Customarily, when you are in the first couple of weeks of a new job,
it’s best to learn the names of the people around you, absorb the
rudiments of your new workplace, maybe figure out the lunch situation.
This was clearly not the way of Anthony Scaramucci, the new communications director for the Trump White House. The Mooch is a man in
a hurry. But while he looks to most like someone racing into a wall, he
is, to his patron, doing precisely what is required.
Within moments of arrival, Scaramucci was declaring his everlasting
fealty to the President (“I love the President”), erasing the digital
evidence of his previous contempt for the President (“an inherited money
dude from Queens County”), and comparing his relationship with Reince
Priebus, the White House chief of staff, to that of Cain and Abel, the
killer and the killed. And then, the other night, he called Ryan Lizza,
of The New Yorker. First, Scaramucci tried in vain to unearth the
source who revealed that he had dined at the White House, and wrongly
presumed it was Priebus. He then went on an obscene tirade about
Priebus’s mental stability, Steve Bannon’s dorsal flexibility, and, most
alarming of all, his intention to “fucking kill all the leakers” by
employing the capacities, human and technological, of the Department of
Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
“O.K., the Mooch showed up a week ago,” Scaramucci told Lizza. “This is
going to get cleaned up very shortly, O.K.? Because I nailed these guys.
I’ve got digital fingerprints on everything they’ve done through the
F.B.I. and the fucking Department of Justice.” He then ended the nearly
nine-minute colloquy by saying, “Yeah, let me go, though, because I’ve
gotta start tweeting some shit to make this guy”—meaning
Priebus—“crazy.”
The reaction to all this was predictable. It roiled, yet again, the
sense of vertigo that has accompanied the Trump era. And there were
laughs all around, can-you-top-this jokes on Twitter, gleeful one-liners
on late-night television, grave pronouncements on the morning shows. And
yet the reaction that matters most was that of Scaramucci’s patron, the
President of the United States. Mike Allen, the co-founder of the Web
site Axios, wrote, “We’re told the President loved the Mooch quotes.”
Of course he did. After all, Scaramucci was, in language and in manner,
channelling Trump himself. What about Scaramucci’s rant could possibly
have offended Trump’s sense of propriety, dignity, or politics? As so
many audiotapes, tweets, interviews, and speeches have made clear, Trump
has no compunction about treating people, even his most self-abnegating
loyalists, as vassals; he speaks in the language of obscenity and
contempt. What previous President could have delivered an
oration so filled with political bile that his host, the Boy Scouts of
America, would find it necessary to apologize to anyone who might have
been offended? He is unique.
Scaramucci, who was endorsed by Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, seems to
have been installed to carry out Trump’s form of personnel
management—to help demean and get rid of retainers who have proved
disappointing or threatening to his interests. Sean Spicer. Reince
Priebus. Steve Bannon. Jeff Sessions. And, ultimately, Robert Mueller.
In other words, the Mooch matters because the Mooch helps to clarify
what matters most to the President and his family. What matters most is
Trump’s grip on his base voters and his survival in office. Everything
else—a sane health-care policy, the dignity of the transgender people
who have volunteered to serve their country, a rational environmental
policy, a foreign policy that serves basic democratic values, rule of
law—is of tertiary interest.
Trump’s focus is not impossible to divine. He is increasingly anxious
that Mueller and congressional investigators are exploring the details
of his business transactions and financial holdings, and how they might
have exposed him to being targeted by the Russian government.
In the meantime, Trump’s capacity to demean and diminish everyone in his
proximity continues apace. H. R. McMaster, the national-security
adviser, is said to have an increasingly rocky relationship with the
President, and to have been on the receiving end of his contempt;
Secretary of Defense James Mattis was informed of the ban on transgender
soldiers merely as a courtesy; Secretary of State Rex Tillerson finds
himself in a turf battle with Trump’s son-in-law, who believes himself capable
of untold diplomatic achievements. How long can these people last? Priebus,
Bannon—if they are swept away, do not expect them to be replaced by
models of probity.
Last week, while Trump was battling to repeal Obamacare, Scaramucci told CBS, “I don’t know if he’s going to get what he wants next week, but he’s going to get what he wants eventually, because this guy always gets
what he wants. O.K.?” Scaramucci matters because he has divined what
Donald Trump wants, and he is speaking in his language. Last night, John
McCain and many others refused to be cowed or intimidated. They acted in
favor of the most elemental notion of rationality and principle. Who
else will follow?
More: David Remnick and Ryan Lizza listen back to audio of the phone call from Anthony Scaramucci.