’t play well in every room. Graduates of Harvard Business School, however, are apparently more used to this kind of thing, and Scaramucci’s response was greeted with murmurs of understanding from both sides of the aisle.

Some of Wall Street’s One-Percenters Are Trying to Convince Themselves That Trump Isn’t Crazy [NYM/Jessica Pressler via Matt Levine]