By the summer of 2017, covering the Trump Show had become something of a family affair. My older daughter, Emily, was working for CNN as an intern, spending most of her time on Capitol Hill. My younger daughter, Anna, still in high school, spent the month of July helping me out at work. Both of them already knew journalism requires a willingness to work long, unpredictable hours and a thick skin, but none of us could have predicted the events we would witness during the summer ahead.
I congratulated Emily on Twitter when she wrote her first story for CNN. I was incredibly proud, but one troll seized the opportunity to attack both of us.
“Father crooked = Daughter crooked,” said the tweet by a self-described supporter of the president, “double the lies = double the sedition.”
You expect that kind of thing from anonymous trolls on Twitter, but Anna quickly saw firsthand that the nastiness extended straight into the West Wing of the White House.
Early on the morning of July 21, 2017, I spoke to both Sean Spicer and Reince Priebus over the phone. There had been reports that Anthony Scaramucci, a brash and fast-talking investment banker from Long Island, was about to be hired as the White House communications director. Both Spicer and Priebus assured me the reports were wrong. Priebus acknowledged there were some in the West Wing who were encouraging the president to hire Scaramucci, but he said if Trump decided to bring him onto the White House staff, it would almost certainly be in another role. After all, he told me, Scaramucci had no experience in either government or communications. Why, Priebus asked me, would the president hire him to be communications director? Spicer gave me a more definitive denial.
“It’s not going to happen,” he told me.
A couple of hours later, I got word Scaramucci had just been offered the job.
So, at 11:20 A.M., I hustled up to Spicer’s office to try to find out what was going on. Anna grabbed a notepad and pen and followed me through the briefing room and up the ramp to the suite of offices known as “upper press.” As we turned down the narrow hallway leading to the press secretary’s office, we saw Spicer and Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Sanders walking into his office from the other direction. Anna and I arrived at the door to his office at almost exactly the same time Sean did.
“Hey, Sean,” I asked. “So, this is happening?”
Spicer looked at me with a smirk, and before I could say another word, he slammed the door in my face. If I had been six inches closer, I might have had a broken nose. As it was, both Anna and I felt the breeze from the door slamming shut.
Twenty minutes later, the White House announced that Sean Spicer had resigned. I would later learn that just minutes before slamming the door in my face, Spicer had turned in his letter of resignation to the president. And yes, Scaramucci would be the new communications director, Sarah Sanders the new press secretary.
The press release announcing Scaramucci’s appointment said he would be reporting directly to the president, not to the chief of staff, which would have been customary for a communications director. Before it was sent out, Priebus went into Scaramucci’s new office.
“We need to take this out,” Priebus told him, pointing to the line in the press release that said Scaramucci would be reporting directly to the president.
“It’s staying in, Reince,” Scaramucci said. “That’s the way it is. Don’t worry about it.”
And with that, Priebus slowly walked out, powerless and humiliated. Priebus had the title chief of staff, but that moment made it clear who held the power. Scaramucci was calling the shots and Priebus couldn’t do anything about it.
As it turned out, this was not only the end of Spicer’s brief and troubled tenure as White House press secretary. This would also be the beginning of the end of phase one of the Trump presidency. Within a month, Priebus and chief strategist Bannon would be gone, and a retired marine general, John Kelly, would be the new chief of staff. Kelly would make a valiant effort to impose order in the West Wing.
But between phase one and phase two, there was Scaramucci. He would go out in an inglorious blaze just ten days later, but what a ten days it was.
Scaramucci spoke a little like Trump—almost always off the cuff, making grand pronouncements and loving every minute of the spotlight. That first day—and he had still not officially taken over as communications director—he came into the White House briefing room and gave a wonderfully absurd performance. Spicer had not held a televised briefing in nearly a month; as Scaramucci went on, it seemed like he might never stop.
He was full of love, really full of love, and he made sure everyone knew it, using the word twenty-one times—professing his love for the president, his love for Sarah Sanders, his love for the people who loved the president, and even his love for Sean Spicer and Reince Priebus, who had both done everything they could to prevent Scaramucci from getting his job (“I love these guys”).
