Farewell, Mooch – and congratulations, Trump fans: you got your ‘reality show’ White House
Just hours after Trump pulled in John Kelly as his new White House Chief of Staff, guess who got voted off the island?
President Trump on Monday removed Anthony Scaramucci from his position as communications director, the White House announced, ousting him just days after Mr. Scaramucci unloaded a crude verbal tirade against other senior members of the president’s senior staff.
“Anthony Scaramucci will be leaving his role as White House Communications Director,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said in a statement. “Mr. Scaramucci felt it was best to give Chief of Staff John Kelly a clean slate and the ability to build his own team. We wish him all the best.”
Translation: “Scaramucci has been tossed out the front gate onto his tochas. Mr. Kelly felt it was best to get the foul-mouthed bozo off the premises to feign a new beginning and build a façade of near-competence. Good riddance to the vulgar little troll.”
Mr. Scaramucci’s abrupt removal came just 10 days after the wealthy New York financier was brought on to the West Wing staff, a move that convulsed an already chaotic White House and led to the departures of Sean Spicer, the former press secretary, and Reince Priebus, the president’s first chief of staff.
Trump is making America great again – for comedians, naysayers, and lovers of the media sideshow:
The White House has devolved over the past six months into a hotbed of intrigue, innuendo and boulder-sized rumors seemingly more appropriate for tabloid newspapers than the annals of history.
With various administration officials publicly attacking each other, President Donald Trump and his team have seen their dirty laundry thrown around Washington and the world, with few policy accomplishments to show for all their drama.
From alleged divorces and mistresses to backroom and overt backstabbing in the newspapers, here are just some of the scandals that have plagued the White House and made their way to the headlines in recent months.
The most recent feud involves former White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and new White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci. Priebus, who was replaced by Homeland Security chief John Kelly on July 28, had been blocking Scaramucci from joining the staff for months. But with the administration struggling to form a cohesive message and failing to spin any of the president’s tweets, former press secretary Sean Spicer, who came over from the Republican National Committee and is close with Priebus, resigned after Trump decided Scaramucci is what the press office needed.
In one week, Scaramucci went from claiming he and Priebus were like “brothers” to outright bludgeoning him in the press. The former hedge fund manager told The New Yorker last week that Priebus was a paranoid schizophrenic and a “paranoiac.” He added, in different words, that Trump’s chief political strategist, Steve Bannon, liked to perform fellatio on himself. A report later surfaced in The Huffington Post that alleged Priebus had warned Trump not to bring on Scaramucci because of his financial links to China.
That led to a friend of Scaramucci’s, Arthur Schwartz, accusing Priebus of leaking the story to the Huff Post and threatening to reveal information about Priebus’s alleged mistress. He later walked back his threat and apologized.
Also, an unverified story surfaced in the New York Post’s Page Six last week that Scaramucci’s wife had filed for divorce, citing her frustrations over his “naked ambition” to get close to Trump’s White House.
And a growing number of people surrounding “The Mooch” and his soon-to-be-ex-wife are scrambling to tamp down the mess:
[T]he Trump-Scaramucci political union did not cause [Scaramucci’s wife Deidre] Ball to file for divorce in Nassau County on July 6 — at least according to Jill Stone, who is representing Ms. Ball in the divorce.
“It has nothing to do with Trump,” Ms. Stone said.
Ms. Stone, who may have been invoking a bit of wishful thinking when it comes to this White House, added: “Honestly, it’s a private matter, and she’s hoping that it just dies down.” … She added that reports of a casual text message sent from Mr. Scaramucci — “Congratulations, I’ll pray for our child” — to Ms. Ball after she gave birth were false.
Meanwhile, Trump’s tabloid presidency is always put in a positive light by the nation’s most notorious tabloid weekly. Jonathan Swan draws a parallel with the children’s book “Harold and the Purple Crayon,” in which a boy creates his own world using the eponymous writing implement:
I thought of it while reading the July 24 edition of the National Enquirer:
- Here’s the Enquirer‘s take on Trump’s handling of the North Korean missile crisis: “Faced with nuclear doomsday like no president since John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Donald Trump has taken bold and extraordinary steps to ensure America survives the siege and emerges with total victory!”
- The Enquirer also says “Trump has both China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin in the palm of his hand.”
Why this matters: I’ve been paying close attention to the tabloid since the campaign because David Pecker, the publisher, is an old friend of Trump’s and often channels his worldview. The magazine draws reality as the President would like to bend it. It is Trump’s purple crayon.
So congratulations to all the deplorables who voted for Trump. You got your media spectacle Oval Office and a big media bubble to go with it. And now, if you will excuse the rest of us, we are due back in the reality-based world.
