Front Row at the Trump Show by Jonathan Karl

Author:Jonathan Karl [Karl, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

TWO DOOR SLAMS

By the summer of 2017, covering the Trump Show had become something of a family affair. My older daughter, Emily, was working for CNN as an intern, spending most of her time on Capitol Hill. My younger daughter, Anna, still in high school, spent the month of July helping me out at work. Both of them already knew journalism requires a willingness to work long, unpredictable hours and a thick skin, but none of us could have predicted the events we would witness during the summer ahead.

I congratulated Emily on Twitter when she wrote her first story for CNN. I was incredibly proud, but one troll seized the opportunity to attack both of us.

“Father crooked = Daughter crooked,” said the tweet by a self-described supporter of the president, “double the lies = double the sedition.”

You expect that kind of thing from anonymous trolls on Twitter, but Anna quickly saw firsthand that the nastiness extended straight into the West Wing of the White House.

Early on the morning of July 21, 2017, I spoke to both Sean Spicer and Reince Priebus over the phone. There had been reports that Anthony Scaramucci, a brash and fast-talking investment banker from Long Island, was about to be hired as the White House communications director. Both Spicer and Priebus assured me the reports were wrong. Priebus acknowledged there were some in the West Wing who were encouraging the president to hire Scaramucci, but he said if Trump decided to bring him onto the White House staff, it would almost certainly be in another role. After all, he told me, Scaramucci had no experience in either government or communications. Why, Priebus asked me, would the president hire him to be communications director? Spicer gave me a more definitive denial.

“It’s not going to happen,” he told me.

A couple of hours later, I got word Scaramucci had just been offered the job.

So, at 11:20 A.M., I hustled up to Spicer’s office to try to find out what was going on. Anna grabbed a notepad and pen and followed me through the briefing room and up the ramp to the suite of offices known as “upper press.” As we turned down the narrow hallway leading to the press secretary’s office, we saw Spicer and Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Sanders walking into his office from the other direction. Anna and I arrived at the door to his office at almost exactly the same time Sean did.

“Hey, Sean,” I asked. “So, this is happening?”

Spicer looked at me with a smirk, and before I could say another word, he slammed the door in my face. If I had been six inches closer, I might have had a broken nose. As it was, both Anna and I felt the breeze from the door slamming shut.

Twenty minutes later, the White House announced that Sean Spicer had resigned. I would later learn that just minutes before slamming the door in my face, Spicer had turned in his letter of resignation to the president. And yes, Scaramucci would be the new communications director, Sarah Sanders the new press secretary.

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