“I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don’t watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year’s Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!”
With that tweet, fired off from the residence at 7:52 A.M. on June 29, 2017, the President kicked off our workday in the White House by going after Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski of MSNBC’s Morning Joe.
The tweet set the internet ablaze and caused serious backlash across party lines, and it marked a major escalation in the growing feud between Trump and his two former friends.
Late in the campaign, comms staffers had been surprised one day to look up and realize Joe and Mika were walking through the war room with Trump. The candidate paused to show off the giant wall full of televisions. When he saw one of them was airing CNN, he dismissed it. “We have to see everything, but we don’t want to watch that, believe me.” The two morning show hosts chuckled, then continued on their tour.
They had occasionally been Trump’s guests at Mar-a-Lago, and I’d seen them at least one other time in the lobby of Trump Tower during the transition. But somewhere along the way their relationship with Trump turned sour. And the drama played out daily on MSNBC’s flagship morning show, which received poor ratings nationally but was the go-to wake-up show inside the Beltway.
I met the President on the ground floor of the White House residence about an hour after the tweet went out.
“Good morning, sir,” I said as he stepped off the elevator. I then directed him toward the Diplomatic Reception Room, where we had a camera crew waiting to record his weekly address to the nation.
At that point in the administration, I was typically the only West Wing staffer there for the recording—the President preferred recording with as few people in the room as possible—but on this particular morning, Spicer had decided to come over from the West Wing as well.
Seeing Sean, Trump stopped in the grand hallway on the ground floor. Unwitting White House tourists were standing about fifteen yards away on the other side of partitions, which blocked them from being able to see us.
“Did you see the tweet?” he asked. His tone was serious, but there was a hopeful glint in his eye, as if he were a new father asking us if we’d seen his newborn child.
“Oh, I’m pretty sure the whole world has seen the tweet,” I replied, drawing a laugh from Keith Schiller, who had come down from the residence with the President. He was almost always the first to see the President in the morning, and he was carrying the President’s stack of newspapers.
“Well, what did you think?” the President continued. He was looking at Spicer.
“It was … aggressive,” Spicer said, hesitating. Trump pondered this for a moment before responding.
“They’re going to say it’s not presidential,” he said. “But you know what? It’s modern-day presidential. I’m not going to stop telling the American people what I think because it makes some people uncomfortable. And by the way, it’s true—one hundred percent true.”
Spicer’s face betrayed no emotion. He didn’t have time to respond anyway.
“Don’t you dare say I watch that show,” the President snapped. “I wouldn’t have any idea what happens on there, but people call me about it.” This may or may not have been accurate. He certainly preferred Fox & Friends in the morning, but who among us doesn’t find ourselves hate-watching something from time to time?
He continued to rage on about Mika and Joe.
“They’re pathetic. They were desperate for access. They came to Mar-a-Lago and I promise you she was bleeding. I saw the bandages. And when the cameras weren’t around they were like groupies. So don’t say I watch them, because I don’t.”
Whether or not the President of the United States should get so worked up over two talk show hosts was a question we had long since stopped asking. It didn’t matter; it was a fact of life.
Then things got awkward. Or more awkward.
“You’re not briefing today, are you?” the President asked Sean. Spicer shook his head and said Sarah Huckabee Sanders, his deputy, would be briefing the media in his stead. She had been doing this more and more often.
“Good,” the President responded. This seemed to please him, but his tone of satisfaction quickly shifted to something between tough love and heartfelt disappointment. “You just can’t go out there, Sean. I’ve been talking to a lot of people about it, and your credibility is shot. It’s just bad—really bad. You just can’t go out there. Sarah needs to be the one out there. You can’t right now—you just can’t, okay?”
It was true, of course, but brutal nonetheless. Spicer knew he was having a hard time with the press. He was constantly coming up with new reasons to either not hold a press briefing or to let Sarah do it. Yet he clearly did not want to relinquish the job.
He seemed enamored with the fame—or infamy, depending on your perspective—and would occasionally boast about the hordes of people who wanted to take selfies with him out in public. It wasn’t clear that he had absorbed just how badly his credibility had been damaged. But worse than that, in Trump’s eyes, was that he looked inept at parrying reporters’ questions and offering nonresponses. Every White House Press Secretary has moments when they can’t or won’t answer reporters’ questions, but they usually manage to maintain some respectability in the process.
Sean mustered a little “Yes, sir” in response.
It took a lot to make Spicer a sympathetic figure in my eyes.
The main difference between him and Sarah was basic human decency. If Sean had ever heard the old saying “Be kind to everyone on the way up; you’ll meet the same people on the way down,” he definitely didn’t act like it.
At one point we met one-on-one in his office to discuss my role and the overall organizational structure of the press and communications teams.
“You’ve got thirty people sitting across the street in EEOB who don’t have any direction, don’t have any purpose, and don’t feel like they are a part of the team,” I told him, communicating a frustration many of the EEOB staff had relayed to me.
“I don’t have time to walk around and give everyone a f—ing hug,” Spicer snapped.
“They don’t need hugs,” I replied. “They need a leader.”
Our mutual friends told me that he blamed nearly every negative story written about him on me. And I usually left work at night feeling like he would do just about whatever he could to push me out.
But he occasionally endured such indignities that I almost felt bad for him—almost. Now Spicer was about to suffer the biggest indignity yet.
Trump was going to bring in another “killer.”
In mid-July 2017, I did some late-afternoon socializing with the First Lady’s staff in the East Wing. I liked to go over there for a change of scenery, to decompress, and sometimes to vent. The atmosphere was much more pleasant and inviting than that of the West Wing, like floating in a rooftop infinity pool instead of swimming with piranhas in the Amazon.
As I came back through the Palm Room, I ran into the President and his dinner companion for the night. He immediately introduced us—not that his guest needed an introduction. It was Bob Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots.
“I’m surrounded by a lot of winning right now,” I said.
“You’re a wise man,” Kraft said. “Where are you from?”
“Alabama. Roll Tide.”
“Oh, so you know a lot about winning, too, then. We have one of your best guys on our defense,” Kraft bragged. “Dont’a Hightower—but the guys call him ‘The Stripper.’”
A quizzical look came across Trump’s face.
“The Stripper?” he said, laughing. “What kind of nickname is that for a football player?”
“Oh, they call him that because he stripped the ball from the Falcons’ quarterback in the Super Bowl,” Kraft replied. “It was a big turning point in the game. So he’s been ‘The Stripper’ ever since then.”
As the conversation turned to my role in the White House, the President interjected with what at the time seemed like a random question.
“Hey, what do you think about Anthony Scaramucci?”
Scaramucci, a wealthy hedge fund manager, had been one of the President’s best television surrogates during the campaign. This was admittedly a pretty low bar. I had gotten to know him because, since I was a communications adviser with a focus on messaging, he would call me before going on TV to ask how the campaign wanted him to answer certain questions or talk about specific issues. But more memorably for me, he would call back after his appearances to ask how he could improve. That seemed to be a rare quality in the mega-ego world of television talking heads: some semblance of humility and self-awareness. Whether by calculation or just because that’s who he was—I tended to think the latter—the Mooch oozed earnestness.
