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New Trump hire Anthony Scaramucci spent his day as newly minted White House communications director doing two things: threatening to fire White House staffers who leaked, and actually leaking that he was about to fire someone.
“This is the problem with the leaking,” he said. “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.”
That wasn't a hypothetical, as it turns out—nobody knew Moochie was about to fire Short until Moochie leaked it to Politico with those very words. (Why the "Roman Catholic" addendum? No clue.)
As for Short? Moochie had told him nothing.
"No one has told me anything and the entire premise is false," Short said Tuesday morning, referring to the Politico story that suggested his firing was tied to Scaramucci's efforts to root out leaks.
Early Tuesday afternoon, though, Short told multiple reporters that he had resigned.
So it turns out that this fat-headed movie reject is, lo and behold, very freaking terrible at his new job. But this shouldn't surprise anyone: Moochie apparently has developed a reputation in campaigns of being a grifting, leaking, loyal-to-nobody self-promoter, to the extent that prior campaigns left him out of some meetings for fear he'd promptly leak their contents to the press. But he is evidently a dedicated suck-up, and that is the singular quality Donald Trump looks for in a toady.
So that is how Anthony Scaramucci began his first week in the White House: with a vow that he's "going to fire everybody" and that he was “committed to taking the comms shop down to Sarah [Huckabee Sanders] and me if I can't get the leaks to stop.”
To be sure, Donald Trump must have felt he needed to reboot the whole White House if he was going to outrun the stink of his current failures. But it is not likely that the introduction of this new character, Poochie—sorry, I mean Moochie—will do the Trump show any favors. We are likely to soon hear that he has been recalled to his home planet, with no other explanation given, after which the White House team will be then led by Sarah Huckabee Sanders, whichever intern is standing next to Sarah Huckabee Sanders at the time, and perhaps a sock borrowed from Donald Trump's clothes hamper.