Anthony Scaramucci, a New York investment banker, became the shortest-serving Communications Director in the history of the White House last week. He served exactly six days, starting July 25. The shortest career in this position until then was of Jack Koehler, who had to quit the Reagan administration 11 days after he joined, when news broke that he had belonged to a Nazi youth group as a child. Mr. Scaramucci made and continues to make headlines, by being the story himself. In the process, he also pushed the boundaries of American journalism. Sans the expletives, which get masked out by asterisks in news reports, there would have been limited communication left in the statements from him.
President Donald Trump has said he is his own best communications manager. An uncharitable commentator once said Mr. Trump can say all that he knows about anything in 140 characters. Mr. Scaramucci shares the President’s penchant for unkind words and his brief tenure was full of them.
Two of his statements, however, stand out for their candour, or stupidity, depending on which side you are hearing them from. “As you know from the Italian expression, the fish stinks from the head down... I can tell you two fish that don’t stink. That’s me and the President,” he told CNN, even before he formally joined the White House. Launching a tirade against senior colleagues in the White House, and threatening to sack all members of the communications team, Mr. Scaramucci declared: “When the iceberg hits the boat, the rats start flying up from steerage. The water comes in steerage.” Critics of the President have said such things about the current White House, but nobody may have said it with such precision and lethality. A White House that stinks from the head. A White House that is like a sinking ship.
Mr. Scaramucci’s flamboyant entry into the White House and his ignominious exit possibly demonstrate the dilemma for people who work for Mr. Trump. He wanted to get rid of former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus because he found him to be not assertive enough. On the other hand, Mr. Scaramucci fell out of favour for being too assertive. Mr. Scaramucci’s statements, in which he claimed unqualified proximity with the ‘first family’, were not helpful either. “Last night, we were having dinner. I told his wife, I looked over to the First Lady and I said, ‘I forgot how much fun I used to have when I hung out with him on the campaign trail,” he told a day before joining the job.
Lying low
Stephen Bannon, the White House Chief Strategist, figured this key trait of the President early on, and has been lying low. Mr. Trump, who counts the number of times he has been on the Time cover, was peeved to find Mr. Bannon on the cover in February and did not hide his displeasure.
In the coming weeks, he described Mr. Bannon as “a guy who works for me”. In one interview, he dismissed Mr. Bannon’s role in his election campaign. “He was not involved in my campaign until very late... I’m my own strategist and it wasn’t like I was going to change strategies because I was facing crooked Hillary.” Reports had indicated that Mr. Bannon was losing out in the White House power struggle, but it turns out that it is too early to write him off.
The nationalist faction in the White House that aligns with Mr. Bannon is now playing out as misery for National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, a favourite of the Republican establishment. Lt. Gen. McMaster scored a victory last week when he fired Eza Cohen-Watnick, a protégé of Mr. Bannon in the National Security Council. The NSA’s future remains a topic of speculation among White House gossips.
(Varghese K. George works for The Hindu and is based in Washington)
