Anthony Scaramucci, the new White House communications director, loves the president. Loves him. He said this at least three times on Friday, in his spectacularly entertaining inaugural appearance before the White House press corps.
He loves Sean Spicer, the press secretary who quit the instant Scaramucci was hired. “I love the guy, I wish him well, and I hope he goes on to make a tremendous amount of money,” Scaramucci said.
People call Scaramucci “the Mooch,” and he doesn’t push back on this. He loves getting his chops busted—loves it. He also loves busting chops. Once he busted the president’s chops by calling him a “hack.” Does the president ever let him forget about that? Whatta you think? He busts the presidents chops, president busts him right back. It’s love.
He loves Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff who came right up to the point of quitting before remembering that unflinching, hackish loyalty is his lodestar in life. “We are a little bit like brothers,” Scaramucci said, “where we rough each other up once in awhile, which is normal for brothers, lot of people have brothers and you get that.” Scaramucci revealed that he even offered Priebus a job at his hedge fund, SkyBridge Capital, six years ago, but the poor mook didn’t take it. Coulda made a lot of money, had all the choice steaks, the best champagne, the cars, the women.
Mooch loves Steve Bannon, who also nearly quit once Scaramucci was hired. But Scaramucci thinks Bannon’s a genius—I mean, the brains on this guy. They both worked at Goldman Sachs, so you know they’re both good guys. “We didn’t really overlap at Goldman Sachs,” Scaramucci said, “but we both worked there for a period of time. And there was something great about that culture back in yesteryear. Maybe it’s true today.” (It definitely isn’t the same, Mooch. Those chuckleheads working there now, they have no idea.)
Did you know Scaramucci went to Harvard Law School, too? “A little name-dropping there,” he said. This guy. You can read about that and more, in his book.
There was a lot of love at Friday’s press briefing. But Scaramucci’s heart belongs to the big guy, the main man, the president.
“I think he’s got some of the best political instincts in the world, and perhaps in history, if you think about it,” Scaramucci said.
I mean, this president, is he something or is he something?
“[Trump] is the most competitive person I have ever met,” he said. “I have seen him throw a dead spiral through a tire. I’ve seen him at Madison Square Garden, with a topcoat on, standing in the key and he’s hitting foul shots and swishing them.” The Mooch illustrates each of these feats of athletic domination with the appropriate hand gestures.
“He sinks three-foot putts,” Scaramucci glowed.
This is why the president is going to get a health care “win” in the end, the Mooch predicted.
“The president has really good karma.”
Scaramucci’s a big-hearted guy, so he’s determined to love the hacks in the press, too. He’s gonna use a little Wall Street magic to get the media to see things his way. “To use a Wall Street expression,” he told the reporters, “there might be an arbitrage spread between how well we are doing and how well some of you guys think we are doing, and we’re going to work hard to close that spread.” And maybe make a few bucks doing it, eh?
The problem with these hacks—and he loves them—is they’ve just gotta trust the president a little more, maybe stop overthinking it quite so much. Say you’ve got a question about those 3–5 million people the president says voted illegally. Some jerk—just joking, just having some fun here, we like to bust chops—did in this in the Q&A.
“So, if the president says it—let me do more research on it—my guess is that there’s probably some level of truth to that,” Scaramucci said. See? Closing that arbitrage spread already.
The big guy in the Oval Office, love him to death, really has done it. He’s hired a smoother version of himself to run his communications stop. This is going to be fantastic. And if you don’t like it, Spicer, Bannon, Priebus, whoever? Then you can vamoose. Love you to death.
