Podhoretz /
JUST an hour after the shocking announcement that Anthony Scaramucci had been dumped as White House communications director, something amazing happened.
Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster jointly announced US sanctions on Nicolas Maduro, who’d staged a stolen election in Venezuela on Sunday that will effectively turn his country into a totalitarian state.
Why was this amazing? Because it’s what’s supposed to happen in a White House: Senior officials, speaking with gravamen and serious intent, informed the country and the world of an action being taken by the most powerful country on earth to protest an immoral action and use the means at its disposal to give teeth to that protest. This was normal. And after 10 days of the most sustained public abnormality Washington has seen since Monica Lewinsky became a household name in 1998, the normality came as a blessed relief — and a sign of hope.
Because the antics in and around the Trump White House have been our daily bread and circus, we close Trump watchers didn’t quite react to the obvious insanity of Scaramucci’s hiring as we might have.
After all, this was a guy who had never before done a communications job — and comms director is one of those White House jobs that requires some know-how. Nevertheless, the first day he was on board Scaramucci took to the podium in the press room with command and fluidity, and that seemed a welcome change after the barely coherent Sean Spicer.
But it was only a few days before the madness began to hit. First Scaramucci said he was going to extirpate leakers and fire everybody who didn’t get in line. And he didn’t sound like he meant just people on the communications staff, but rather that he might be ploughing through the West Wing like Dolores Umbridge through Hogwarts looking for those disloyal to the Ministry of Magic.
This had a whiff of someone getting way too big for his britches, but nobody really knows what’s going on in Trump Central, and maybe Trump told the Mooch to clean house, so who were we to judge.
Then a reporter got a hold of Scaramucci’s financial-disclosure forms, which he had submitted for his previous job at the Export-Import Bank and which had be- come a matter of public record that day according to an established schedule. An enraged Mooch announced the “leak” of these public documents was a felony and he was contacting the FBI.
That was bonkers, but hey, maybe Trump agreed with him, so who were we to judge.
On his first day, he’d said he and thenchief of staff Reince Priebus were like “brothers” — but that night he suggested on Twitter Priebus leaked his documents. The next morning he told CNN’s Chris Cuomo that they were brotherly like Cain and Abel.
That was psycho, but he was working for Trump, and Trump says crazy stuff, so who were we to judge.
Then The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza tweeted that Scaramucci was having dinner with Trump, Melania, Sean Hannity and a former Fox executive. Mooch called Lizza, demanded his source’s identity as a “patriot” and proceeded to defame Priebus and Steve Bannon in graphically disgusting ways.
This was “put this guy in a mental institution” stuff, but maybe Trump thought such things were funny, and who were we to ju. . .
No, no, no. It was time to judge. Only six days had passed and Lizza’s New Yorker account of their phone call made it clear Scaramucci’s continuing employment at the White House was a new kind of political red line — one across which the Trump revolution had entered its Tale of Two Cities, Jacobin, wholesale slaughter phase.
The next day Priebus was gone and Trump announced that John Kelly, the retired general running the Department of Homeland Security, would be the new chief of staff. There were questions about whether Kelly would be Scaramucci’s boss or whether the Mooch would still report directly to Trump.
Add into all this the domestic drama involving the collapse of Scaramucci’s marriage days before the birth of a child, and even for Trump, this madness had to end. Maybe it did because Scaramucci was simply becoming too big of a story himself.
Or maybe, just maybe, John Kelly told Trump he’d only take the job of chief of staff if he were, in fact, the chief of staff.
And maybe, just maybe, the canning of the Mooch was the necessary precursor to the most important moment of the day — when the treasury secretary and the national-security adviser did their jobs the way they were and are supposed to do for the good of the American people.