“Oh, I think he’s great,” I told the President, launching into a brief explanation of my experience with his coachability and desire to constantly improve. That left Mr. Kraft nodding his head.
“That’s good to hear,” the President said. “Let’s talk about him more in the morning. I think you’re going to be very excited. Big plans!” With that, the two titans retreated to the residence for dinner.
A few hours later, I got a phone call that brought clarity to the President’s cryptic reference to Scaramucci.
“No one knows this yet,” a close friend of Scaramucci’s told me, “but the President is probably about to make Mooch the new White House Communications Director.” The problem, the friend explained, was that Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon were going to do whatever it took to keep him out.
Bannon and Priebus. The West Wing’s odd couple. By all accounts they were strange bedfellows.
Bannon had built Breitbart’s media empire into a platform that eviscerated establishment weaklings like Priebus. One of Bannon’s young deputies in the White House, Julia Hahn, had earned her hard-nosed reputation at Breitbart for going after Priebus’s best friend in Congress, Paul Ryan. She’d driven up to his gated home in Wisconsin, at Bannon’s direction, just to snap a photo to go along with the headline PAUL RYAN BUILDS BORDER FENCE AROUND HIS MANSION, DOESN’T FUND BORDER FENCE (for the country).
Priebus, on the other hand, almost certainly viewed Bannon as someone better suited for a psych ward than the West Wing (although you could argue it was sometimes hard to tell the difference). In the moments when chaos reigned supreme, Priebus was visibly uncomfortable, probably longing for what a more peaceful existence might have been like inside Jeb Bush’s White House. In those same moments Bannon seemed like a hog who had unexpectedly found himself a mud puddle to wallow in on a hot day—he lived for it.
They put their differences aside—in terms of both policy and style—to keep other White House enemies in check.
Priebus was fighting enough battles and simply preferred for Bannon to not be one of them. Bannon viewed Priebus as the weakest Chief of Staff imaginable, which he was, allowing Bannon relatively free reign. But even more important to Steve was that keeping Reince in place and on his side made it more difficult for Jared Kushner—and the rest of “the globalists,” as Steve derisively called them—to push him out. If Scaramucci came in, however, that could immediately destabilize Reince’s already tenuous hold on power.
Bannon had scolded me before about openly expressing my frustrations with the RNC regime. “You’ve got to cut this s— out,” he snapped. “These guys are fine, dude. We’ve got a good thing going here. F— this up and we’re going to be dealing with some s— you can’t even imagine. They’ll be trying to have us all frog-marched out of here. The country’s at stake. You’ve gotta understand that.”
The whole thing felt like Game of Thrones, but with the characters from Veep.
Scaramucci was looking for advice on how to handle the entire situation, and our mutual friend thought I was in a good position to help him out, especially since I was so frustrated with Spicer.
Within minutes, I was on the phone with Scaramucci.
I didn’t know him that well, but he began our call by confessing his deepest fears. That was how he talked—stream of consciousness and filter-free. No wonder he and Trump got along.
“This is my last shot at coming in, you understand what I’m telling you?” Scaramucci said.
He had initially sought to join the White House as Director of the Office of Public Liaison. This would have made him the conduit for outside groups—companies, trade associations, and coalitions—to interact with the White House. Priebus, viewing him as a direct threat, blocked him from landing the job. Since then, Scaramucci’s name had come up in rumors about various White House roles, but nothing had materialized.
“Reince and Bannon don’t know what the President’s doing yet, okay? But his plan is to bring me in Friday morning and surprise them by announcing me as Comms Director. They’re going to do everything they can to block me. They’ve been successful so far, right? So what I need to know is, how can we make sure this time is different?”
I guess it should have concerned me more than it did that I was now involved in a plot to undermine the White House Chief of Staff. But it didn’t even cross my mind. This was the Trump White House and this sort of thing happened every day. And I rationalized it all by convincing myself it was all an effort to help the President. And I suppose it was. But I was trying to help myself, too, and in retrospect that was probably my primary concern.
Priebus’s opposition to Mooch was nothing new. I had not previously been aware that Bannon was so vehemently opposed to him, too, but it made sense. Bannon’s nemeses—Kushner, Ivanka Trump, and several other New Yorkers in the President’s inner circle—were advocating hard for Scaramucci.
Bannon was a survivor. He had weathered being on the outs with the President before, such as when he seemed to be taking too much credit for Trump’s election victory. But he’d then return to his good graces by keeping his head down and falling back on his most valuable asset: the fact that he and the President had an ideological mind-meld on Trump’s favorite issues—immigration, trade, and foreign affairs.
Throughout the summer, a months-long internal battle over troop levels in Afghanistan had been raging. The President was uncertain that the presence of American troops in the tribal nation was serving the vital national security interests of the United States. This debate led to a broader discussion about the value of America’s troop deployments around the globe. He wanted his top national security officials to justify the entire premise of projecting hard power all over the world.
To address these issues, Secretary of Defense James Mattis organized a meeting of the top military brass, national security officials, and the President in a windowless room called the Tank, deep inside the Pentagon. The day before the meeting, Trump was already spun up. “Somebody’s going to have to answer a very simple question for me,” he said, standing just outside the Oval. He stretched out his arms as he spoke, seeming to compare the length of his suit-coat sleeves. Perhaps it was newly tailored. “It really is quite simple,” he said. “We’ve been in Afghanistan for seventeen years. What has it gotten us and why are we staying? It’s like this all over the world. We go in—bing, bing, bing, our people get killed—we never leave, then at some point nobody can remember what we were doing there in the first place.” This was music to Bannon’s ears, but I knew it would not sit well with Mattis and others in the national security establishment.
I didn’t accompany the President to the Pentagon the next day, July 20, but the meeting later became infamous for Secretary of State Rex Tillerson reportedly calling Trump a “f—ing moron” after it was over. All parties involved denied he ever said that, so we’ll likely never know what actually happened. But when the President returned to the White House, I was waiting for him in the Oval and witnessed the aftermath firsthand.
He entered through the external door with Bannon just steps behind, and they were both exuberant. “Steve, Steve, that was spectacular,” the President said. They both stopped in the middle of the room and recounted the meeting in the same way my former high school or college basketball teammates relive the victories of our youth. “We had them on the ropes,” the President continued. “Rex didn’t have any idea what to say. He was totally unsure of himself.”
“He’ll never get it, Mr. President,” Bannon said of Tillerson. “He’s totally establishment in his thinking.”
“Totally establishment,” the President echoed. “That’s the perfect way to put it: completely and totally establishment. Everyone in the room was completely and totally establishment.”
This was Bannon at the height of his power: ideologically aligned with the President and encouraging him to go with his gut, disrupt the status quo, and demand “the establishment” get on board or get out of the way.
With Bannon riding high after the Pentagon meeting, I was worried he would have the extra juice he’d need to keep Mooch out. And in this instance, I thought he was putting his interests ahead of the President’s.
