The Trump White House by Ronald Kessler

Author:Ronald Kessler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2018-04-03T04:00:00+00:00

13

MOOCH

Despite his persona on The Apprentice, Donald Trump almost never fires anyone himself. Instead, he makes their lives miserable.

Having given his chief of staff virtually no authority, the president periodically complained to aides about Priebus’s effectiveness. Despite the fact that some of his own tweets were most damaging to his presidency, Trump blamed Priebus for not stanching the constant leaks to the press.

Rumors that Priebus was on his way out circulated for months. Trump fed the rumor mill, asking friends and other advisers to evaluate Priebus’s performance and tossing around names of possible replacements. Like almost everything else in the Trump White House, it all leaked to the press and provided a constant stream of negative White House stories. Jared contributed by telling associates he believed Priebus was doing a poor job.

But Trump never gave Priebus the power to get it done. Priebus felt the internal chaos was unsustainable. He was frustrated that he could not assert full control over basic White House functions, such as policy development, communications, and even formal announcements, which sometimes were made impulsively by the president.

As in his business, Trump acted as his own chief of staff.

“We kind of run a little bit like a mom-and-pop in that sense,” Don Trump Jr. said in a 2011 deposition in a lawsuit involving a Florida development. “I guess there is an organizational chart, but in theory, there is not too many levels.” He added, “Could I make one? Yes. Is there one officially? Not that I’m aware of.”

But the U.S. government is not a family business. “You can’t have a structure where nobody reports to the chief of staff and everybody feels free to pursue their own agenda,” Spicer says. “It just doesn’t work.”

Matters came to a head when Trump in July 2017 named hedge-fund magnate Anthony Scaramucci communications director, bypassing Press Secretary Sean Spicer. Scaramucci joined Goldman Sachs’s investment-banking unit after graduating from Harvard Law School. He started his own hedge fund, SkyBridge Capital, in 2005 and remained a comanaging partner until January 2017, when the firm was sold to the investment company RON Transatlantic and HNA Capital, the financial services arm of the Chinese HNA Group.

Jared and Ivanka pushed Trump to hire Scaramucci, who had no experience in the realm of public relations. Being neophytes, neither Jared nor Ivanka saw through Scaramucci’s slick self-promotion.

After meeting with Ivanka, Trump announced that Scaramucci would become communications director. Scaramucci, known as “the Mooch,” made it clear in a press briefing that he would report to Trump, not Priebus.

In Bannon’s opinion, the move to hire Scaramucci was another ploy by Jared and Ivanka to dump both Spicer and Priebus. It was an example of Trump’s adopting bad advice. Ironically, Trump had previously rejected several attempts by Scaramucci to join the White House.

“Scaramucci was always shot down by Trump,” Bannon says. “Trump said, ‘He never supported me. He’s a promoter, and I have no interest.’ ”

Trump pointed out that Scaramucci did not back him in the campaign. He bounced

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