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Despite his persona on The Apprentice, Donald Trump almost never fires anyone himself. Instead, he makes their lives miserable.
Having given his chief of staff virtually no authority, the president periodically complained to aides about Priebus’s effectiveness. Despite the fact that some of his own tweets were most damaging to his presidency, Trump blamed Priebus for not stanching the constant leaks to the press.
Rumors that Priebus was on his way out circulated for months. Trump fed the rumor mill, asking friends and other advisers to evaluate Priebus’s performance and tossing around names of possible replacements. Like almost everything else in the Trump White House, it all leaked to the press and provided a constant stream of negative White House stories. Jared contributed by telling associates he believed Priebus was doing a poor job.
But Trump never gave Priebus the power to get it done. Priebus felt the internal chaos was unsustainable. He was frustrated that he could not assert full control over basic White House functions, such as policy development, communications, and even formal announcements, which sometimes were made impulsively by the president.
As in his business, Trump acted as his own chief of staff.
“We kind of run a little bit like a mom-and-pop in that sense,” Don Trump Jr. said in a 2011 deposition in a lawsuit involving a Florida development. “I guess there is an organizational chart, but in theory, there is not too many levels.” He added, “Could I make one? Yes. Is there one officially? Not that I’m aware of.”
But the U.S. government is not a family business. “You can’t have a structure where nobody reports to the chief of staff and everybody feels free to pursue their own agenda,” Spicer says. “It just doesn’t work.”
Matters came to a head when Trump in July 2017 named hedge-fund magnate Anthony Scaramucci communications director, bypassing Press Secretary Sean Spicer. Scaramucci joined Goldman Sachs’s investment-banking unit after graduating from Harvard Law School. He started his own hedge fund, SkyBridge Capital, in 2005 and remained a comanaging partner until January 2017, when the firm was sold to the investment company RON Transatlantic and HNA Capital, the financial services arm of the Chinese HNA Group.
Jared and Ivanka pushed Trump to hire Scaramucci, who had no experience in the realm of public relations. Being neophytes, neither Jared nor Ivanka saw through Scaramucci’s slick self-promotion.
After meeting with Ivanka, Trump announced that Scaramucci would become communications director. Scaramucci, known as “the Mooch,” made it clear in a press briefing that he would report to Trump, not Priebus.
In Bannon’s opinion, the move to hire Scaramucci was another ploy by Jared and Ivanka to dump both Spicer and Priebus. It was an example of Trump’s adopting bad advice. Ironically, Trump had previously rejected several attempts by Scaramucci to join the White House.
“Scaramucci was always shot down by Trump,” Bannon says. “Trump said, ‘He never supported me. He’s a promoter, and I have no interest.’ ”
Trump pointed out that Scaramucci did not back him in the campaign. He bounced from supporting Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, to former Florida governor Jeb Bush, to Florida senator Marco Rubio.
In the early days of the race, Scaramucci called Trump a “hack politician” on Fox Business Network and savaged him for his bombastic and controversial rhetoric. Calling Trump anti-American, Scaramucci said, “And I’ll tell you who he’s going to be president of. You can tell Donald I said this: the Queens County bullies association.”
However, Jared and Ivanka persuaded Trump to come around to hiring Scaramucci as communications director. According to Bannon, Ivanka urged her father to hire him, saying, “We need good press coverage for Jared. Nobody in the press office is supporting Jared.”
Scaramucci had been going on TV and defending Trump, which is the way many Trump supporters try to endear themselves to the president. Then Scaramucci got into a spat with CNN over its report linking him to a Russian investment fund managed by a Moscow-controlled bank. The network subsequently retracted its report, and three journalists who were involved in developing the story left the network as a result.
Trump had watched Scaramucci act as a surrogate for him on TV. Based on that, he heaped lavish praise on him to advisers. Above all, Trump relished the fact that Scaramucci was able to get a retraction from CNN.
After that triumph, Ivanka brought Scaramucci into the White House, meeting with him and her father in the late afternoon. On the spot, the president hired him as the communications director, a vacant position.
That furthered Jared’s and Ivanka’s goal of getting rid of Spicer as press secretary, who they felt was failing to promote them. As part of that effort, they had made sure Spicer was not on the list to meet Pope Francis when Trump traveled to the Vatican. A devout Catholic, Spicer was hurt. Trump tried to tell him that it was a mistake, but the slight was purposeful.