Priebus and Spicer were hurting Trump’s ability to accomplish his agenda—the President had lost trust in them—and they either needed to shape up or ship out. I believed Scaramucci’s entrance into the West Wing was likely to ensure one of those two things would happen, and I told Mooch I was going to do whatever I could to help make it happen.
Scaramucci told me the President was bringing him into the White House at 10 A.M. for a meeting in the Oval Office. I decided the best course of action was to meet Trump on the ground floor of the residence the following morning, catching him right when he stepped off the elevator. So that’s what I did.
I quickly told him what I was hearing from the Mooch. And I shared my fears about Priebus and Spicer.
“Mr. President, they’re going to do anything they can to dissuade you from hiring Scaramucci this morning,” I said. “For what it’s worth, I think anyone who is arguing against this and in favor of the status quo has their best interest—not yours—in mind.”
The President flashed a wry smile. “They can argue all they want.” He seemed very secure and confident about what he was doing.
With that, I knew it was a done deal, and we casually walked down the West Colonnade discussing O. J. Simpson, who had just been paroled after serving nine years for armed robbery. “The Juice is loose,” I said as he turned left toward the Oval and I kept walking straight into the press office. I wish I could remember what the President said to that. He loved talking about celebrities, especially disgraced ones. What I didn’t fully understand yet, though, was that the Mooch was about to be loose as well—in one of the weirdest weeks ever recorded in the history of the American presidency.
About an hour later, Scaramucci walked into the communications office flashing a toothy grin.
“It’s a done deal,” he said. “And Spicer is out—resigned in protest.”
I was stunned. Spicer quit? Wow.
He shook my hand. Not satisfied with that, he then pulled me in for a big hug.
Ours was a unique White House, to say the least, with reality television stars and famous First Family members as senior staffers, billionaire industrial titans as Cabinet members, a multilingual supermodel for a First Lady, and a celebrity CEO as the President. The Mooch was an Ivy League–educated, former Goldman Sachs investment banker turned private financier who had amassed a nine-figure fortune. But, more than anything, he was perfect for Trump World because he was born to be in front of the camera—and there was no bigger stage than this White House.
This guy’s going to fit right in.
The communications and press teams were quickly assembled in the Press Secretary’s office. Spicer, Priebus, and Scaramucci stood shoulder to shoulder behind the large, crescent-shaped desk that has been the White House Press Secretary’s workstation for decades, and about forty staffers crowded into the office. It was a tight fit. Most were totally unaware of what was taking place.
Spicer was gracious in announcing his departure. He thanked the team for their hard work and promised to help with the transition. He looked relieved. Though he loved being in the spotlight, the constant fight for survival must have been exhausting. Finally, his agony was over. He leaned comfortably against his standing workstation, his right leg casually crossed over his left. Priebus, on the other hand, was wound up so tight he looked like he might spontaneously combust. His position was now more precarious than ever. He raved about how close he and Scaramucci were—which seemed dubious—and how good a team they were going to make, which seemed preposterous. Junior aides—particularly former RNC staffers—looked down at their shoes, pondering what the sudden changes might mean for their own jobs.
The truth, of course, was that Reince was fuming. Not only had the Mooch made him look like more of a joke than ever, he had also persuaded the President to add a line into the press release announcing his appointment explicitly stating that he reported directly to the President. The media was feasting on the spectacle.
Hours later, the President saw me standing just outside the Oval and waved me in. Mike Pence was already inside.
“I heard you were the happiest son of a b—— in the entire building today!” Trump howled. The Vice President laughed along conspiratorially, though he was not exactly sure what Trump was talking about. “Mike, this is the happiest guy in Washington—I guarantee it.”
“Yes, sir,” I said sheepishly. “I think this is going to be a great thing for us all, especially you.”
Three days later, on a Monday, Scaramucci came into the building to start his first day of work. He declared that his first order of business was to stop the leaking. This was his mandate from the President. His plan to accomplish this was simple: he was going to scare everyone to death. After an uneventful weekend, the combined press and communications teams packed into the Roosevelt Room with nervous anticipation for the Mooch’s first full day at the helm.
As the group was waiting, Scaramucci and I stood in his new corner office. The floor-to-ceiling window made it one of the West Wing’s most coveted spaces. My desk was about ten feet from his, where it had been since my disastrous first day with Spicer. Mooch was standing with his back to me, shifting his weight from one foot to another and shaking his arms like a baseball pitcher warming up. As he looked out at the North Lawn, the kinetic energy pulsing through his body was starting to make me nervous. I couldn’t tell if it was semi-controlled anger, or just first-day jitters. But he was amped.
“They’re going to remember this day for the rest of their lives,” Scaramucci said, turning around to face me with a subtle head nod and a sly grin. “They’ve messed with this President for too long and I’m not going to stand for it anymore.” They referred to his new staff. Some of them, most of them, all of them? It wasn’t clear.
“What’s your plan?” I asked, trying to sound more curious than concerned. I was both.
“Just watch, Cliffy,” he said, moving toward the door. He marched through the upper press office and stopped in the hallway. He still didn’t know his way around. “We in here?” he asked, pointing to the Roosevelt Room door just a few feet away.
“Yeah, everyone’s in there waiting for you,” I said.
Click. Whoosh.
He calmly walked through the room toward the head of the table. It felt like everyone—including the paintings on the wall—was tracking his every move with their eyes. He came to a stop just under Rough Rider Teddy Roosevelt on horseback. Present were the entire comms team and Kellyanne Conway, who wasn’t actually in the communications division but floated in and out when she felt it was warranted. Mooch seemed to view Kellyanne, who disliked Reince, as an ally, albeit with some skepticism. But as far as I knew she hadn’t weighed in heavily with the President for or against Mooch. She may have been conflicted between wanting to get rid of Reince and Sean, which she obviously did, but also wanting more control over White House comms herself. She was content to observe and see what happened. She was in for quite a show. We all were.
“There are some people in this room who are leakers,” he began. “And guess what? I know who you are.”
People glanced around uncomfortably.
“I’ve been watching you. I’ve been reading the stories that you put out there. I’ve been paying attention to which reporters write which stories. I’ve been keeping track of everything.”
More awkward side glances.
“I know who you go to when it’s a really important leak. I know who you go to when you want to attack your colleagues. I know who you go to when you want to attack the President. And I know who tells you to do it. I know it all—I know everything.”
The room sat in stunned silence. Senior press aides sat at the long conference trying not to show their growing anxiety. Junior staffers stood around the walls looking down. No one dared even shift in their chair for fear that the sound of crinkling leather might attract Mooch’s attention. Even Teddy Roosevelt looked taken aback.
“I’m going to fire every last one of you until the leaking stops,” Scaramucci said. “I’m going to make it where you’re left selling postcards out on Pennsylvania Avenue, and that’s the closest you’ll ever be to getting back inside the White House.”
It was like an iconic scene from The Office, after Dwight Schrute takes over as manager of the paper company and threatens his friends and coworkers in a bizarre motivational exercise: “I love you guys, but don’t cross me, but you’re the best.” Except Dwight’s speech lasts about five minutes. The Mooch ranted, largely uninterrupted, for a solid hour.
