Trump didn’ t want a staffer. He wanted a peer. He got one. He and new communications chief Anthony Scaramucci are cut from a similar New York loaf.
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump cast new leads for his White House communications and press team on Friday.
Slick Anthony Scaramucci, who speaks fluent New York, and down-home Sarah Huckabee Sanders, whose charming Southern is flawless, are the new, respectively, communications chief and press secretary.
Scaramucci replaces somebody no one outside tight political circles here knew, who didn’ t last long at the White House anyway, and had zero national visibility.
Sanders is the new Sean Spicer, who left after 182 days rather than be layered by Scaramucci.
The daughter of former Arkansas Gov. and presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee, she’s unflappable – and her folksy way works for her. My favorite Sanders line, from last February: “One of the things we say in the South “If a Girl Scout egged your house, would you buy cookies from her?”
Trump and Scaramucci have a cultural closeness – a shared New York thing which puts Scaramucci smack into Trump’s comfort zone. Don’ t underestimate that cultural fit in figuring out why Trump signed on Scaramucci, despite attempts by other White House figures to sideline him these past six months.
Usually a communications chief in the White House is a political operative or strategist skilled in driving messaging, marketing, coordinating with outside special interests groups, all aimed at persuading Congress to advance a presidential agenda.
Trump didn’ t want a staffer. He wanted a peer. He got one.
Scaramucci can decode Trump’s stream of conscious parentheticals, because they are cut from a similar New York loaf.
Scaramucci – his nickname is “The Mooch” — is billionaire rich, brash, a Wall Street financier, great on television, good looking — an important Trump factor — with a nice, obsequious manner. He’s right out of central casting.
“The president has really good karma, OK? And the world turns back to him, ” Scaramucci said at the White House briefing room podium for the first time on Friday.
He did pretty well at his first briefing. He stuck around, took a lot of questions.
What is troubling is that Scaramucci didn’ t promise to tell the truth. He was asked about the disproven Trump claim that millions of people voted illegally in the 2016 election. There is no evidence to back that up.
A reporter asked Scaramucci about Trump’s ongoing lie.
“So, it’s a little bit of an unfair question because I’ m not up to speed on all of that, ” Scaramucci said. “I’ m just candidly telling you that.”
The reporter pressed. “The president said three million people voted illegally, and there’s no evidence. Do you stand by that or not?”
“OK, ” Scaramucci said. “So if the president says it, let me do more research on it. My guess is that there’s probably some level of truth to that.”
“I think what we have found sometimes — the president says stuff, some of you guys in the media think it’s not true, and it turns out it’s closer to the truth than people think, so let me do more homework on that and I’ ll get back to you, ” he said.
Spicer hung around long enough to tarnish the wonderful reputation he had before joining the Trump White House. Out of loyalty to Trump, the institution of the presidency, a sense of duty and a dash of ambition, Spicer willfully plunged through the looking glass to tumble into that bad place where Trump is often parked, where facts and truth are treated like bubbles that fizzle away.
Let me add this: Spicer was always straightforward with me. When I had business to do with Spicer – the off-camera stuff – he was a stand-up guy.
It’s not normal to tap a lawyer-turned-Wall-Street-financier/television personality to be a White House communications director.
But there is nothing — nothing — normal about the Trump presidency. Or Trump’s obsession with television shows. Or Russia. Or Trump’s view that the problem six months into his presidency is the messengers – and not his own self-inflicted wounds delivered via his Twitter posts or stream-of-conscious interviews.