When he called on me, I asked a variation of the same question that had offended Spicer so greatly.
“Is it your commitment to the best of your ability to give accurate information, the truth, from that podium?”
He seemed to love that question too: “I am going to do the best I can.”
I also asked if he and Sarah Sanders would commit to holding regular on-camera press briefings, something Spicer had slowly done away with.
“If she supplies hair and makeup, I will consider it, okay?” Scaramucci said, provoking laughter, something we had not heard in the briefing room for a long time. “But I need a lot of hair and makeup, Jon. I don’t know. Maybe.”
And then I snuck in one more:
“I know you’ve been one of the president’s strongest supporters for a while now. But does he know what you said about him back in 2015, when you said he was a hack politician?”
“Yes, he brings it up—he brings it up every fifteen seconds, all right?” Scaramucci said, provoking more laughter. “I should have never said that about him. So, Mr. President, if you’re listening, I personally apologize for the fiftieth time for saying that.”
Compared to our last six months with Spicer, “the Mooch” was a breath of fresh air in the press room. But he was a terror to the press office. It began at his first meeting with the roughly forty people who worked on the White House communications staff.
He walked into the meeting, which was held in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, with a junior press aide named Cliff Sims. Scaramucci decided he trusted Sims, apparently because Spicer had not. Sims, who was by Scaramucci’s side for his entire ten and a half days on the job, describes the scene vividly in his own book, Team of Vipers.
“There are some people in this room who are leakers,” Scaramucci began. “And guess what? I know who you are.”
When word of that meeting leaked out, Scaramucci convened another one the following day and said the firings would start right away and continue until the leaks stopped.
To illustrate his plan to crack down on leaks, he started drawing an organizational chart that had Scaramucci at the top and then Sarah Sanders and then others down the line. As Scaramucci drew an elongated oval around the names, one person in the meeting later told me he and others in the room had struggled to keep from laughing because Scaramucci’s diagram looked just like a penis. Not a propitious start for the new communications director.
According to Sims, during the second meeting, Deputy Communications Director Jessica Ditto broke down in tears, telling Scaramucci “there [were] some really good people” on the communications team. The tears prompted Scaramucci to soften his tone, telling a story about how he had once fired a manager of an ice-cream shop he used to own because he caught the manager stealing from him. But the guy was married to somebody in his family, so he forgave him and helped him find another job. The point: The Mooch is tough but compassionate.
“You see, guys, I’ve got a big heart, just like our president,” Scaramucci said, according to Sims. “I may end up firing all of you, but I’ll help you find the best job you’ve ever had somewhere else.”
In the end, there was only one person Scaramucci ended up forcing out: a junior staffer named Michael Short, who had worked at the Republican National Committee during the campaign. I never knew Short to leak anything and doubt he ever did. He was forced to resign but the steady stream of leaks at the White House didn’t stop.
While Scaramucci was terrorizing the White House press staff, he was waging an all-out charm offensive with the news media. On one of his first days on the job, he met over breakfast with leaders of the White House Correspondents’ Association and the bureau chiefs of the five major television networks.
Meetings between Spicer and this group had often devolved into shouting sessions with Spicer complaining, usually about some perceived slight against him. This breakfast meeting was a few blocks from the White House at a large table in the back of the restaurant at the St. Regis hotel. Scaramucci walked in smiling with big handshakes for everybody around the table. He sat down and proclaimed he was going to repair the president’s relationship with the press.
CNN bureau chief Sam Feist wanted to clear up one thing first: What did the new communications director want to be called?
“Do you want to be called ‘Mooch’?” he asked. “Or is that too informal?”
“Shouldn’t it be ‘Mr. Scaramucci, sir’?” I joked.
And with that, he jumped out of his chair, leaned across the table, reached out his right arm, and gave me the middle finger. For a nanosecond, it seemed he might have actually taken offense, but then he let out a big laugh, and so did everyone else.
