Another spectacular embarrassment for the administration.
Ladies and gentlemen, the Scaramucci has just been overtaken in our political lexicon. All followers of the follies of Trump’s first administration remember it fondly as a unit of political time measured in ten-day increments, or the length of Anthony Scaramucci’s tenure as Donald Trump’s White House press secretary. (Example: Matt Gaetz lasted a mere 0.73 Scaramuccis as Trump’s attorney general nominee.)
Leave it to Donald Trump to reflect on that record and think, “I’m the man who set this record once already; I alone should break it.” Trump likes headlines? Few are more guaranteed to lead the evening news than “Trump Invents New Unit of Measurement.” The Scaramucci has been not merely surpassed but obliterated by the “Zacharia”: White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia — who stumbled so atrociously during her debut press conference on October 13 that even Trump couldn’t look away — and then did even worse on Sean Hannity’s Fox show last night — is reported to be out of a job she held for all of five days. It’s fair to say that it calls for a new addition to the list of measures. (Simple conversion for purposes of math: 1 Scaramucci = 2 Zacharias.)
I don’t want to get into why she was fired (or hired) for right now. Jim Geraghty has been all over that beat, and I’ll write more about it later (it’s guaranteed a slot in next week’s Carnival of Fools). Needless to say, she was desperately incompetent, and the confused, haphazard nature of her hiring and firing reflects desperately poorly on Trump’s judgment. How can he claim he hires “only the best” anymore? Why is he doing end-runs around his chief of staff’s supervision? Is this administration in hot-mess-collapse mode already?
Honestly, it’s like watching someone set a land-speed record before your very eyes. Spectacular embarrassments pile up in a Trump administration where Marco Rubio seems like the only man trying to do his job.