Anthony Scaramucci’s tenure in the Trump White House proved memorable, albeit in the same ways that the Deliverance rape scene did. It was short, painful, and traumatizing.
President Donald Trump fired Anthony Scarmucci on Monday before his communications director could fire everyone else that works for the president on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.
“O.K., I’m going to fire every one of them,” Scaramucci vowed of his communications team to reporter Ryan Lizza in reaction to leaks, “and then you haven’t protected anybody, so the entire place will be fired over the next two weeks.”
Well, one notable member of the communications team received his walking papers. But the investment-banker-turned-politico did not do the firing.
The entertaining Anthony Scaramucci era ended much as it began. We couldn’t help but watch, even if through the gaps in our fingers.
Leakers damage a presidential administration because they undermine the overall effort to control messaging. In his zeal to silence the loose-tongued leakers, the loose-tongued Scaramucci damaged the administration’s communications efforts in a manner akin to the people he wished to fire. There is something Shakespearean in the irony even if there is something more Mario Puzo in the players.
Mooch called Reince Preibus “a fucking paranoid schizophrenic” who “cock blocked” him out of a job in the early days of the administration. “I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own cock,” he remarked to Lizza of the president’s chief strategist. “I’m not trying to build my own brand off the fucking strength of the President.”
He showed himself only slightly less tolerant of his co-workers who made headlines every day in a more nameless, faceless manner. He told Lizza, “I want to fucking kill all the leakers.”
How long before cowardly figures playing footsie with the press awoke to a horse head in their bed?
Internecine battles, which appear as a tic that Scaramucci, like some noted hill clans of Appalachia, can’t shake, plagued his personal life as well as his professional one. During his ten-day tenure, news hit that his wife had filed to end their three-year marriage. If Scaramucci left viewers feeling traumatized like Ned Beatty, he likely feels a little like Senator Jefferson Smith, beleaguered and out of his league. His communications skills left something to be desired (a bad trait, one surmises, for a communications director). But at least Mooch’s motives seemed pure. He wanted to root out those loathsome leakers. Instead, with the help of their friends in the Fourth Estate, Mooch got the boot.
And therein lies a cautionary tale. Before you clean the stables, clean your own mouth.
Mooch, we hardly knew ye.