The Anthony Scaramucci Era Will Be Freakish, Embarrassing and All Too Short

By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

29 July 17

Glad-handing hedge-funder turned White House press chief has reignited the comic potential of Trump presidency. It's too bad he won't last past the end of this sentence

already miss Anthony Scaramucci. Of course, he hasn't officially been fired yet (checks Twitter), or committed suicide by jumping into boiling steak fat at his Gotti-esque Hunt and Fish Club restaurant in Manhattan (checks Twitter again). But it sure seems like he's not long for this earth. Even by Trumpian standards, has any federal official had a more disastrous rollout?

The big headline this morning is that the new White House Communications Director got upset and decided to call Ryan Lizza at the New Yorker and go full-on Glengarry Glen Ross without asking for background or off-the-record privileges. 

In the call, Scaramucci hounded Lizza to give up his sources, threatened to fire the entire White House communications staff, and gave what Saddam Hussein would have described as the mother of all quotes in an effort to bash fellow backstabbing Trump insider Steve Bannon:

"I'm not Steve Bannon, I'm not trying to suck my own cock," he said. "I'm not trying to build my own brand off the fucking strength of the President."

Bannon declined to comment on Scaramucci's charge that he sucks his own cock.

It's hard to believe that it was barely a week ago, on July 21st, that Scaramucci was given Trump's top press job. It feels like it was millions of years in the past, back when Africa was still connected to Brazil, and Sean Spicer was still our idea of a national embarrassment. This is the way time works in the Trump era. Days seem like centuries, and weeks seem like millennia.

In that short period of time, Scaramucci has already accomplished a lot:

• He began by announcing cheerfully that he wanted a "fresh start" with the media, pledged an "era of new good feeling," and promised to "create a positive mojo." As he was doing this, the press was seizing on the fact that he was deleting old tweets that supported gun control, called climate science "irrefutable," and described Trump as an "odd guy… smart with no judgment." One tweet even committed ultimate Trump-heresy by saying of Hillary Clinton, "She is incredibly competent." Even if the media had wanted to give the guy a break, he all but forced them to beat him like a mule minutes into his appointment.


• While speaking of fellow White House spokesperson and new department subordinate Sarah Huckabee Sanders, “Mooch” delivered a line that read like a Mad Men screen test: "Sarah, if you're watching, I loved the hair and makeup person that we had on Friday." By the next day he was like a man with a sackful of ants turned over on his head, so many were the news stories denouncing him as sexist.


• He got caught talking out of school in between TV segments: "In the back of my mind I have to call on CNN and send a message to [CNN President Jeff] Zucker that we are back in business." He added that Zucker wasn't "getting a placement fee," but had "helped me get the job by hitting those guys," referring to three CNN reporters who had to resign over a botched report claiming Scaramucci had inappropriate contact with Russians.


• He appeared to confirm a Washington Post report his boss Donald Trump had called "fake news." Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow had told ABC that "pardons are not being discussed and are not on the table," but Scaramucci told Fox News Sunday that, hell yes, he'd discussed pardons with the chief: "I'm in the Oval Office with the president last week, we're talking about that," he said. "He brought that up, he said but he doesn't have to be pardoned there's nobody around him that has to be pardoned he was just making the statement about the power of pardon."

In the space of a week, Trump's new press expert demonstrated that he a) didn't know how to hold off-the-record conversations b) didn't understand that cameras and microphones keep rolling even when the red light is off and c) doesn't bother to check the other public statements made by administration officials before he makes statements of his own. An alien crashed on earth and given a two-minute tutorial on dealing with reporters would have done a better job.

On the other hand, it sort of worked! The least successful Trump administration officials to date have been the ones who have labored in public to act like real presidential aides. Scaramucci on the other hand is like Trump himself: ridiculous, ham-brained, unapologetic, disdainful of Washington pieties, and bursting with reasonless confidence.

