Vice President Kamala Harris defeated former President Donald Trump in their debate because she “looked presidential,” according to ex-Trump administration official Anthony Scaramucci.
Harris and Trump faced off for the first and possibly only time in Philadelphia on Tuesday, with both candidates declaring victory soon after. Polls and pundits largely suggested that the vice president outperformed Trump.
Scaramucci, who served a brief stint as Trump’s White House communications director in 2017, said during a CNN appearance on Thursday that he thought Harris could have presented “more fundamentals” on the economy during the debate.
The former Trump official, who is backing Harris in this year’s election, went on to say that the vice president won the debate based on her demeanor, arguing that she looked like she belonged in the White House.
Scaramucci shared that former Republican New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a former Trump ally who helped him prepare for his 2020 debates with President Joe Biden, expressed similar sentiments in a text message following the debate.
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“Where she won that debate is she looked presidential,” Scaramucci said. “She showed up, she was classy, she was comported properly.”
“Chris Christie sent me a text and said, ‘She deserves to be there. She looks like she deserves to be there,'” he added. “And that’s the win for her.”
Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement to Newsweek that “nobody is going to listen to someone who barely lasted more time than an expired ham sandwich as White House communications director” in response to Scaramucci’s remarks.
Newsweek reached out for comment to the Harris campaign via email on Thursday night.
Scaramucci also predicted that Trump would eventually agree to participate in another debate with Harris, despite the former president saying in a Truth Social post Thursday that there would be “no” additional debates because he believes that he “clearly won” the first contest.
“It’s 100 percent that he’s gonna debate,” Scaramucci said. “He’s gonna say he’s not gonna debate. He knows he lost the debate … He would have never shown up in the [post-debate press] spin room if he had won that debate.”
“He knows he’s debating her again,” he continued. “But he has to have a buildup, he thinks it’s a negotiating chip. He’s trying to show his macho flex.”
Trump has repeatedly cited favorable but unscientific and easily manipulated polling from social media and conservative media outlets as evidence that he defeated Harris on Tuesday.
Scientific polls have suggested the opposite, with surveys conducted by CNN/SSRS, YouGov and Reuters/Ipsos all finding that a majority of Americans thought Harris was the debate winner.
Any potential impact that the debate may have on the election outcome remains to be seen. An average of recent polls compiled by FiveThirtyEight suggests that the race remains neck-and-neck, with Harris leading Trump nationally by 2.8 percent as of Thursday.