He alternated between righteous indignation and fatherly disappointment as he berated his new staff, most of them strangers to him, for hurting the President, disrespecting the office of the presidency, and not being sufficiently patriotic.
At one point he seemed to reverse course. “I don’t want to fire everybody,” he declared, with seemingly sincere emotion. “But you guys are just not going to give me a choice, are you?
“I don’t want to do it, guys. I don’t—but I’m just going to have to.
“Or am I?”
Then came the dramatic finish. “I guess it’s up to you.”
Scaramucci finally walked out of the room, leaving the team shaken in his wake. I followed him back across the hall to his office and closed the door behind me.
Whoa. I had been the biggest booster of the Mooch in this entire building, as the President gleefully noted. I owned this, for better or worse. Most other staff had sat it out.
I didn’t articulate any of these thoughts, of course. I smiled and encouraged the fire-breathing dragon that had just returned from laying waste to the unsuspecting peasants in the village. His was certainly an unorthodox approach, there was no doubt about that. But he was right about the leaks. I kept telling myself that.
“That was great, wasn’t it?” he said with a wry grin, jumping right back in before I could answer. “They’re scared to death! Did you see the looks on their faces?! No more leaks. I’m telling you, no more leaks.”
If that were true, maybe it would be worth it.
The following morning the full staff meeting followed a similar trajectory. But this time Scaramucci declared that he was offering “amnesty” to the entire staff, allowing them to keep their jobs as long as they didn’t leak anymore.
He motioned toward Deputy Press Secretary Lindsay Walters, a former RNC staffer who was very close to Spicer and Priebus. The day before, after his first staff meeting, he and Walters had engaged in an animated discussion, after which she had stormed out of the room red-faced.
Now he was focusing in on her again.
“Right, Lindsay?” he said, walking over behind her and gripping the back of her chair. “No one’s getting fired, right, Lindsay?” She gave a subtle nod but looked like she might melt.
As Scaramucci’s diatribe continued, his phone buzzed in his pocket and he finally pulled it out to see who kept calling.
“Give me a second,” he said, smirking, then answered the phone.
“Mom, I’m trying to work here!” he told her, winking to the group. She must have jumped right into what she needed to tell him, because soon he was trying to cut her off.
“Mom, Mom, Mom, okay, Mom,” he pleaded. She kept going. “Mom, give me a second, okay? Here, talk to Kellyanne.”
Mooch handed the phone to an amused Kellyanne, who spoke politely with Mrs. Scaramucci, allowing Mooch to return to his speech. A couple of minutes later, Kellyanne handed the phone back to him, but he didn’t let himself get sidetracked again for long.
“Love you, Mom, but I’m just in the middle of this thing, okay? Call you right after.”
He finally hung up, flashed a big grin, declared Mrs. Scaramucci “the greatest,” and for a few moments the entire room seemed to actually be entertained.
Then he jumped back in with a brand-new, horrifying motivational technique: role-playing.
He would pretend to be a senior White House staffer trying to convince someone on the comms team to leak something against one of their colleagues. Mooch was convinced this was how it often worked, so that senior aides could “keep their hands clean” by having subordinates “do their dirty work.”
“Here’s what I want you to say to anyone who tries to get you to do that,” Mooch said, holding his hands out in front of him like he was trying to stop traffic. “‘I cannot do that. I only report to Anthony Scaramucci and he reports directly to the President of the United States.’ Okay, we got it?” He looked across a sea of bemused faces. “Let’s give it a try.”
Every single person in the room labored to avoid making eye contact with him. For one poor sap, the task proved fruitless.
“What’s your name?” Mooch asked a young staffer on the regional media team.
“Tyler Ross,” he replied. Tyler was a hardworking guy in his mid-twenties who tended to keep his head down and plug away. He was probably the last person in the room who would ever leak anything.
“Okay, Tyler. I’ll be Reince Priebus and you be you.”
Reince Priebus? I thought. The White House Chief of Staff is going to be the villain in this exercise? By name? Amazing.
“Tyler,” he continued, “I need you to leak something for me.”
There was a brief silence, as we all looked at poor Tyler. What in the heck was he supposed to do? Finally, Tyler did what we all would have done in his position.
“I cannot do that,” he said. Like a conductor leading a promising violinist, Mooch twirled his finger in a circle, prompting Tyler to continue.
“I cannot do that,” Tyler reiterated. “I report to Anthony Scaramucci and he reports directly to the President of the United States.”
“Perfect,” the Mooch replied, clapping his hands together. “See, this isn’t so hard, folks. I’m your shield, okay? I’m taking all the arrows for you, okay? Don’t worry about it.”
But a lot of staffers were definitely worried about it. The Mooch was coming in too hot—way too hot. And the heat was overwhelming some of the staff.
As the meeting inched along, Jessica Ditto, a Deputy Communications Director and close Spicer ally, at one point broke down in tears. She tried to explain to Scaramucci that “there are some really good people” on the team that Scaramucci was misjudging.
The sudden flood of emotions seemed to take Mooch by surprise, so he softened his tone and shifted gears—again.
“Let me tell you all a story,” he said.
Okay, at this point I have to admit I was interested to hear where this was going.
“You guys probably don’t know this about me, but I used to own an ice cream shop,” he said. I was certain absolutely no one in the room was aware of this.
“The ice cream was incredible—I’d go in there and order every flavor and you wouldn’t even believe how good it was. But for some reason the place wasn’t making any money. We were going broke. It didn’t make any sense. Great ice cream, great location, but no money. How does that happen? Well, guess what? I know how that happens, I just had to prove it.”
He smiled knowingly, a detective about to reveal how he cracked a tough case. Kellyanne sat listening to all this, just like everyone else. I don’t recall her saying a word. What was there to say?
“So what I did was, I went in there and told the manager, ‘Hey, go grab me something from the back.’ And while he was gone, I’d stuff a hundred fifty dollars in the cash register. The next day I’d do it again and stuff sixty-five dollars in the cash register. The next day I’d do ninety dollars. I did it all week. And every day, at the end of the day, I’d say, ‘How was your count?’ And every day the manager would say, ‘Oh, we were under by a dollar twenty-five, but I’ll take that out of my pay,’ or, ‘We were over by three dollars because I think I forgot to give Mrs. So-and-so her change on that ten,’ or whatever. It doesn’t take a genius to understand that he was stealing from me, okay?”
His eyes narrowed. “And no one steals from the Mooch, okay?
“Now, you’re probably sitting there asking yourself, ‘Why’s he telling me this?’
“That’s a good question. The moral of this story is this: I always find out. I always, always, ALWAYS find out.”
The room was so silent you could have heard an ant crawling on the carpet. Then someone broke the tension with the question on everyone’s minds. “What happened to the guy who was stealing?”
“Oh, he’s fine, don’t worry about him,” Scaramucci answered. “He was married to someone in my family, so I fired him but let him off the hook for being a thief. I even helped him get another job.”
