Conservative talk radio host Mark Levin blasted new White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci on Thursday for going to a “liberal rag” and making “absolutely disgusting” comments about White House Chief Strategist Steve K. Bannon.
.. Levin marveled at the fact that Scaramucci called a “liberal reporter at a liberal rag” and spoke in that way about his colleagues.
“What the hell has Steve Bannon done to this guy?” Levin asked. “Nothing!”Levin, who is the author of the current best-selling book Rediscovering Americanism, said that “if you support Donald Trump, then you don’t sit back and excuse all this.”.. Levin, a Reagan administration alum who has written some of the most seminal books of the modern conservative movement like Liberty and Tyranny, which became a runaway bestseller despite scant to no coverage in the legacy media, asked, “Do you think this kind of internecine warfare makes America great again?”“It makes these guys look stupid, moronic, pathetic! That’s not how you serve your president, in my view,” he said... “The president is under brutal attack, and he really needs some pros around him,” he continued.
.. On Fox News, conservative radio host Laura Ingraham slammed Scaramucci for “trashing Steve Bannon, who has been carrying the conservative populist banner for years, loyal to this president,” and said Scaramucci’s comments were “humiliating to the president.”
Levin had a reminder for Scaramucci about the position he holds.
“You’re communications director to the president of the United States,” Levin said. “You hold a public trust.”
Anthony Scaramucci Spends First Days as Comms Director Putting Himself in the Spotlight
White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci was brought in purportedly to grease the wheels of the WH comms operation and to put the president’s agenda and achievements into the spotlight. Instead, a series of outbursts — including an unhinged late-night rant to a liberal reporter — means the only thing he has put into the spotlight so far is himself.
.. However by Thursday night, the words “calm” and “in control” were on no-one’s list of phrases to describe “Mooch.”
.. Mooch deleted a bunch of tweets after journalists quickly skimmed through his past tweets and statements and found a series of awkward comments, including when he called Trump a “hack politician” making “anti-American” statements
.. “You’re an inherited money dude from Queens County. Bring it, Donald. Bring it,” he said on Fox Business in 2015. Just two years later, he would be drooling over that same “money dude from Queens County” tweeting: “I serve @POTUS agenda & that’s all that matters.”
.. Scaramucci’s first major mistake was to overreact to a piece in Politico Wednesday night that reported on his financial filings and said that he still stands to profit from an ownership stake in his investment firm SkyBridge Capital. Despite the story mentioning in the third paragraph that the record was “publicly available upon request,” it triggered a meltdown from the new comms director, who suddenly believed he was the victim of a leak.
.. But Scaramucci wasn’t done. On Thursday morning he called into CNN’s “New Day” in which he engaged in a rambling interview replete with macho, tough guy filibustering as well as a few wild swings at Priebus.
.. Scaramucci dominated the day’s news cycle, turning his boss and his agenda into a sideshow to the Scaramucci Show. What did Trump do late Wednesday and Thursday? The public could be forgiven for remaining uninformed as the media was understandably drawn to Mooch’s Machiavellian maneuverings.
.. On Thursday night, the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza dropped the news that Mooch had called him late Wednesday and unleashed a verbal tirade at his colleagues of the kind that would be a sacking offence for most American workers.
.. Scaramucci has already become arguably the worst White House communications director in modern American history — and he’s only been in the job a week.
.. Trump has long admired Scaramucci’s performance on cable news, but as his own agenda and achievements get drowned out by his scatterbrained comms man, Trump may be wondering if being a tough guy on cable news is a strong enough qualification to lead the White House communications office.
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Anthony Scaramucci Called Me To Unload About White House Leakers, Reince Priebus, and Steve Bannon
He started by threatening to fire the entire White House communications staff. It escalated from there.
.. “Who leaked that to you?” he asked. I said I couldn’t give him that information. He responded by threatening to fire the entire White House communications staff. “What I’m going to do is, I will eliminate everyone in the comms team and we’ll start over,” he said. I laughed, not sure if he really believed that such a threat would convince a journalist to reveal a source.
.. While they have publicly maintained that there is no bad blood between them, Scaramucci and Priebus have been feuding for months.
.. But Priebus didn’t want him in the White House, and successfully blocked him for being appointed to a job until last week, when Trump offered him the communications job over Priebus’s vehement objections.
