openpolitics.com

Where Ms. Sanders tends to the dry and sardonic, Mr. Scaramucci is over the top.

.. The uneasy alliance between Mr. Scaramucci and Ms. Sanders will help determine the fate of Mr. Trump’s efforts to reboot his message and survive amid the escalating scandals engulfing his presidency.

The pair represent the competing power centers still vying inside Mr. Trump’s West Wing:

• Ms. Sanders, the Southern-drawling, workmanlike political operative installed by Mr. Priebus; and
• Mr. Scaramucci, the gregarious New York hedge fund manager who has grown close with the Trump family and is new to politics.

.. Telegenic and smooth-talking, he was an eager face of the Trump campaign on television and in the halls of Trump Tower, bringing a brash style and disarming humor to his tussles with reporters.

.. A mother of three young children whom she often mentions in tense moments in the White House briefing room, she inherited her father’s folksy style, his Christian conservatism and his biting sarcasm.

“If you want to see chaos,” she told a reporter on Friday, when asked about the West Wing turmoil, “you should come to my house early in the morning, when my three kids are running around. That’s chaos; this is nothing.”

.. there’s a New York-versus-Washington dichotomy here, New York is winning

..  it was left to Mr. Scaramucci, not the president, to announce that Ms. Sanders would be his new press secretary. The slight did not go unnoticed by veteran communicators, who said it could undercut her at the outset.

.. “It would have been appropriate for him to announce Sarah,” said Ari Fleischer, who served as press secretary for President George W. Bush. “It empowers her, it sends the message that the president appointed her, he’s standing next to her, and that signal was not there.”

.. While Mr. Trump all but invented the “fake news” moniker himself, some of his advisers, including Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, have told him that he cannot afford to have a spokeswoman who has such a poisonous relationship with reporters. That was one of the reasons that Mr. Scaramucci was brought on.

.. “He’s very slick and smooth,” said Jennifer Palmieri, another of Mr. Obama’s communications directors. “This removes any ruse that this is a White House that will operate under the transparent standard we expect for a democracy. Instead, it will operate like a country with ministers of propaganda, not press secretaries.”

.. “If the president thinks he’s surrounded by good people fighting for him, defending him and doing a really good job at it, then the president won’t feel the need to push boundaries himself and make the mistakes that he’s made on Twitter,” Mr. Fleischer said.

.. Mr. Scaramucci wished Mr. Spicer well in a distinctly New York style.

“I love the guy,” he said. “And I hope he goes on to make a tremendous amount of money.”