The White House mess

New White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci hasn’t been on the job a week yet and he has already brought the degradation of the Trump White House to a new low. For some reason that is not apparent to me, on Wednesday night he called on New Yorker correspondent Ryan Lizza to unload on his White House colleagues Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon. Lizza’s article on the call is posted online here.

Scaramucci undertook a vulgar rant of the kind that might be explained by inebriation, but it appears that Scaramucci was only angry. He is an angry guy. He is angry about leaks emanating from the White House. He doesn’t like his Priebus or Bannon. And he draws on a deep well of vulgarity to express his anger and disaffection.

I wondered why Scaramucci would call Lizza to let him work a story like this one. The New Yorker is a diehard opponent of President Trump. When it comes to politics, it is just another brick in the wall of the mainstream media. Why not reach out to us or another conservative outlet? We call them as we see them and we support the administration’s objectives most of the time.

There is a reason that Scaramucci called Lizza, but it not a good one. It supports the inebriation hypothesis. Scaramucci had recently received a leak from the Trump White House. Scaramucci called Lizza to find out who leaked the item Lizza had written about. He apparently thought Lizza would tell him.

None of this reflects well on Scaramucci (or on President Trump). Scaramucci needs to take inventory of what went wrong here. In his most recent tweet (below), however, he blames Lizza when he ought to be looking in the mirror.

Lizza credits Scaramucci’s motives. He writes: “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.”

Well, here’s hoping.

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