Scaramucci has been hovering around the Trump administration for a while, but until now didn't have a prominent role. The reason for that is hilarious: he was considered too ridiculous and uncouth for public service by the other swamp-monster members of the Trump administration.

His hire horrified even hardened mutants like Bannon ("Over my dead body will you get this job!" Bannon is reported to have yelped, when he heard the Scaramucci news). Spicer, who for months had effortlessly gulped down Trump administration lies like a vulture guzzling battery acid, resigned in protest at Scaramucci's arrival (an "unusual choice of hills to die on" was the New Yorker's comment).

Priebus, who kept his nerve even as the loathsome Bannon groped his inner knee in public, reportedly flipped his lid at the news "Mooch" had been hired.

The conventional explanation for all of this outrage was that Beltway hacks were revolting against the arrival of a condescending Wall Street operator. As Scaramucci explained to New York magazine reporter Jessica Pressler in January:

"And the other thing I have learned about these people in Washington ... is they have no money. So what happens when they have no fucking money is they fight about what seat they are in and what the title is. Fucking congressmen act like that. They are fucking jackasses."

A hilarious and true observation! Mencken himself would have approved of Scaramucci's take on Washington's jobholder class. Of course, the rest of that article included Scaramucci laying a Seventies come-on on Pressler at his garish Hunt and Fish club restaurant:

"How old are you?" he asked. "You look good. No lines on your face. What are you, a Sagittarius?"

Scaramucci is a hedge funder – a fund-of-funds guy to be exact, who charges modestly massive fees to funnel your money to other hedge-funders who do the actual thinking.

He is said to be good at his job, in a field that is mostly about mesmerizing high net worth individuals with cannon-bursts of shmaltzy bullshit just long enough to get them to write huge checks. He is a yammerer and a glad-hander and apparently also a guy who genuinely likes talking to reporters, or at least he did before he got this job.

He supposedly got the White House post for the most important reason that exists in the Trump administration: the president likes the way he looks on TV. This was as opposed to 45's take on Sean Spicer's famously ill-fitting attire: "Doesn't the guy own a dark suit?"

Making Scaramucci Communications Director because he dresses like the owner of a Lamborghini dealership fit like a glove with the Trump ethos. After spending his early presidency stuck with a standard-issue Beltway prevaricator as his chief public spokesperson (Spicer was just a year removed from denouncing Trump on behalf of the RNC for his remarks about John McCain), Trump was getting back to his roots.

The Communications Director job in the Trump administration is a no-win job, because the real Communications Director is Trump's Twitter feed. The job that Scaramucci technically occupies is a thankless and redundant position that involves standing before reporters and reconciling avalanches of already-circulated lies, contradictions, and insulting/ignorant statements.

Even a genius of the highest order couldn't make this work. Of course, Trump hasn't had geniuses available to him. The fourth-rate minds he has instead had in his employ just started raging trash-fires whenever they tried to logically explain Trump's utterances.

They gave us statements like Kellyanne Conway's "alternative facts," or Katrina Pierson's bit about how Trump wasn't changing his position on immigration, but rather "changing the words that he is saying."

An actual smart person given this job wouldn't bother with any of this. He or she would simply take the podium each day and say, "What can I say? The president said that shit." Then just no-comment everything but schedules and staff announcements. Over time, reporters might actually respect the work. Probably not, but maybe.

Scaramucci represents a third strategy, one that's similar to Trump's own campaign tactics. That is, don't ever react to the news or attempt to explain it, but continually stay ahead of it by making new news of your own.

There are thousands of reporters in America, and if Scaramucci has the stomach for it, he should call a new one every night and just rant his brains out. It might not save America from being the laughingstock of the planet – that ship has sailed for us – but at least it will be entertaining. At this point in our relationship with the Trump administration, we have to take what little enjoyments we can. And remember, the next press chief could be Alex Jones.

Long live Mooch (checks Twitter). 

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders addresses questions about rising staff tensions. Watch here.

