A struggle for control
Scaramucci attacks Priebus on TV after telling writer he’d fire staff over leaks
of the West Wing breaks into the open as President Donald Trump’s new communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, lashes out at White House chief of staff Reince Priebus.
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump and his aides frequently complain about back-biting leaks from within the White House. But on Thursday, the infighting was out in the open, live on television.
The incoming communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, in a morning phone call broadcast on CNN, compared the West Wing to a fish that “stinks from the head down,” implying that White House chief of staff Reince Priebus is responsible for at least some of the leaks.
“There are people inside this administration who think it’s their job to save America from this president,” Scaramucci said.
Another Trump adviser, Kellyanne Conway, used a prison analogy for the broader backstabbing, telling Fox News that her White House colleagues were using “the press to shiv each other.”
Later, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders declined to come to Priebus’ defense and say whether Trump has full confidence in his chief of staff.
While the discord might suggest a new level of chaos in a White House with a reputation for it, the style is all Trump. As a businessman, he has a history of fostering rivalries among his employees.
“He always did sort of like competition, backstabbing, infighting kind of stuff,” said Barbara Res, who spent nearly two decades as a top executive in Trump’s real estate business. “He set people up to do that. He’d pick the winner and blame the loser,” she added.
As president, he hasn’t changed, Sanders told reporters: “The president likes that kind of competition and encourages it.”
The Priebus intrigue was amplified by Scaramucci on Twitter and in the CNN interview. He blamed Priebus for leaking Scaramucci’s personal financial disclosure forms — information that is publicly available — and suggested that Trump encouraged his attack on Priebus in a phone conversation the two men had right before Scaramucci dialed into CNN.
Later Thursday, New Yorker writer Ryan Lizza reported that Scaramucci, in a profanity-laden phone call to him Wednesday night, referred to Priebus as a “paranoid schizophrenic” who had blocked him from the White House for six months. He accused White House strategist Steve Bannon of seeking to “build (his) own brand off the (expletive) strength of the president,” and he claimed to have evidence from the FBI about who in the White House had been leaking derogatory stories.
Infuriated that someone had told Lizza about a dinner Wednesday night at the White House, Scaramucci demanded to know the reporter’s source and said he would “eliminate everyone in the comms team and we’ll start over,” unless Lizza told him.
Priebus has declined to engage publicly. But hours after Scaramucci first aired his side in the two men’s strife, Sanders called it “healthy competition.”
The result of all the drama is a White House that increasingly resembles the set from the president’s former life as the star of a reality TV show. His aides’ cable television appearances recall the “confessionals” familiar to fans of the genre.
“The primary attribute for a successful tenure in the Trump White House is masochism,” tweeted Rick Wilson, a longtime Republican operative and Trump critic.
The evidence of dysfunction, and the high level of insecurity among Trump’s core aides, helps explain the White House’s inability to focus on its agenda.
Trump’s critics suggested the public staff blowup was a deliberate distraction from several controversies — the struggle in Congress to pass a health care bill; ongoing investigations into potential collusion between his campaign and Russia, and the blowback from Republicans and others to Trump’s surprise Twitter announcement on Wednesday that transgender people will be barred from military service.
But those issues also were being heavily covered on cable news. The stories that were overshadowed were those the White House was trying to promote this week.
“Right now, the president is operating the White House by himself,” relying on only a handful of aides, including Scaramucci, said Barry Bennett, a former Trump campaign adviser who maintains contacts in the White House.
It’s Scaramucci’s “natural inclination to go after Reince and he’s not getting any kind of halt sign,” Bennett added. “One of them is not going to make it.”