The Mooch’s defection could hurt Trump come 2020
It’s Wednesday and already this week the President of the United States has cancelled a meeting with the Danish Prime Minister because of her refusal to sell him Greenland. He has also accused American Jews of “disloyalty” if they vote for Democrats, thereby equating Jewishness to the nation of Israel, which, of course, is very much the antisemitic trope in vogue at the moment. Meanwhile, under pressure from the NRA, Trump has decided not to support universal background checks for gun owners, repeating a pattern of capitulation that is now so established it would be laughable if it weren’t for the many tens of thousands killed by guns under this administration. And if that weren’t enough to chew on, he’s now grumbling about the word “recession”, suggesting that analysis of the US economy is nothing more than media spin meant to make him look bad.
Under Obama, Bush, or Clinton, these would be stories worthy of debate. Is the President fixated on Greenland for strategic reasons, for the mineral rights, or simply a place to send illegal immigrants in his next hairbrained scheme? These are the Trump years so it’s pointless to dwell too deeply. They’ll be replaced by something equally ridiculous in the coming days. What they do for the moment, however, is distract from some properly bad news for this president.
If you’ve been looking for significant cracks to appear in the Trump presidency, the recent defection of Anthony Scaramucci is worth noting. The former White House communications director has written a short but punchy piece for The Washington Post in which he finally, appropriately, and perhaps predictably, admits to being wrong about Trump.
As an act of contrition, it’s entirely believable. Anthony Scaramucci has always been one of Trump’s better advocates on US cable networks because he is a gifted communicator who understands the power of nuance. By vocalising Trump’s flaws, he always made a better case for the administration’s accomplishments. Trump might well have preferred the shameless advocacy of Sarah Huckabee Sanders (or, certainly, the wild-eyed idolatry of Stephen Miller) but Scaramucci was arguably the best he had, albeit only for eleven days in 2017. His brief stint in the White House came to an end after Scaramucci gave an interview to a reporter, Ryan Lizza, at The New Yorker. It was filled with blunt, often vulgar, but generally astute assessments of the White House. Read it in the voice of Tony from The Sopranos and with a suitable tug of your underwear and you’ll have a sense of why Scaramucci has proved so effective. He called Reince Priebus “a fucking paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac” and, most memorably, implied that Steve Bannon was capable of self-fellating.
Whilst he was never going to win friends by threatening to “fire every one of them […] over the next two weeks”, Scaramucci did, at least, believe the President wanted to him to fix a White House that was systemically broken. He was wrong. As General John Kelly later discovered, nobody could right a ship that the President prefers listing.
Scaramucci’s interview led to his sacking yet he remained loyal to the President, fulfilling in private life the role he should have been carrying out inside the Oval Office. Yet his fealty simply wasn’t the same as we saw with others. When Omarosa Manigault Newman wrote her insider’s account of Trump’s White House, she claimed that she was offered a retainer to remain on friendly terms with the administration, ostensibly working for his election campaign. Perhaps it explains why surprisingly few insiders have been publicly critical of Trump. Scaramucci has been the rare exception. He was never unbridled in his admiration, notably critical of Trump around the time of his Charlottesville response, yet, even at his most damning, he would still couch his criticism in the language of advising the President about his messaging.
That is no longer the case. The former White House communications director now says that the “final straw” was the comment Trump made about the four congresswomen, telling them to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came.” Scaramucci admits that he had believed “the positive results achieved during his time in office, especially concerning the economy, outweighed the corrosive effects of [Trump’s] unpresidential behavior.” Now, he concludes that the President’s “lack of tact in trade negotiations with China now threatens to cause a recession”.
That is particularly damning, coming from a man who prides himself on understanding markets. Whether for moral reasons or an instinctive understanding of where Trump’s economic policies are heading, Scaramucci’s defection is clearly bad for Trump. He has called Scaramucci a “highly unstable nut job” but that “nut job” is now intent on preventing Trump’s re-election, even launching his own PAC to fund advertising to that end.
Often, the case against something is made most strongly by former advocates. “Eventually he turns on everyone and soon it will be you and then the entire country,” tweeted Scaramucci, as if speaking to the Republican Party still shackled to this President as he careers towards the cliff edge of 2020. Trump has good reason to be worried. Scaramucci might not do enough to encourage others to detach themselves but he will fill network news with the kind of invective that even Democrats have failed to generate. There is a reason why Scaramucci is affectionately called “The Mooch”. Like Trump, he is a compelling figure you love to hate or, perhaps more accurately, hate to love. The President is learning to do the former.