Everything Trump Does Must Be Viewed Through This Single Lens

By Frank Rich, New York Magazine

29 July 17

Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. Today: Trump’s attacks on his attorney general, the Senate’s health-care vote, and new messaging from the Democrats.

ew White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci pledged to “fire everybody” to stop leaks to the press and almost immediately threatened Reince Priebus, implicitly accusing him of a felony. Meanwhile, the rift between Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions suggests Sessions may be out before long. What does Trump hope to gain from the purges in the highest reaches of his administration?

At this juncture the priorities of Donald Trump have winnowed down to a single agenda item: saving himself and his family from legal culpability for their campaign interactions with the Russians and their efforts to cover up those transactions ever since. Almost everything this president does must be viewed through this single lens. If you do so, you’ll find his actions usually make sense.

This overriding motive explains both this week’s orchestrated staff turmoil in the White House and the simultaneous assaults on the civil rights of transgender American troops and all LBGTQ employees in the private workplace. The primary purpose of all of it is to distract from investigations into potential Trump-family criminality and to galvanize a base that Trump believes will protect him against the rule of law. If you have already forgotten Jared Kushner’s loophole-strewn profession of innocence from Monday, that’s the point.

It would seem particularly counterintuitive for Trump to go after the like-minded Sessions, who was not only the first sitting senator to endorse his campaign but whose Department of Justice has just filed the court papers seeking to cripple federal civil-rights law to roll back protections for employees based on sexual orientation. Sessions also shares Trump’s xenophobic opposition to immigration and his antediluvian approach to criminal justice. What’s more, Session’s political allies are Trump’s allies — from conservative Republican senators like Richard Shelby and Orrin Hatch to media cheerleaders like Breitbart and Tucker Carlson. But all of that is negated by Trump’s sole priority of derailing the Russian investigation. Trump assumed that Sessions would fix the investigation on his behalf, much as he expected corruptible local officials to fix his legal violations as a real-estate developer, and was appalled that Sessions’s recusal made that impossible. If Sessions survives, it will be only because Trump finds an easier way to achieve his No. 1 goal, the firing of Robert Mueller. That’s bound to happen no matter who stands in the way.

As for Scaramucci, he may profess to know and love Trump, but clearly he doesn’t understand him. If he did, he’d know that his days are already as numbered as Sean Spicer’s were. Trump is a diva who doesn’t like anyone else to share his spotlight, and Scaramucci is a drama queen who seems determined to pull focus from his boss at any opportunity. He just can’t help himself. Scaramucci wasn’t even supposed to start officially as White House director of communications until August 15 and already he is overexposed. His inevitable sadomasochistic humiliation at the hands of the man he “loves” will be nothing if not entertaining to watch.

Meanwhile, the departures and purges, this White House’s Nights of the Short Knives, will continue. The secretaries of Defense and State, Jim Mattis and Rex Tillerson, often considered the adults in the cabinet, are now castrated, serving as at best bystanders to major policy decisions. (Mattis, typically, was given only one day’s notice about the transgender troop ban.) The only Trump appointees whose jobs are safe are Ivanka and Jared. Trump is in the bunker now. The president no doubt feels that he could pull out a gun and shoot his attorney general on Fifth Avenue, and his base would still remain loyal. I have no doubt he’s correct: This is the same quarter of the populace that believes it makes sense to endanger themselves by replacing Obamacare with a wish and a prayer — the same crowd that believes transgender patriots serving their country in uniform, not Russians who hacked our election, are a clear and present danger to American security.

Following his dramatic return to the Senate after brain surgery in Arizona, John McCain delivered a fiery lecture about the “obligation to work collectively” and voted to move the Obamacare repeal process forward. Will the rest of the health-care debate be worth the trip?

