Mooch's Tenure: 'Minus 16 Days'

'Scaramouche, we hardly knew ye'
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Aug 1, 2017 6:27 AM CDT
Mooch, 'We Hardly Knew Ye'
Anthony Scaramucci speaks to the media during the daily press briefing at the White House, Friday, July 21, 2017, in Washington.   (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

The Mooch is out after a tenure as White House communications director that only lasted around 250 hours. Anthony Scaramucci was fired and reportedly escorted off the White House premises Monday, swept away by new broom John Kelly, the retired Marine Corps general expected to bring some military discipline to the Trump team as the new White House chief of staff. Scaramucci started out promising to create "an era of a new good feeling," but the brash, trash-talking financier very quickly came to be seen as a distraction. A roundup of opinions:

  • "So much for the Mooch," writes Elizabeth Williamson at the New York Times. He compared himself to Cain and Reince Priebus to Abel, she notes, but his his tenure ended with "biblical flair" when Kelly, "who was brought in as the new chief of staff on Monday to end the fratricidal drama in the White House, demanded the Mooch's head on a platter."

  • Scaramucci's "buffoonery, self-aggrandizement, and foul mouth caused him to be sacked after just 10 days on the job," writes Dana Milbank at the Washington Post. "He wasn’t officially supposed to start until Aug. 15, so his tenure, technically, was minus 16 days." His time on the job "was such a whirlwind that it’s tempting to describe them as Ten Days That Changed the World," he writes. "But the Mooch didn’t really change anything. He just made everything wildly entertaining."
  • Charles Krauthammer's view, per the National Review: "Scaramouche, we hardly knew ye. Although I think he would be a better contestant on Dancing With the Stars than Spicey would, so I think it’s actually an upgrade for them." He praises Kelly and predicts that if he has control over some of Trump's "unrestrained impulses"—like tweeting—it "will be a tremendous advance and give this administration a chance of succeeding."
  • The Hill reports that it is hard to find anyone on "Team Trump" who disagrees with the firing. "Scaramucci quickly became an embarrassing distraction who did not know anything about the job," says one source close to the White House. “The only reason Trump wanted him to have the job was to go on TV, but not outshine him with negative publicity."
  • A zinger from Ryan Lizza at the New Yorker, whose Scaramucci interview last week hastened the Mooch's downfall: "On Wednesday night, Scaramucci told me, 'What I’m going to do is I'm going to eliminate everyone on the comms team and we’ll start over.' He did not know how prescient he was."
(More Anthony Scaramucci stories.)

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