White House director quite a talker

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This article was published 31/07/2017 (3011 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

One can’t help wondering if, based on its most controversial recent hire, the Trump administration thinks it’s staffing the White House or casting a reality-TV show.

If the arrival last week of newly appointed White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci was intended to provoke and shock, then U.S. President Donald Trump may finally have found someplace (or, in this case, someone) upon which to hang a “Mission Accomplished” banner.

Mr. Scaramucci, a former hedge-fund promoter who has been one of the president’s most vocal defenders on American television’s political talk-show circuit, seems to have been selected for his new job on the basis of his aggressively confrontational TV demeanour. His first meeting with the White House press corps involved introductions and pleasantries, a few sharp jokes and a promise from Mr. Scaramucci that he intends to repair the fractious relationship that has developed between the administration and media during Mr. Trump’s first seven months in office.

There was even a blown kiss, aimed mischievously in the assembled reporters’ direction, at the end of the new appointee’s first press briefing.

What happened next, of course, was the sort of conflict-driven reality-TV stuff the producers of Survivor or Big Brother or, for that matter, The Apprentice could scarcely hope to achieve.

On Wednesday, Mr. Scaramucci — apparently upset by a tweeted media report involving leaked details of his dinner at the White House with the president, the first lady and a few others, including Trump-defending Fox News personality Sean Hannity — contacted the reporter from The New Yorker who shared it and unleashed a profane rant that could best be described as unhinged.

After demanding the identity of the information’s leaker, telling reporter Ryan Lizza it was his duty as an “American patriot” to disclose it, Mr. Scaramucci — who, it should be noted, seems to enjoy referring to himself in the third person as “the Mooch” — spent several minutes disparaging White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, whom he suggested might be the source of the leak and labelled as a “paranoid schizophrenic” and, more inventively, a “paranoiac.” (Mr. Priebus resigned late Thursday, replaced by Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly).

Mr. Scaramucci also vented to the reporter about chief presidential adviser Steve Bannon, whom he described in vulgar, sexually explicit and decidedly unflattering terms.

Mr. Scaramucci expressed an intention to fire the entire White House communications staff, apparently thinking this threat might cause Mr. Lizza to be sufficiently gripped by guilt to reveal his informant’s name, and then claimed to have connections at the FBI and Department of Justice that had provided him with “digital fingerprint” information that had already exposed alleged leakers within the administration.

“What I want to do is I want to (expletive) kill all the leakers and I want to get the president’s agenda on track,” was how the communications director communicated his feelings.

If Mr. Trump was unhappy about his new hire’s first public blowup, he offered no outward indications. Of course, POTUS was rather busy being displeased about last week’s crashing failure of his party’s long-promised repeal of the Obama-introduced Affordable Care Act.

Mr. Scaramucci, for his part, excused himself for his meltdown by observing that, as a New Yorker, he occasionally uses “colourful language.” As for the unsolicited call to Mr. Lizza and the unflattering story it produced, Mr. Scaramucci offered this tweet in response: “I made a mistake in trusting a reporter. It won’t happen again.”

The pleasantries have ended. The blown kiss has, no doubt, been rescinded. And America’s disturbing reality-TV show continues.