If, as seems likely, the farcical GOP attempt to repeal and replace Obamacare ends in tragedy for millions of Americans deprived of health care, McCain’s trip to Washington will be a sad endnote to his career. With the notable exception of Donald Trump, most Americans deeply admire McCain’s courage as a prisoner of war and wish him a victory in his tough battle against cancer. Few can disagree with his speech this week chastising our bankrupt and inert Congress. But his actual vote in the Senate — to bail out Trump and Mitch McConnell in their desperate last-ditch bid to steamroll a cruel bill — directly contradicted his rhetorical sentiments that the Senate address health care through “regular order” in an open, bipartisan process instead of “behind closed doors.” McCain’s heroism in Vietnam exemplifies the maxim that actions speak louder than words. His vote this week in Washington belied his words, and were all too typical of his historic failure to stand up to Trump forcefully in the two years since he ridiculed McCain’s wartime service. That capitulation to the crazies on the right is not a recent aberration: It was, after all, his cynical choice to put Sarah Palin potentially within a heartbeat of the presidency almost a decade ago that prepared the ground for Trump.

Only 25 percent of Americans support the Republican health-care bill — whatever it is — according to a poll aggregation by the MIT political scientist Chris Warshaw. That 25 percent — i.e., the hard-core Trump base — includes many of the Americans most likely to be victimized by it. They will ignore the “fake news” telling them so and believe the president when he blames Obama and the Democrats for their medical indignities. But few others will buy Trump’s passing of that buck. The GOP has owned American health care from the moment Trump held that premature Rose Garden “Mission Accomplished” celebration of the passage of the House bill. The GOP will also own whatever comes next: the Senate’s “skinny repeal” or whatever bastard legislation may emerge from a compromise between House and Senate Republicans in conference. While it will be of little solace to those Americans who lose their insurance or find their premiums and deductibles skyrocketing, the price to be paid by Republicans on the ballot in 2018 will be commensurately catastrophic.

Earlier this week, Democratic leaders rolled out their “A Better Deal” agenda, an early effort to rebrand the party for 2018. What have they learned from the failures of last November?

Little, if anything. One of the biggest lessons that the Democrats should have learned from Trump’s victories over bland GOP opponents like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio as well as Hillary Clinton is that his off-the-rails fulminations, however offensive or dishonest, have rendered typically anodyne political “messaging” (the word itself is offensive) obsolete. The boilerplate cobbled together by consultants, focus groups, and party committees sounds like the cautious pandering it is. One can only imagine the high-level discussion that went into the too-clever-by-half rubric “A Better Deal,” which is as much a surrender to Trump’s “Art of the Deal” jargon as a jab at it and which sounds like a dime-store New Deal besides.

Reading Chuck Schumer’s explanation of what this deal is in his Times op-ed, one can see the game immediately: The “Better Deal” Democrats aren’t going to offer an encyclopedia of planks as Hillary did (there are only three); they are not going to bring up gender or social issues or name-check minorities in the Democratic coalition (as Hillary did); and they are going to sound some populist notes (as Bernie Sanders and Trump did). But it’s populism lite: There’s nothing in this “Better Deal” to suggest that Democratic Establishment leaders like Schumer are going to abandon the corporate and Wall Street elites who have defined the party’s economic profile since Bill Clinton turned the Treasury Department over to Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers — the cadre that most recently could be found paying Hillary Clinton those self-immolating speaking fees.

Nancy Pelosi was honest when she said “A Better Deal” was not intended as “a course correction” but “a presentation correction.” Yet even that isn’t entirely the case: Though Schumer describes the Democrats’ manifesto as offering “bold changes” and “a new vision for our party,” much of its overall tone and substance is same-old, overlapping with what Schumer proposed in the book he published before the 2008 campaign, Positively American: Winning Back the Middle-Class Majority One Family at a Time.

The recent Washington Post–ABC News poll finding that only 37 percent of Americans think that the Democratic Party “stands for something” — or, at best, “just stands against Trump” (52 percent) — rings true to me. The Democrats will inevitably rebound after Trump’s implosion as they did after Richard Nixon’s, but, as was the case in the short-lived Jimmy Carter interregnum of the 1970s, the party’s comeback will prove short-lived if there is not a blood transfusion of new leaders and genuinely “bold” ideas.