Without being asked, he declared: “I’m bringing the president to your dinner next year!” President Trump, just a couple of months earlier, had skipped the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner, ordered everybody in his administration to skip it too, and held a rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on the same night. Trump was the first president to skip the dinner since Ronald Reagan in 1981. And even Reagan, who couldn’t attend because he had recently been shot, called in and addressed the dinner over the phone.
Trump seemed to love the Scaramucci sideshow at first, but by about day four or five, I began to sense the new communications director was communicating a little too much for a president who likes to do the communicating himself.
His fate was sealed during a late-night, profanity-laced phone call to Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker that Scaramucci failed to specify was off the record. And like so much else in this presidency, it all started with a tweet.
Earlier that evening, Lizza had tweeted what appeared to be a minor scoop. It was interesting but hardly a state secret:
Ryan Lizza
(@RyanLizza)
Scoop: Trump is dining tonight w/Sean Hannity, Bill Shine (former Fox News executive), & Anthony Scaramucci, per 2 knowledgeable sources
7/26/17, 7:36 PM
Scaramucci called him to ask who had told him about the dinner. He wanted to find—and punish—the leaker, looking to make good on his zero-tolerance promise.
The Scaramucci/Lizza conversation was one of a kind, even by the standards of the Trump White House, where outrageous statements, infighting, sniping, and recriminations were a daily reality. It was a White House interview for the ages. And Lizza not only wrote the whole thing up, he recorded it and put out the audio, which ran over and over again (with lots of profanities bleeped out) on CNN and MSNBC.
The quotes are unlike any ever uttered by a White House communications director to a reporter and they spelled the end of his brief tenure as communications director.
“Reince is a fucking paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac,” he said of the White House chief of staff.
He said Reince would be fired. And that he had called the FBI and Department of Justice to ask them to investigate Priebus for leaking information contained in his financial disclosure, a document that, incidentally, was publicly available.
Then he went after Chief Strategist Steve Bannon.
“I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own cock,” Scaramucci told Lizza. “I’m not trying to build my own brand off the fucking strength of the president. I’m here to serve the country.”
There was no recovering. Though it took a few days, Scaramucci was done. The “Mooch” era was over. And though he didn’t last, he was able to enjoy watching the collateral damage from afar. Within weeks, Bannon and Priebus would be gone too.
A few days earlier, on the evening of Spicer’s resignation, I had gone up to his office to see him one last time before he left. This wasn’t a news call. I wanted to wish him well and, just maybe, let bygones be bygones. I wanted to let him know that I knew he had been under enormous pressure. I thought there was even a chance he might apologize for slamming the door in my face that morning. I would tell him that I understood. After all, he had just been put in a situation so bad that he was forced to quit. Once again, I brought my daughter Anna with me.
Anna and I ran into Priebus in the hallway outside Sean’s office. As we talked for a few minutes, Priebus assured me that he and Scaramucci were actually friends. He told me a story about how Scaramucci had offered him a job, after the 2012 election, running his company SkyBridge Capital. After Priebus walked away, I saw Spicer coming out of his office. He looked my way and scowled. And then he saw NBC News correspondent Hallie Jackson, who had just walked up from the briefing room, and smiled.
“Do you have sixty seconds for me?” Jackson asked.
“Sure,” Spicer replied.
“Sixty seconds for me, Sean?” I asked, walking with Anna up to the door of his office.
“Not for you,” came the reply, and for the second time that day, he slammed the door in my face, my daughter Anna again by my side.
Spicer was able to watch all of Scaramucci’s rise and fall from right there in the White House complex. He moved out of the press secretary’s office and into an office next door in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. He didn’t seem to have much work to do, but he remained on the government payroll for another month. Of course, everybody asked him about his plans. He told people he was being courted by ABC’s hit show Dancing with the Stars, but that he was likely to turn them down.*
Spicer had lofty ambitions for turning his fame into a big post–White House career. As soon as he left, he hired Washington superlawyer Bob Barnett to help him make his next move. Barnett is the friend of the Clintons who, as described in chapter 5 of this book, was helping Hillary Clinton prepare to debate Donald Trump when news of the Access Hollywood video broke. It was Barnett who, on his laptop computer, first played the video for Hillary Clinton that so many people thought would doom Trump’s campaign. With Barnett’s help, Spicer met with executives at the major TV networks, hoping to land a high-profile job as a network analyst. It didn’t happen. As an executive for one broadcast network (not ABC) told me at the time, they agreed to meet with Spicer out of curiosity more than anything else; they wanted to see what the angry man behind the podium was like in person but had no desire whatsoever to hire him.