Then we finally came to the real lesson. The Mooch was a great guy. “You see, guys, I’ve got a big heart, just like our President. It’s kind of like here, if you think about it. I may end up firing all of you, but I’ll help you find the best job you’ve ever had somewhere else.”
Scaramucci left the room again, triumphant. He really felt he had won over the crowd, had taught them a lesson, had made them feel loved, had felt love back in return. In some cases, he was actually right. Some staffers, particularly those from the campaign, were enjoying watching the Spicer allies—their longtime oppressors—squirm. But others were petrified.
Lower-level staff members started begging their superiors to let them stay out of the morning meetings. “If I’m not there, there’s no way someone can think I’m a leaker,” one staffer from the digital team reasoned. Others probably feared this guy might fire someone at random just to prove he could.
The paranoia reached its peak the Wednesday morning of Scaramucci’s first—and ultimately only—full week on the job. The evening before, Scaramucci had called me into his office and declared, “I have to fire this kid Michael Short—how do I do it?”
The President, Scaramucci explained, had given him explicit orders to fire Short because Priebus had not done it when he’d ordered him to months before. I told Mooch that I assumed the process would involve Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations Joe Hagin and the White House Counsel’s Office, and he dispatched me to find out what had to be done.
I walked through the Roosevelt Room and into the back hallway where Hagin’s office was. I wasn’t particularly thrilled about being anybody’s executioner, but it was too late now. The die was cast. I had mounted the dragon and there was no jumping off.
Hagin, a longtime senior aide to President George W. Bush, had been brought into the Trump White House because of his vast institutional knowledge. He was soft-spoken and had a reputation for doing things by the book. So when I walked into his office explaining the Michael Short saga, he was confused, to say the least. We walked together back to Scaramucci’s office, and Mooch launched into a lengthy explanation of what he was needing to do, and why.
Picking up a piece of paper and a black Sharpie marker, Scaramucci began drawing a diagram.
At the top of the paper he wrote “POTUS,” and drew a circle around it. In the middle of the paper on the left side, he wrote “REINCE.” On the bottom of the paper he wrote “SHORT,” and drew a circle around it. Holding the paper in front of him, he turned back to Hagin.
“This guy told this guy to fire this guy,” he said, pointing in order from “POTUS” to “REINCE” to “SHORT.”
“He didn’t do it, Joe. I’m just telling you, he didn’t do it, okay?”
He returned to the diagram, wrote “MOOCH” in the middle of the page across from “REINCE,” and drew one final circle around it.
“Now,” he continued, repeating the process, but this time pointing to his name instead of Reince’s. “When this guy tells this guy to fire this guy, you better believe it’s going to happen.” He drew an “X” through Short’s name over and over.
“Here’s something you need to understand about me, Joe,” Scaramucci said. “When the President tells me to do something, I’m just going to do it and that’s all there is to it.”
Hagin, who was sitting on the arm of Mooch’s couch with a bemused look on his face, laughed. At least he didn’t have to participate in a role-playing exercise. Hagin said he understood, but that it was the White House Counsel who was going to need to initiate the process.
Scaramucci again dispatched me, this time to the Counsel’s office. But it was late in the day, and they asked if the dismissal process could start the following morning. I reported back to Scaramucci, who relented, but was insistent that it had to happen first thing. “I want to show the President that when he makes a call, I execute immediately,” he told me.
The following morning I began the day in the Counsel’s office, even though I was growing increasingly uncomfortable. They started the process of putting together the paperwork, but as I waited in their lobby on the top floor of the West Wing, a frantic Scaramucci called my cell phone.
“Have you read Politico this morning?” he exclaimed.
I hadn’t.
“Go pull it up right now.”
Putting Mooch on hold, I pulled up Politico on my phone’s browser, and saw the headline: SCARAMUCCI THREATENS “TO FIRE EVERYBODY” TO STOP WHITE HOUSE LEAKS.
“Headline sounds accurate,” I laughed as I clicked on the article. But the first few sentences revealed a problem. The story’s lead was all about the firing of Michael Short, which obviously had not yet happened.
“I don’t know why they’re reporting this!” Scaramucci snapped. I wasn’t sure if he was blaming me for the leak. As I read down through the story, however, it was Scaramucci himself who had confirmed to the reporter, Tara Palmeri, that Short had been fired.
“I don’t know why she would do this,” he complained. “I told her not to post it until nine A.M.!”
I glanced at my watch.
“Mooch, it’s nine-fifteen.”
I walked back downstairs to find Michael Short sitting beside my desk.
“Did you do this?” he asked me, angrily. “Because everyone thinks you did this, and I think so, too.”
“I didn’t have anything to do with this story,” I replied. “And you got yourself into this mess.”
Short and I weren’t friends—far from it. But I also thought he was a talented operative, and no matter what, no one deserved the public humiliation he was starting to experience.
As press inquiries came streaming in, Short said on the record, “No one has told me anything and the entire premise is false.” Several hours of confusion went by, with Scaramucci nowhere to be found. Around 12:45 P.M., Short began calling reporters to tell them that he had resigned. Shortly thereafter, Mooch went on another tirade, vowing to rid the White House of leakers.
“This is actually a terrible thing. Let’s say I’m firing Michael Short today. The fact that you guys know about it before he does really upsets me as a human being and as a Roman Catholic,” he told reporters. “I should have the opportunity if I have to let somebody go to let the person go in a very humane, dignified way, and then the next thing … is help the person get a job somewhere, okay, because he probably has a family, right? So now you guys are talking about it, it’s not fair.… Here’s the problem with the leaking, why I have to figure out a way to get the leaking to stop, because it hurts people.” Asked again how he was going to get rid of the leakers, Scaramucci had a simple answer: “I’m going to fire everybody, that’s how I’m going to do it.”
During an interview on CNN’s morning show New Day, with Chris Cuomo, Mooch explained that he had “interviewed most of the people on the communications team in the White House, and what the President and I would like to tell everybody, we have a very, very good idea of who the leakers are, who the senior leakers are in the White House.… As the President would say in his own words, the White House leakers are small potatoes. I’ll talk to you about a few leaks that happened last night that I find reprehensible. But the White House leaks are small potatoes, relative to things that are going on, with leaking things about Syria, North Korea, or leaking things about Iraq. Those are the types of leaks that are so treasonous that a hundred fifty years ago people would have actually been hung for those types of leaks.”
In interview after interview, Scaramucci lambasted the leakers and vowed to expel them all from the White House—and generally had a grand ol’ time in the process.
Similar to other senior White House aides, Scaramucci would frequently record television interviews at “Pebble Beach,” the area on the North Lawn of the White House—which acquired its name because it was at one time covered by gravel—where news organizations set up their cameras for 24/7 coverage. But unlike with most other interviewees, who record their interviews and walk back into the West Wing without much fanfare, a crowd of reporters would assemble on the driveway and wait for Mooch, knowing that he would be more than willing to deliver a viral sound bite.
One morning, the White House regional media team organized a “radio row” in front of the West Wing, inviting various local and regional broadcasters to interview top administration officials. In a lineup of Cabinet officials and household names, Scaramucci was the biggest attraction. As he moved from tent to tent, a cloud of reporters, producers, and photographers tracked his every movement.
Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin was taken aback. Mnuchin was no stranger to red carpets, having produced Hollywood blockbusters including American Sniper, Mad Max: Fury Road, Batman v Superman, Suicide Squad, Wonder Woman, and The Lego Movie. But even he had never experienced anything quite like The Mooch Show.
“That’s what a star looks like,” he said as Mooch—in his patented shades—moved with the press in tow, the way the sun effortlessly holds the planets in its orbit.
On another occasion, Scaramucci finished up an interview at Pebble Beach and, as he walked back down the West Wing driveway, was approached by several cameramen from one of the networks, each of whom wanted to take a photo with him. This was not normal—rarely do cable network staffers ask for pictures with political aides. But Mooch was becoming a rock star—the subject of fascination, consternation, and conversation at dinner tables around the country—so even seasoned staffers turned into tourists when he came around.
“Guys, gather around, we’ve got to get a picture,” he said to the four cameramen. “I hear you’re the best in the business, so you’re going to be my guys. We’re going to have a blast.”
I snapped the photo on one of the cameramen’s phone and handed it back to him as Mooch shook their hands, hugged several of them, and predicted great times to come.
Then he put both hands on his belt buckle, leaned in close to the cameramen—each of whom happened to be African American—and said, “Can I tell you guys something? We’ve already hit it off, and I think I know one of the reasons why.”
Mooch paused for a few moments to build the anticipation.
“It’s ’cause I’m black from the waist down.”
The cameramen fell over laughing hysterically.
“He’s crazy!” one of them howled as Mooch swaggered down the driveway and back into the West Wing.
“This is fun, right?” he asked as we walked back into the West Wing, not hesitating for an answer before moving on to greet the receptionist, Secret Service officer, and various guests waiting in the lobby. It was Mooch’s world, and all of us were living in it.
His media appearances were becoming must-watch television and, his initial management style aside, in most cases they were also incredibly effective. This stood in stark contrast to Spicer’s work, which had been must-watch for much different reasons.
Mooch’s first—and ultimately only—press conference behind the podium in the Press Briefing Room was a master class in how to give and take with a hostile press corps. And similar to the President, he possessed an inherent likability that left people smiling, even when they disagreed with his points. Perhaps most important, he displayed an intense loyalty to the President and his agenda. Prior to joining the Trump campaign he had been a vocal critic, and after leaving the White House it was clear that he did not agree with many of the President’s policies. But during his tenure in the West Wing, he understood something that many others never did: when you work for the President, you subordinate your views to his. That does not mean you shy away from making your case behind closed doors, but once he makes a decision, it is your job to execute it with the same vigor you would if it had been your idea all along. Scaramucci understood this, and he also realized that some other senior aides did not.
“There are people inside the administration that think it is their job to save America from this president,” he said, with great insight, on CNN. “Okay, that is not their job. Their job is to inject this President into America so that he can explain his views properly and his policies so that we can transform America and drain the swamp and make this system fairer for the middle- and lower-income people.”
But in spite of his virtuoso early performances, it soon became apparent that Mooch was drunk on the attention and adulation. Most normal human beings would be, but he was guzzling it in a way that I had never seen before.
“I’m going to lower my profile a little bit,” he told me in his office after one tough interview that had not gone quite as well as he had hoped.
“That’s probably not a bad idea,” I replied. “Let’s let it calm down some, get the palace intrigue stuff off of the front page, then roll you back out once you’re settled in and can sell the President’s agenda.”
“Exactly,” he said. “That’s what we’re going to do.”
A half hour later I looked out of our West Wing office window and he was holding a gaggle with two dozen reporters. He was about to crash, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it.
Media attention in Trump World is a double-edged sword. There is nothing the President values more than a loyal, effective surrogate who will go toe to toe with an aggressive interviewer and not give an inch. During an appearance on Face the Nation, Senior Policy Advisor Stephen Miller was pressed by host John Dickerson to defend the President’s executive order banning individuals from certain countries from entering the United States. Miller had been largely responsible for the order’s drafting and rollout, which had resulted in widespread protests and confusion.
“Our opponents, the media, and the whole world will soon see as we begin to take further actions that the powers of the President to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned,” Miller responded.
The Washington Post called it an “authoritarian declaration.”
Later that morning he went on ABC’s This Week and defended the President’s claim that millions of people had likely voted illegally in the 2016 election.
“I’m prepared to go on any show, anywhere, any time … and say the President of the United States is correct, one hundred percent,” Miller said without blinking an eye. The Huffington Post proclaimed the appearances “a disaster,” but the President loved every second of it.
“Congratulations Stephen Miller—on representing me this morning on the various Sunday morning shows,” Trump tweeted. “Great job!”
However, when a staffer’s media coverage detracted from the Boss, it could prove disastrous.
In author Robert Greene’s modern take on Machiavellianism, The 48 Laws of Power, the number-one law is to “never outshine the master”:
Everyone has insecurities. When you show yourself in the world and display your talents, you naturally stir up all kinds of resentment, envy, and other manifestations of insecurity. This is to be expected. You cannot spend your life worrying about the petty feelings of others. With those above you, however, you must take a different approach: when it comes to power, outshining the master is perhaps the worst mistake of all.
Steve Bannon learned this “law” the hard way. Just three months after the President’s inauguration, Time magazine made Bannon its cover story, dubbing him “The Great Manipulator” and adding the tagline, “How Steve Bannon became the second most powerful man in the world.” I had been told that Time originally planned to declare him “the most powerful man in the world,” but realizing how the President would react, Bannon and his allies pressed them to change the line. Time acquiesced, but the damage was done. Saturday Night Live had already begun portraying Bannon as the Grim Reaper, bending the President to his will, and the President’s patience was growing thin.
“I like Steve, but you have to remember he was not involved in my campaign until very late,” Trump told his favorite hometown paper, the New York Post, the same week Bannon’s Time cover debuted. “I’m my own strategist and it wasn’t like I was going to change strategies because I was facing Crooked Hillary.”
In October 2017, Press Secretary Sarah Sanders walked into the Roosevelt Room, where the President was hosting prominent business leaders to discuss tax reform. As she quietly walked across the room, the President said, “There’s my Sarah—my star.” After the meeting we walked back to Sarah’s office as she joked that, after seeing the rise and fall of others in the President’s orbit, she figured his remark signaled the beginning of the end for her. “When he says you’re his big star, you know your time is almost up.” She laughed.
But for Scaramucci, the rise and fall that took some other high-profile aides months or even years to experience took place in a matter of days.
On Wednesday, July 26, five days after Scaramucci accepted the job as White House Communications Director, Mooch and I finished off the workday by walking over to the White House residence. He was excited because he had organized a dinner for the President that evening with Fox News personality Sean Hannity, a Trump favorite, and former Fox executive Bill Shine. Scaramucci’s master plan included bringing Shine onto the staff to build out a revolutionary broadcast component to the White House communications operation.
