Earlier today, we reported that newly appointed White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci appeared to be on the warpath, threatening various West Wing staffers—and specifically his rival, chief of staff Reince Priebus—with firings or resignations over perceived White House leaks. What we didn’t realize at the time, though, was that this was the calm version of the Mooch. Now, a new piece from New Yorker reporter Ryan Lizza reveals Scaramucci in all his third-person talking, Steve Bannon’s dick-referencing glory.
Scaramucci apparently called Lizza last night, attempting to get him to reveal the source of a story about him getting dinner with the president, the first lady, Sean Hannity, and former Fox News exec Bill Shine. In between threatening to fire his entire department in a weird bid to get Lizza to talk (“Is it an assistant to the President? O.K., I’m going to fire every one of them, and then you haven’t protected anybody, so the entire place will be fired over the next two weeks”), and promises that “the swamp will not defeat him,” Scaramucci offered up his heartfelt opinion on a number of his co-workers.
For instance: “Reince is a fucking paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac,” Scaramucci said. “‘Oh, Bill Shine is coming in. Let me leak the fucking thing and see if I can cock-block these people the way I cock-blocked Scaramucci for six months.’” (Priebus apparently used his clout with Donald Trump to block Scaramucci’s initial appointment after the inauguration.) He also offered what may be the worst mental image to come out of the current administration to date, in an apparent attempt to express his own humility: “I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own cock.”
Response to this particular, terrible sentence has been widespread on the internet, as commentators attempt to exorcise the image from their head, and more “respectable” outlets do everything in their power to talk around it.
Scaramucci, possibly realizing that he’d crossed the line from “straight talk” to “semi-megalomaniacal ranting,” attempted to walk back his statements today, deleting a tweet implying Priebus was the leaker, and attempting to express some half-assed White House solidarity. He also issued a tweet not quite apologizing for his “colorful language,” or for implanting the thought of Bannon, wheezily leaning his head down toward his own crotch, into the public mind.
UPDATE: Good news, everybody: Scaramucci’s pinpointed where he went wrong.