The week after his resignation, while he was still at the White House, Spicer ran into my daughter Anna but clearly did not recognize her from the door slams just four days earlier. Or maybe he hadn’t noticed she had been there in the first place. Spicer said hello to her, and my ABC News colleague Gary Rosenberg snapped a photo.
Just after taking that photo, Gary told Spicer that Anna was my daughter. He just shook his head, laughed, and walked away.
With his history in Washington, Spicer had come into the job as one of the most experienced and seemingly well-qualified members of President Trump’s senior staff. But he turned out to be comically unfit for the job. To the public, he’ll be remembered for the unforgettable skits on Saturday Night Live. To White House reporters, he’ll be remembered as the press secretary who killed the televised daily White House briefing and tried to move the press corps out of the White House.
To be sure, Spicer had an impossibly difficult job. Every press secretary makes mistakes, but because of the public fascination with Trump, Spicer’s mistakes were magnified many times over. Day in and day out, his briefings were carried live by the cable news channels, something that only occasionally happened with his predecessors. So, when Spicer walked out to the podium one Friday in May 2017 wearing an upside-down flag pin, it was headline news. After all, according to the US Code, the flag should be displayed upside down only “as a signal of dire distress.” Jennifer Bendery of the Huffington Post tweeted the question on many minds: “Spicer’s USA flag pin is upside down. A silent scream for help?”
Any time Spicer misspoke, he faced instant ridicule on Twitter and provided material likely to be used by late-night comedians. Some of the mistakes were trivial. He had a famously hard time pronouncing names and he seemed unable to say more than two or three complete sentences without messing up the grammar.
In one briefing that Spicer gave, he made mistakes from which he would never recover. On April 11, 2017, Spicer addressed the press shortly after President Trump ordered air strikes on Syria in retaliation for a poison gas attack blamed on Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. The transcript of the briefing is a challenge to read because Spicer continually misspeaks and cannot seem to pronounce Assad’s name. He was trying to make a point that should have been an easy one to make: What Assad had done was bad, really bad.
“Look—we didn’t use chemical weapons in World War II,” he said.
Fair enough. And that much was accurate.
“You know, you had someone as despicable as Hitler who didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons.”
Uh-oh. Hitler didn’t use chemical weapons? Could the White House press secretary really not know that millions of Jews were gassed to death during the Holocaust?
This was a catastrophically bad thing for a White House press secretary to say. Was he denying the Holocaust? Or, alternatively, had he really never learned about the gas chambers?
Spicer continued to talk, totally unaware that he had just made a disastrous mistake. And amazingly, at first nobody in the briefing room called him on it.
The next reporter he called on asked him if the White House planned to release the president’s tax returns on April 15 (that was a no) and how many people would be at the White House Easter Egg Roll (seriously). Several more questions followed. One reporter asked about Ivanka Trump’s role in the president’s decision to attack Syria. There were questions on North Korea and on health care.
Finally, Spicer called on my ABC News colleague Cecilia Vega.
“I just want to give you an opportunity to clarify something you said,” Vega said, reading back his words. “‘Hitler didn’t even sink to the level of using chemical weapons.’ What did you mean by that?”
You could almost see Spicer searching through his brain to find the answer. Again, the transcript here is difficult to read, but only because it is exactly what Spicer said.
SPICER: I think when you come to sarin gas, there was no—he was not using the gas on his own people the same way that Assad is doing, I mean, there was clearly—I understand your point, thank you.
VEGA: I’m just getting—
SPICER: Thank you, I appreciate that. There was not—he brought them into the Holocaust center, I understand that. But I’m saying in the way that Assad used them, where he went into towns, dropped them down to innocent—into the middle of towns. It was brought—so the use of it—I appreciate the clarification there. That was not the intent.