“A-level talent attracts A-level talent,” Scaramucci said as we walked down the West Colonnade connecting the West Wing to the residence. “They’re going to be shocked when they realize the people we’re going to be bringing in to replace Spicer’s hacks.”
As we walked into the Palm Room on the bottom floor, we ran into Reince Priebus, who was walking toward us.
“Can I talk to you a minute?” Priebus asked Scaramucci.
“Go ahead upstairs, Cliffy,” Mooch said. “I’ll be up in a minute.”
As much as I wanted to hear what those two could possibly have to discuss, I went ahead and walked up the stairs to the State Floor. I turned the corner just as the President stepped off the private elevator.
Trump saw me and nodded. “How’re we doing?” he asked. Usually when he asked this, which was often, he was referring to the day’s media coverage, which was usually terrible. We quickly went over a couple of stories that were dominating the media coverage, which naturally brought us to the topic of Scaramucci.
“Is it going how we hoped it would?” he inquired.
I didn’t have any time to reflect on that question. I mean, where to even begin? So I stuck to the basics.
“We’ve got a lot of work to do to professionalize the operation, but we’re headed in a better direction,” I replied (and hoped). “And at least you know the comms team is going to have your back now.” That, for sure, was true. The Mooch was a lot of things, but disloyal to the President was not one of them.
“It’s about time,” the President said as Scaramucci topped the stairs and joined the conversation.
“There he is,” Trump said, smiling. “Let’s go have dinner.”
I wasn’t at the dinner, and I don’t know what was on the menu. But what happened afterward was something everyone in Washington, D.C., would feast on. It was precipitated, as so many things in the Trump White House were, by a tweet. At some point that evening, Ryan Lizza, a writer for The New Yorker, tweeted that a senior White House official had informed him that the First Lady, Hannity, and Shine were at dinner with the President.
The Mooch was enraged by this. Another leak!
After having just run into Priebus on the way over to the dinner, Scaramucci was convinced this “senior White House official” was Reince. He had no proof of this, but he was probably right. I could not quite understand why it was such a big deal. Nobody would really be surprised that the President was meeting with either of these guys. Maybe I was too conditioned to everything leaking.
“He’s always going to try to ruin anything I try to do here,” he growled about Priebus. “That’s okay, watch what I do. I’m going to take care of this.” What happened next became so infamous that it survived as a topic of conversation for months, even in the Trump White House, where story lines changed by the hour.
Here’s how it was told by Ryan Lizza in The New Yorker.
On Wednesday night, I received a phone call from Anthony Scaramucci.… He wasn’t happy.…
In Scaramucci’s view, the fact that word of the dinner had reached a reporter was evidence that his rivals in the West Wing, particularly Reince Priebus, the White House Chief of Staff, were plotting against him.…
“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 swamp will not defeat him,” he said, breaking into the third person. “They’re trying to resist me, but it’s not going to work.…”
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 c—,” he said, speaking of Trump’s chief strategist. “I’m not trying to build my own brand off the f—ing strength of the President. I’m here to serve the country.”
The story went live just before 2 P.M. on Thursday, July 27, the day after the dinner. It melted the internet, then completely took over cable television. Scaramucci, who had returned to New York, called me, defiant.
“Don’t sweat it,” he said dismissively. “I talked to the President. He thinks it’s hilarious. But can you believe this guy Lizza? I’ve known his family for years and he still set me up. There’s no loyalty. That’s changing, though, starting with the White House. Reince is going to be gone soon. They’re going to try to use this against me, but it’s going to backfire because the President is behind me 100 percent.”
I caught the President before he went up to the residence that evening. He was less dismissive of the media coverage than Scaramucci had let on. But he seemed less angry than he was befuddled.
“Can you believe this guy? I’ve never seen anything like it.” Said the guy who hosted a reality show with Dennis Rodman, Omarosa, and Gary Busey.
I still believed the Mooch could be a great asset to the President—if he could survive the initial craziness and bring himself under control. Trump didn’t seem so sure anymore.
“He’s completely out of his mind—like, on drugs or something—totally out of his mind,” the President continued. “We’ll figure it out, but the guy is crazy.” I didn’t think Mooch was on drugs, and I don’t think Trump really meant that, either. He was just trying to say that there had to be some explanation for this guy, who seemed totally competent and in control in one moment, only to run completely off the rails the next. Regardless, on a rainy Friday evening, the President began “figuring it out.”
I have no idea how Reince Priebus reacted to Mooch’s tirade with Ryan Lizza. He couldn’t possibly have been happy about it. But in a flash, that—or anything else at the White House—was no longer his concern.
“I am pleased to inform you,” Trump tweeted not twenty-four hours after the story hit, “that I have just named General/Secretary John F Kelly as White House Chief of Staff. He is a Great American and a Great Leader. John has also done a spectacular job at Homeland Security. He has been a true star of my Administration.
“I would like to thank Reince Priebus for his service and dedication to his country,” he added. “We accomplished a lot together and I am proud of him!” Reince effectively lasted a week longer than his closest ally in the White House, Sean Spicer, although Sean stuck around “on the payroll” for a while, but was no longer involved in the day-to-day operations. It was a devastating blow to the RNC faction of the Trump White House.
The following morning, I poked my head into Jared Kushner’s office—along with me, he had been another Scaramucci booster and Priebus nemesis. I silently raised my eyebrows.
“Mooch was like a Reince-seeking missile,” Jared said with a laugh. “We’ll see if he blew himself up in the process.” Looking back, I wondered. Was this Jared’s plan all along? He was as smooth as they came—sharp, low-key, always dressed immaculately in well-tailored attire. But maybe what the President liked most about his son-in-law was that he was a “killer,” too. Silent, but deadly. Did he see this all coming? Did he know what was going to come next?
Scaramucci was elated that he had finally taken out his longtime nemesis, but General Kelly’s no-nonsense reputation immediately concerned him. Understandably so. Kelly had been a four-star Marine general, and in the few times I’d seen him in the West Wing, he didn’t seem like the most pleasant guy to be around. But I was also optimistic that his approach might be able to unite a fractious West Wing that couldn’t seem to get its act together.
“What do you think this means?” Scaramucci asked me on the phone. “Have you talked to the President about me or heard anything?”
I had not spoken to the President since that announcement and did not share with the Mooch what Trump had said the night before. But the fact that Scaramucci had gone from dismissive about his prospects to worried was a telling sign.
In reality, the backlash over Mooch’s meltdown was still the main story on the news. The President had watched this with growing irritation.
The following Monday morning, Scaramucci came into the West Wing ready to get back to work. He seemed like he had finally committed himself to keeping his head down and trying to stay out of the news. Maybe, just maybe, I hoped, he could survive this and focus on his duties. Then he gave me another reason to keep having his back.
“First things first,” he said. “You’re officially getting named my number two—Deputy Communications Director and Chief of Staff for the Communications Department. We’ll announce it in the team meeting this morning. Second, I’ve got the first draft of a plan that is going to be our starting point for restructuring everything. Let’s start going over this, and after General Kelly is sworn in this morning, we’ll get his buy-in and start getting it done.”