“It was a hundred percent Jared and Ivanka,” Bannon says. “They were trying to run Sean out of the White House. They were trying to humiliate him.”
What the president did not seem to appreciate was how important it was to Sean to be included in the visit and that it was a slap in the face to exclude him.
In front of Scaramucci, Priebus, Spicer, Jared, and Ivanka, Bannon told Trump that Scaramucci would be a disaster. Priebus and Spicer seconded that declaration.
“I told Scaramucci I totally disagree with his appointment,” Bannon says. “You have no skills to be a comms director. It’s a skill set and a profession.”
Scaramucci gave a White House press briefing that went smoothly. But he ramped up the drama by threatening to fire “everybody” in the White House press office if leaks to reporters did not stop. Scaramucci had once offered Priebus the job of chief operating officer of his company and an ownership interest. Priebus had hooked him up with Scott Walker’s campaign, for which he served as finance chairman, yet Scaramucci began disparaging Priebus.
Apparently, Scaramucci blamed him for the fact that he had not been offered a White House job earlier. In fact, Priebus had been holding up a job offer because under ethics rules, he could not hire him as an assistant to the president until the sale of Scaramucci’s company SkyBridge Capital was complete and the ethics office signed off on his hiring.
“Scaramucci perceived me as the guy who was solely responsible for hiring, so he thought I was responsible for him not getting a job, not the fact that we had an ethics obligation before we bring people in,” Priebus says. Priebus and Bannon had put Scaramucci on speakerphone to try to explain to him why he could not yet be hired for the White House staff, but Scaramucci never seemed to accept the explanation. He seemed to think Priebus was screwing with him. But instead of hiring him for the White House, Priebus arranged for Scaramucci to be hired by the Ex-Im Bank, where the conflict-of-interest rules were not as stringent as for a high-ranking White House aide.
In an interview on Fox News while still in his White House job, Scaramucci complained about leaks and Washington’s backstabbing culture. “What I don’t like about Washington is people do not let you know how they feel,” he said. “They’re very nice to your face and then they take a shiv or a machete and they stab it in your back. I don’t like it. I’m a Wall Street guy, and I’m more of a front-stabbing person, and I’d rather tell people directly how I feel about them than this sort of nonsense.”
For Trump, the final straw was a phone interview Scaramucci gave to Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker immediately after a White House dinner with Trump and Fox News people.
“On Wednesday night, I received a phone call from Anthony Scaramucci, the new White House communications director,” Lizza wrote. “He wasn’t happy. Earlier in the night, I’d tweeted, citing a ‘senior White House official,’ that Scaramucci was having dinner at the White House with President Trump, the first lady, Sean Hannity, and the former Fox News executive Bill Shine.”
Scaramucci demanded to know who had leaked the news of the dinner, Lizza wrote. When Lizza refused to tell him, 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,” Scaramucci told Lizza, saying that the leak of the dinner was “a major catastrophe for the American country.” In Scaramucci’s view, Lizza wrote, the leak proved that his rivals in the West Wing—particularly Priebus—were plotting against him. He told Lizza that Priebus would be fired shortly.
On CNN, Scaramucci compared his relationship with Priebus to that of the fratricidal brothers Cain and Abel. Later, in an expletive-laced rant to the New Yorker, he described the former Republican National Committee chairman as a “paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac.”
In the same interview, Scaramucci disparaged Bannon. “I’m not Steve Bannon. I’m not trying to suck my own cock,” he said. “I’m not trying to build my own brand” on the president’s coattails. “I’m here to serve the country,” he added.
In a tweet minutes after talking with Lizza, Scaramucci claimed that his financial records showing that he had assets of eighty-five million dollars had been “leaked” to the press. Tweeting about the so-called leak, he listed Priebus’s Twitter handle, suggesting that he was blaming the chief of staff for what he called a felony. When stories took note of the fact that he seemed to be blaming Priebus, Scaramucci tweeted, “Wrong!”
When going on TV, Scaramucci never missed a chance to work in that he had graduated from Harvard Law School. Yet in talking about the “leak,” he claimed he was going to report the “felony” to the FBI and Justice Department. In fact, the financial disclosure filings listing his assets were public records that were online. Even if they were not public records, the FBI would not become involved unless the leak was of classified material affecting national security.