Satire, commentary, analysis—throw it all out the window. What’s happening in Washington is beyond parody, beyond fiction. What will happen tomorrow, what will happen in the next hour? No one knows.
.. Trump doesn’t want stability, he wants motion. He isn’t interested in details or arguments, he’s energized by accomplishments, achievements, placards on the wall. He doesn’t have a cabinet, he has employees. And the primary job of those employees is to protect their boss.
.. Which is what Anthony Scaramucci understands. Like Trump, he’s a showman. Larger than life. He’s familiar with grand gestures. He’s not a D.C. guy.
.. So the man whom the voters brought in to disrupt Washington brought in Scaramucci to disrupt his own White House. Well, mission accomplished.
.. I have been reading past issues of National Review, including bound volumes from 1977-1981. I do not know whether Donald Trump fits the historian’s model of a “disjunctive” president like Jimmy Carter, but the two chief executives do share this in common: Both campaigned as outsiders, both brought fellow outsiders with them to Washington, and these coteries of trusted advisers did not mesh with the institutions and personalities and manners they found in the city. In both cases there was a culture clash, apparent from the beginning. It soon became apparent that Carter’s presidency was not only dysfunctional, but a failure.
Opinions Trump is something the nation did not know it needed
There will be 42 more months of this president’s increasingly hilarious-beyond-satire apotheosis of himself, leavened by his incessant whining about his tribulations (“What dunce saddled me with this silly attorney general who takes my policy expostulations seriously?”).
This protracted learning experience, which the public chose to have and which should not be truncated, might whet the public’s appetite for an adult president confident enough to wince at, and disdain, the adoration of his most comically groveling hirelings.
.. Scaramucci grew up in Port Washington, the Long Island community that is East Egg in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” Gatsby lived in West Egg, yearning to live across the water, where shone the beckoning green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. Scaramucci’s ascent to a glory surpassing even that available in East Egg shows that the light on the lectern in the White House press room is, at last, something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
Krauthammer’s take: Kelly replaces Priebus
Syndicated columnist and Fox News contributor on John Kelly replacing Reince Priebus as White House chief of staff, whether chaos in the Trump White House will end #Tucker
- The test case is Scaramucci. Is he going to have direct access to the President, or will he have to go through Kelly?
- Will Ivanka and Jared have to go through Kelly?
Anthony Scaramucci, After Blasting Reince and Bannon: I Will ‘Refrain’ from ‘Colorful Language’
“I don’t like it,” He continued. “I’m a Wall Street guy and I’m more of a front-stabbing person, and I would rather people tell directly how I feel about them than this sort of nonsense.”
.. “Leaking is atrocious, it’s outrageous, it’s unpatriotic, it damages the president personally, it damages the institution of the presidency, and I don’t like it,” he told White House reporters on Tuesday morning.