And there were the words Spicer will never live down: “Holocaust center.”
To his credit, Spicer completely owned his mistake.
“This may have been the lowest moment I had in the White House,” Spicer later said. “I alone had fumbled; no one else made me do it.”
Not long before he quit, a White House colleague of mine told Spicer he would be able to write quite a book, given all that he had witnessed behind the scenes at the White House. He looked at the two of us and smiled.
“No, no,” he told us. “Two books.”
The first book, he said, would be written for the Trump faithful. He would write about the brilliance of Donald Trump and it would be bought by all those people at Trump rallies wearing “Make America Great Again” hats and clamoring to take selfies with the president.
The true tell-all, where he would reveal all the chaos he had witnessed behind the scenes, would come later, presumably when he wouldn’t mind offending Trump or his supporters.
A couple of months after Spicer resigned, Mike Allen of Axios emailed him for comment on a story he was writing that involved Spicer.
“Mike, please stop texting/emailing me unsolicited anymore,” Spicer wrote back.
Allen wrote back with a question mark.
“I’m not sure what that means,” Spicer answered. “From a legal standpoint I want to be clear: Do not email or text me again. Should you do again I will report to the appropriate authorities.”
The incident was bizarre but a perfect capstone to Spicer’s career as a White House press secretary—thin-skinned, grammatically incorrect, and wrong on the facts. What law did he think Mike Allen had violated by asking a question of a former White House press secretary?
Despite Mike’s experience, I reached out to Spicer in writing this book and he agreed to meet with me. We spoke for about an hour in a small conference room in the basement of the Willard Hotel in Washington. About twenty minutes into our conversation, I asked Sean about slamming the door in my face. After a long pause, he said something that surprised me.
“Sorry about that,” he said.
I didn’t say anything at first, waiting for him to speak again. After another pause, he told me I had seen him right after the most difficult and painful moment of his life. He had resigned from what he thought was his dream job. And he felt let down by people close to him. Priebus had assured him he would not let the president hire Scaramucci as communications director. And then when the president said he was doing just that, Priebus did not speak up or do anything to convince the president not to do it. From Spicer it was a rare moment of self-reflection. And although the apology came two years later and only after I asked about what he did, it seemed genuine.
“And I don’t know if you knew this,” I told him. “But that was my daughter who was with me.”
“I know,” he said. And after another pause, “Tell her I said sorry.”
In my career as a journalist, I have interacted with thirteen different press secretaries (so far) under four different presidents. Those interactions can be challenging. They can be adversarial. It’s the nature of the job. I had a particularly tense relationship at times with Obama’s press secretary Jay Carney. In fact, when Spicer was the communications director for the RNC, he would often gleefully send out press releases with video clips of my aggressively questioning Carney during White House briefings. But even in the most heated moments, Jay Carney did not take it personally. He was never afraid to call on me in briefings and I don’t believe he ever intentionally lied to me. Spicer was the first White House press secretary I encountered who habitually said things that were simply untrue.
I don’t know if he will ever write a second book, but Spicer wrote the first one. In the book, he suggested that I had branded him a liar by asking him during his first briefing if he intended to tell the truth from the White House podium.
“Rarely do reporters have their integrity questioned the way Jonathan questioned mine,” he wrote.
That’s quite a statement coming from the former spokesman for a president who routinely accuses reporters of making things up and betraying their country.
I wrote a scathing review of Spicer’s book in The Wall Street Journal. In a measure of how many people Spicer had alienated during his brief White House tenure, I heard from several of Spicer’s former White House colleagues, who praised the review. The first response came in a text message from the person who precipitated Spicer’s abrupt departure.
“Jonathan, it’s Anthony Scaramucci,” the text read. “Rough review in WSJ. You left two things out: he was a bag carrying congenital liar for Reince and if he was born 100 years ago, the movies would have been called ‘The Four Stooges.’ My nickname for him was Liar Spice. Every Spice Girl has a nickname—that’s his!”
Years from now, the veterans of the Trump White House will have one hell of a reunion.