.. Scaramucci, who initiated the call, did not ask for the conversation to be off the record or on background.
.. I asked him why it was so important for the dinner to be kept a secret. Surely, I said, it would become public at some point. “I’ve asked people not to leak things for a period of time and give me a honeymoon period,” he said. “They won’t do it.” He was getting more and more worked up, and he eventually convinced himself that Priebus was my source.
.. “They’ll all be fired by me,” he said. “I fired one guy the other day. I have three to four people I’ll fire tomorrow. I’ll get to the person who leaked that to you. Reince Priebus—if you want to leak something—he’ll be asked to resign very shortly.” The issue, he said, was that he believed Priebus had been worried about the dinner because he hadn’t been invited. “Reince is a fucking paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac,” Scaramucci said. He channelled Priebus as he spoke: “ ‘Oh, Bill Shine is coming in. Let me leak the fucking thing and see if I can cock-block these people the way I cock-blocked Scaramucci for six months.’ ” (Priebus did not respond to a request for comment.)
.. “They’re trying to resist me, but it’s not going to work. I’ve done nothing wrong on my financial disclosures, so they’re going to have to go fuck themselves.”
.. Scaramucci also told me that, unlike other senior officials, he had no interest in media attention. “I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own cock,” he said, speaking of Trump’s chief strategist. “I’m not trying to build my own brand off the fucking strength of the President. I’m here to serve the country.” (Bannon declined to comment.)
.. “What I want to do is I want to fucking kill all the leakers and I want to get the President’s agenda on track so we can succeed for the American people,” he told me.
.. “O.K., the Mooch showed up a week ago,” he said. “This is going to get cleaned up very shortly, O.K.? Because I nailed these guys. I’ve got digital fingerprints on everything they’ve done through the F.B.I. and the fucking Department of Justice.”
“What?” I interjected.
“Well, the felony, they’re gonna get prosecuted, probably, for the felony.” He added, “The lie detector starts—” but then he changed the subject and returned to what he thought was the illegal leak of his financial-disclosure forms.
.. Scaramucci said he had to get going. “Yeah, let me go, though, because I’ve gotta start tweeting some shit to make this guy crazy.”
.. He changed his story about Priebus. Instead of saying that he was trying to expose Priebus as a leaker, he said that the reason he mentioned Priebus in his deleted tweet was because he wanted to work together with Priebus to discover the leakers.
.. Scaramucci then made a plea to viewers. “Let me tell you something about myself,” he said. “I am a straight shooter.”
I told conservatives to work for Trump. One talk with his team changed my mind.
I am a national security Never-Trumper who, after the election, made the case that young conservatives should volunteer to serve in the new administration, warily, their undated letters of resignation ready. That advice, I have concluded, was wrong.
.. The tenor of the Trump team, from everything I see, read and hear, is such that, for a garden-variety Republican policy specialist, service in the early phase of the administration would carry a high risk of compromising one’s integrity and reputation.
.. The president-elect is surrounding himself with mediocrities whose chief qualification seems to be unquestioning loyalty. He gets credit for becoming a statesman when he says something any newly elected president might say (“I very much look forward to dealing with the president in the future”) — and then reverts to tweeting against demonstrators and the New York Times. By all accounts, his ignorance, and that of his entourage, about the executive branch is fathomless. It’s not even clear that he accepts that he should live in the White House rather than in his gilt-smeared penthouse in New York.
.. The canary in the coal mine was not merely the selection of Stephen K. Bannon for the job previously filled by John Podesta and Karl Rove, that of counselor to the president and chief strategist. Rather, the warning signs came from the Republican leaders excusing and normalizing this sinister character — and those who then justified the normalizers.
.. No band of brothers this: rather the permanent campaign as waged by triumphalist rabble-rousers and demagogues, abetted by people out of their depth and unfit for the jobs they will hold, gripped by grievance, resentment and lurking insecurity. Their mistakes — because there will be mistakes — will be exceptional.
.. Until it can acquire some measure of humility about what it knows, and a degree of magnanimity to those who have opposed it, it will smash into crises and failures.
.. Until then, let the Trump team fill the deputy assistant secretary and assistant secretary jobs with civil servants, retired military officers and diplomats, or the large supply of loyal or obsequious second-raters who will be eager to serve. The administration may shake itself out in a year or two and reach out to others who have been worried about Trump.