New White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci threatened to call the FBI on White House chief of staff Reince Priebus for the high crime of releasing the Mooch’s top-secret financial disclosure form. Only Priebus didn’t release it: the form was public. And Scaramucci humiliated himself in front of everyone. Scaramucci also phoned up a reporter, called his colleague “a fucking paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac,” then followed up by forcing news agencies across the world to worry about whether auto-fellatio is a hyphenated term.
So clearly someone is in trouble. And it’s Preibus. Because … look, Scaramucci is a foul-mouthed Goldman Sachs alum who worked in the private wealth financial group teaching billionaires how to hide their bundles, and who just sold his international hedge fund to Chinese investors in a controversial deal that’s still under investigation but could net the Mooch better than $100 million. Reince Priebus is … from Wisconsin. Done.
Donald Trump is totally loving Scaramucci’s attack. And with both Mooch and Kellyanne Conway informing Priebus and all those staffers who came from the RNC that they should start boxing up their desks, it’s time to look at the next candidates for White House chief of staff.
Chief of staff is generally thought of as the most powerful role in the White House. However, in the Donald Trump regime, it’s been slightly downgraded to somewhere between the guy that loads the official Trump Tower Taco Bowl for delivery on Marine One and the woman who scrubs the spittle flecks off the Resolute Desk. So … clearly a plum job.
Scaramucci himself was supposedly brought into the White House as a potential Reince-placement. And now that he’s nearing two weeks in his current job, it is clearly getting to be time to move along. Conway is also on the chief of staff short list. She could probably do that and keep her current job—it’s not as if adding Reince’s heavy load of fuming about being ignored would take a big chunk out of anyone’s day.
But there are other candidates.
Newt Gingrich: Gingrich has spent a lot of time with the president in recent weeks and has become a close confidant of the Trump family. He is a loyalist from the early campaign days but is not afraid to tell the president when he thinks he is making a mistake. Most recently, Gingrich told Trump he should not fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
There are two big problems with Newt. First, he thinks he’s smart. This brings up the idea that he might think that he’s almost as smart as Donald, which is the first step toward disagreeing on something. Thinking he’s smart leads Newt to telling Donald things he doesn’t want to hear. And Donald doesn’t want to hear that. Besides, Newt is part of the Chris Christie/Rudy Giuliani brigade of guys who thought they were on the inside. Freezing them out is too much fun to stop.
Director of the Office of Management and Budget Mick Mulvaney: Mulvaney didn’t have much of a relationship with the president before the inauguration, but he came highly recommended by Vice President Mike Pence to be OMB director. The president has come to rely on him when it comes to dealing Congress and, of course, on budget issues.
Yeah, Mulvaney is possible. He’s a Georgetown guy with a background in money and he comes from a real estate family … in fact, before moving his expertise in taking money away from poor people to Congress, he stole $7 million from taxpayers on a real estate bond deal. Trump has to admire that.
But the best person to replace Reince Priebus is … Reince Priebus. Follow: Priebus is a party insider who Trump can torture to gain credit with his “we’re radical outsiders, though we vote with Mitch McConnell on every single issue” base. He has a strange sense of loyalty that keeps him standing around while Trump beats him with a stick and sends Mooch and Kellyanne down to cackle at him. And he’s got a funny name.
If Trump didn’t have Reince Priebus, he’d just have to make a new one.