MSNBC anchor Stephanie Ruhle questioned former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci on Thursday about his previous claim that former White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon was “trying to suck his own cock.”

“You said six months ago, you said you think that Steve Bannon tries to suck his own penis, and now you’re saying he should get on board, get on the team?” asked Ruhle on MSNBC’s “Velshi & Ruhle.” 

{mosads}“Let’s talk about that because you want to bring that up,” an amused Scaramucci replied. “This is MSNBC, my favorite network.”

 

“I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own cock,” Scaramucci, 53, said of Bannon in the interview. “I’m not trying to build my own brand off the f—ing strength of the president. I’m here to serve the country.”

Ruhle attempted to temper the exact wording the former financier used in the Thursday interview.

“Now you’re talking about getting him back on the team. Let’s be honest about how you feel,” Ruhle said.

“First of all, I have never come on a show where I am not honest about how I feel. If you want to go back to that interview, take out the expletives, see what I said about Steve, and look at the president’s declaration yesterday, they are fairly similar, so I think I have the right read on the guy,” Scaramucci noted.  

“There are two things you can do with a guy like that. You can either excise him and shun him, which I don’t think is the best-recommended strategy. Or you can tell him to knock it off and bring himself back into the fold,” he added.

Scaramucci then turned his attention to Michael Wolff, whose explosive book about Donald Trump’s campaign and first months in the White House has dominated cable news conversation over the past two days. 

“What’s happening is that book is being lifted — all the great juicy excerpts are being lifted to promote the book — but a lot of it is nonsense,” Mooch said. “Michael Wolff, in many ways, wrote a nonsensical book.”

“He’s trying to say the president didn’t want to win the American presidency? He’s trying to say that we all thought he was going to lose… That is a bunch of total and complete nonsense… How about the night that the president flew from Pennsylvania to Michigan and got to Michigan at 12:50 in the morning, 24 hours before the election was over. He was putting everything on the field to win the presidency.”

“This guy is a purely unattractive human being,” Mooch added about Wolff.

“You’re talking about his looks?” Ruhle asked. 

“No! Intellectually,” Mooch replied. “He’s an unattractive human being — intellectually. And he should knock it off himself … You see, I got you there because you stepped in about the looks. I said he is unattractive — intellectually.”

“The president is way more intellectually attractive to me than Michael Wolff,” the 53-year-old former Fox Business host added later.

 

Scaramucci took to Twitter after the interview, describing his July description of Bannon as “off-putting” but standing by the sentiment. 

 

Yes, I used an off-putting metaphor in private type conversation. I’ve owned that mistake 1000x over. But the truth about Steve – the internecine leaking & self-aggrandizement – is now plain for all to see. @realDonaldTrump was architect of his own victory. Time to come together. https://t.co/javdrhfg54

— Anthony Scaramucci (@Scaramucci) January 4, 2018

The White House and some people quoted in the book have criticized book’s accuracy. Wolff’s book is set to be released next Tuesday. 

The buzz has propelled “Fire and Fury” to the top spot on Amazon’s book sales rankings.