He channelled Priebus as he spoke
Ryan Lizza’s phone conversation with Scaramucci is a hot item.
Mooch called Lizza Wednesday night wanting to know who “leaked” the information that he was having dinner with Don and Melania plus Hannity and former Fox News executive Bill Shine, information which Lizza had tweeted.
“Who leaked that to you?” he asked. I said I couldn’t give him that information. He responded by threatening to fire the entire White House communications staff. “What I’m going to do is, I will eliminate everyone in the comms team and we’ll start over,” he said. I laughed, not sure if he really believed that such a threat would convince a journalist to reveal a source. He continued to press me and complain about the staff he’s inherited in his new job. “I ask these guys not to leak anything and they can’t help themselves,” he said. “You’re an American citizen, this is a major catastrophe for the American country. So I’m asking you as an American patriot to give me a sense of who leaked it.”
That’s some good professional press secretarying right there.
Meanwhile, several damaging stories about Scaramucci have appeared in the press, and he blamed Priebus for most of them. Now, he wanted to know whom I had been talking to about his dinner with the President. Scaramucci, who initiated the call, did not ask for the conversation to be off the record or on background.
“Is it an assistant to the President?” he asked. I again told him I couldn’t say. “O.K., I’m going to fire every one of them, and then you haven’t protected anybody, so the entire place will be fired over the next two weeks.”
He said that without having asked for the conversation to be off the record or on background. Smart guy.
“They’ll all be fired by me,” he said. “I fired one guy the other day. I have three to four people I’ll fire tomorrow. I’ll get to the person who leaked that to you. Reince Priebus—if you want to leak something—he’ll be asked to resign very shortly.” The issue, he said, was that he believed Priebus had been worried about the dinner because he hadn’t been invited. “Reince is a fucking paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac,” Scaramucci said. He channelled Priebus as he spoke: “ ‘Oh, Bill Shine is coming in. Let me leak the fucking thing and see if I can cock-block these people the way I cock-blocked Scaramucci for six months.’ ” (Priebus did not respond to a request for comment.)
This is the White House press secretary, remember.
“The swamp will not defeat him,” he said, breaking into the third person. “They’re trying to resist me, but it’s not going to work. I’ve done nothing wrong on my financial disclosures, so they’re going to have to go fuck themselves.”
Scaramucci also told me that, unlike other senior officials, he had no interest in media attention. “I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own cock,” he said, speaking of Trump’s chief strategist. “I’m not trying to build my own brand off the fucking strength of the President. I’m here to serve the country.” (Bannon declined to comment.)
Bannon declined to comment, but jokes about contortionist Bannon are proliferating as we speak.
I got the sense that Scaramucci’s campaign against leakers flows from his intense loyalty to Trump. Unlike other Trump advisers, I’ve never heard him say a bad word about the President. “What I want to do is I want to fucking kill all the leakers and I want to get the President’s agenda on track so we can succeed for the American people,” he told me.
Nothing strange about any of this. Not at all. Completely normal.
Christ, it’s like Joker’s crazed narration in the Arkham Batman games. I mean, it’s almost *exactly* like that.
And he just used the phrase “cock-blocked” and talked about another administration official sucking his own cock. So presidential, right? This is the sort of country we’ve sunk to, where the White House staff sounds like a bunch of schoolboys in the yard at recess trying to one up one another by saying the word cock.
The MRA subreddit has taken over the White House.
These idiots need to wrap their heads around the idea that other people have very different ideas of patriotism than they do. Dissent is patriotic. Doing their part in the teeth of White House resistance to offer some shred of transparency in government is patriotic. Exposing the criminality and gutter mentality of the creeps working there – elected and appointed – is patriotic.
Threatening the free press – not so much.
I think a little too much attention has been paid (not here at B&W, I mean in the media generally) to the profane nature of the comments. I’m not terribly bothered by that,* although the Mooch does seem to take it to a new level. (Rahm Emmanuel, Obama’s first Chief of Staff, reputedly was a notorious screamer and curser, though he usually had the good sense not to do so on the record.)
To me, it’s the fact that one senior WH aide is talking about another in such terms on the record, while the President just sits back and enjoys the fight like it’s just another boardroom scene on The Apprentice. That’s taking the whole “Team of Rivals” thing to preposterous levels, and it’s lousy leadership.
*In fact, I rather enjoyed the joke someone made on Twitter that “get real, Mooch — even Steve Bannon doesn’t want to suck Steve Bannon’s cock.”
Do you think we’ll ever return to the quaint notion that expertise and knowledge are assets and not liabilities?
Maybe the president or the press secretary or the secretary of education (or whoever!) should know how to perform the duties of the job.
Ben, I’m actually kind of optimistic that we will. I think that even some Trump supporters are fatigued with having to defend a lot of the nonsense that’s been generated from sheer incompetence and ignorance about the job and about policy. And certainly the conservatives who never liked Trump but have been holding their noses and supporting him are starting to get frustrated with Trump’s inability to get much done on the conservative agenda.
The notion that an inexperienced outsider needs to come in and “drain the swamp” is never going to go away entirely, because it seems to be deeply embedded in the American psyche, but I think enough of the shine may be off it that nobody’s going to mount a serious run as that kind of candidate in 2020 or even 2024.
@Jeff – they know that dissent is patriotic. They said so very loudly, and very frequently, when Obama was in office.
They just don’t understand that the same rules have to apply to everyone, equally. Rather, they think they’re the special fucking snowflakes who get to question everyone else, while never being questioned themselves.
I’d like to figure out if they’re arrogant, or blind, or shameless hypocrites. Or all 3?
Karellen – George Lakoff opines that understanding Republican voting comes down to regarding it as a moral choice, and that they’re coming at moral perspectives from an authoritarian stance. (The same thing would inform understanding most religious voters too [and yes, the overlap is massive], I suspect – Divine Command Theory specifically in the back of their heads for morality.)
Given that, they certainly won’t suppose that the rules apply equally to everyone: some people properly give orders, some people properly take them. Women, blacks, liberals, atheists are all in the business of taking orders and blame; men, whites, conservatives, Christians are all appropriately giving them, because they’re the boss and/or speaking for the Divine Boss.
They may, sometimes, offer lip-service to universality of moral and political principles, but don’t expect that to be applied consistently. (And yes, I do know that double-standards and hypocrisy can be found across the political spectrum – I’m just saying, on one side, it’s a structural tendency in addition to the personal failing it may be for anyone.)
That’s pretty much the same level as “We’re going to shoot one hostage every hour until you give in to our demands”.
Wasn’t Scaryspice busily slagging Trump off in a speech not so very long ago? ‘Un-American’ was one of the nicer things he called Trump, if memory serves. Or doesn’t that count because he he didn’t call Trump by name? Not that the target of his insults wasn’t obvious, and to pretend it wasn’t would be akin to me describing a large, grey, quadrapedal mammal with a prehensile trunk, ivory tusks, and huge ears, and have people deny I was referring to an African elephant.
Acolyte,
The Mooch was an enthusiastic Obama supporter in ’08, then Obama said something in a speech that wasn’t 100% effusive of our Wall Street overlords, and the Mooch’s fee-fees were hurt. So he backed Romney in ’12. In the 2016 campaign, he supported Walker, then Jeb, then Rubio, criticizing Trump the entire time. Now he’s Trump’s #1. That ought to tell you something of the measure of the man.
Yes, which makes the reporter’s claim about never hearing the human oil-slick say a word against the human(ish) citrus fruit so damned confusing.