With Priebus and Spicer both out, he wanted to enter a new phase. “We tore it down,” he quipped. “Now we’ve got to build it back up.” These were comforting words. I only hoped he meant them.
A few minutes later, Madeleine Westerhout, the President’s executive assistant, knocked on the door and told Scaramucci that the newly sworn-in Chief of Staff wanted to see him. He hopped up, gave me a hopeful smile, and followed her to his office. I stayed behind and began glancing over the ideas he had sketched out.
Wow, this is actually really good.
He was planning for a slimmed-down operation with everyone having clearly defined responsibilities, lines of communication, and accountability. At this moment I was reminded that Mooch, prior to becoming an unlikely media star, had been a wildly successful CEO. I hadn’t even gotten through the first couples of pages, however, when Mooch walked back in, sat down, and leaned back in his chair.
“How’d it go?” I asked.
He sat completely still, looking at a blank space on the wall.
“I got fired,” he said calmly.
“Shut up,” I said with a chuckle.
He turned and looked straight into my eyes. “No, I’m serious. He fired me. The Lizza piece did me in. They killed me. It’s over.” He had just entered his eleventh day on the job—and it came to the most humiliating, if self-inflicted, end. I couldn’t help but feel bad for him.
He returned to staring blankly at the wall for a few moments, then looked back at me. “I’m sorry I Iet you down,” he said, reaching out to shake my hand. “You stuck your neck out for me and I’ll never forget it.”
I didn’t know what to say. I tucked the plans back inside a purple folder and set it on the floor beside me.
“Dude, don’t worry about me,” I said. “I’ll be fine. But what’re you going to do now?”
I watched him for a moment sink deeper into despair, and then just as quickly, saw a new spark slowly taking flame in his eyes. This was not going to destroy him. He was going to get back up again.
“I’ve been up and I’ve been down.” He shrugged, slumping down in his chair. “This is the White House, man. This is the top of the mountain. I made it. But I’ve been low, too. I know what that’s like, but I always come back. Always.” The transformation took place in milliseconds.
He wasn’t quite done yet. He hatched a plan to try to get Kushner to make an end run around the new Chief of Staff and make an appeal directly to the President to save his job. Jared might have had the power to pull this off, if he really wanted to. But why? The Mooch had done his task—he blew up Reince. If he had to blow up himself in the process—hey, this is the big leagues, baby.
Still, for the next several hours, Mooch gave it a try. But the decision had been made, and General Kelly had been given the authority that Priebus never earned. Still, it’s hard to imagine Kelly would have done this, on his first day, without at least Trump’s tacit approval. Tellingly, the firing did not leak and only made its way to the press hours later, after Mooch had quietly left the White House of his own volition.
In a matter of eleven days, Scaramucci had gone from being little known outside the rarefied society of Wall Street tycoons to being a household name in Middle America. A pollster friend told me that his name recognition had gone from basically zero to over 50 percent nationally in the span of a week. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said with genuine amazement.
Walking home from the White House the night that Mooch was fired, I passed by two homeless gentlemen. One was leaned over, resting his arms on the handle of his shopping cart. The other was seated on the ground, looking up at his friend, pounding his fist into his other hand and speaking passionately. As I got closer, the topic of discussion quickly became clear.
“Mooch is my dude!” the man on the ground proclaimed. The two men didn’t own TVs, but they not only knew who Mooch was, they had fully formed opinions about him. And amid this reality was the key to Mooch’s future. Trump had made him a star.
The Mooch affair demonstrated many of the flaws—serious flaws—in the Trump White House operation. There were too many factions, too many people interested in hurting others rather than carrying out their duties, and a lack of leadership in making sure this was all managed. But I also saw in retrospect the flaws in myself. The Scaramucci affair encapsulated every human flaw that I embodied during my time in the White House.
I was selfish. I viciously criticized Priebus, Bannon, and Spicer—all of whom outranked me—for their self-serving desire to keep Mooch out. But I let myself off the hook for my self-serving desire to have him come in. I was nakedly ambitious. I clawed, schemed, and maneuvered to secure a better position for myself, and saw Mooch as the ideal vehicle to help make that happen. I was ruthless. Spicer had a lovely family—a beautiful wife and precious children—whom I had met. I had even taken a family photo of them together in the Press Secretary’s office. But they never crossed my mind when I was laboring to push Sean out. I was a coward. I wasn’t as aggressive as I should have been in pushing back on Mooch’s early tactics, mainly because that could have hurt me (selfish once again). I lacked compassion. I relished the horror of former RNC aides who were suddenly terrified for their livelihoods and careers. Most of all, I saw how the White House, the need to stay in and cling to your access, can become more important than the values that you brought with you. This was a fate that would befall other good people I knew there.
Eight months after Scaramucci’s unceremonious departure from the West Wing, he came back to D.C. for the annual White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. Prior to the event, we met for lunch at the Four Seasons Hotel in Georgetown. Dressed in tan cargo pants and a black, long-sleeve pullover, he appeared to be in high spirits.
“I kiss the ground every single morning I wake up,” he said, smiling. Over a massive plate of shrimp cocktail and crab cakes, Scaramucci explained that his White House experience—as short as it was—had been transformative.
Since early in the administration, when Scaramucci and Priebus first locked horns over Mooch’s potential White House job, Scaramucci had been in the process of selling his company, SkyBridge Capital, to a Chinese conglomerate for $180 million. The move required a lengthy review and regulatory approval that was not certain to come. Additionally, while his business was in limbo, Scaramucci’s relationship with his pregnant wife was deteriorating. In fact, she would later reveal that Mooch took the White House job without even discussing it with her.
“We actually never really talked about it,” she said in a televised interview. “So, obviously, he was campaigning with him. And then one thing led to another [and] kind of like spiraled out of control.”
She eventually filed for divorce, but after he left the White House they reconciled before their separation was finalized.
Sitting in the dining room of the Four Seasons, Mooch explained that his desire for revenge against Priebus, combined with his ambition to work in the White House, was so strong that it caused him to lose sight of what was truly important in his life, namely his family and the company he had spent over a decade of his life building.
“I got my priorities out of order,” he said, biting into a shrimp before wiping his mouth with a cloth napkin. “And I want you to never forget what I’m telling you right now, because you need to learn from me instead of having to learn it for yourself. I got sucked into this political stuff. The President wanted me to run OPL but Reince stopped it. I got angry. I let my pride get in the way. So when people came along and wanted to use me to take him out, I did it. I got him back and I made it into the White House. But you know what? It wasn’t worth it, and I almost lost everything in the process.
“But now I’m like Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas morning. I woke up. I realized that I’d almost lost my wife, I’d almost lost my family, and I’d almost lost my business, and the good Lord gave me a second chance. I got visited by the three ghosts and I’ll never be the same.”
Mooch walked me to the lobby of the Four Seasons and finished up by giving me one last word of wisdom: “None of this matters if it costs you what really matters.”
This was the best advice I received from anyone during my entire time in the Trump White House. I wish I’d taken it more often.