By Moira Warburton
TORONTO (Reuters) - Anthony Scaramucci, financial investor and short-lived communications director for U.S. President Donald Trump, said on Friday that he was raising money to prevent his former boss from being re-elected.
In an interview with Reuters in Toronto, Scaramucci discussed his past support for the president and the chance of another Republican running a successful campaign to unseat Trump in a primary nominating contest, which he believes is the most likely outcome.
"There's no question. I'm raising PAC money," he said, referring to political action committees that help raise funds for candidates. "He's a very, very bad person, and he needs to be removed."
Trump's ex-communications director lasted just 11 days in the job, before he was fired as a result of an expletive-laden on-record conversation with a New Yorker reporter in which Scaramucci lambasted other senior White House staffers.
The past two weeks have seen him engage in a bitter and highly public war of words with his former boss, as the two exchanged insults on Twitter and in media interviews - a war which Scaramucci says is "just getting started. I will cross-sectionally dismantle him."
He declined to say whether the PAC money would go towards supporting Democrats, insisting that Trump will not be the Republican candidate on the 2020 ballot. Scaramucci said he will show up in person to campaign against Trump's re-election.
"I'm going to be on the street in swing states talking to suburban women about this person and the danger that this person presents to their children," Scaramucci said.
His previous support for the president was due to "accepting levels of gaslighting (psychological manipulation) that I should not have been accepting," he said.
"Think like a patriot. We have to remove him from power," Scaramucci said, adding that the president had "early stage fascism."
Trump, for his part, has turned on his former employee, calling Scaramucci a "highly unstable nut job," a "dope" and "a mental wreck" on Twitter.
(Reporting by Moira Warburton, Editing by Steve Scherer and Rosalba O'Brien)