President Donald Trump and his aides love to complain about leaks from within the White House. But on Thursday, the infighting was out in the open.
The new communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, in a morning phone call broadcast on CNN, compared the West Wing to a fish that “stinks from the head down,” implying that White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus is responsible for at least some of the leaks.
Another Trump advisor, Kellyanne Conway, used a prison analogy for the broader backstabbing, telling Fox News that her West Wing colleagues were using “the press to shiv each other.”
While the backstabbing might suggest a new level of chaos in a White House known for it, the style is all Trump. As a businessman, he has a history of fostering rivalries among his employees.
“He always did sort of like competition, backstabbing, infighting kind of stuff,” said Barbara Res, who spent nearly two decades as a top executive in Trump’s real estate business. “He set people up to do that.”
Trump led the charge this week, using his Twitter account and an interview with the Wall Street Journal to ridicule his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, one of Trump’s first and most prominent campaign supporters. By Thursday, both Priebus and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson were seeing their fates publicly debated, less than a week after Sean Spicer was forced out as press secretary after months of speculation and presidential slights.
The Priebus intrigue was amplified by Scaramucci on Twitter and in the CNN interview. He blamed Priebus for leaking Scaramucci’s personal financial disclosure forms — which are publicly available — and suggested that Trump encouraged Scaramucci’s offensive in a phone conversation they had just before the aide dialed into CNN.
The week’s episodes have come to resemble the president’s former way of life, as the star of a reality TV show, and his aides’ cable television appearances recall the “confessionals” familiar to reality show fans, in which characters confide directly to the camera their anger or enmity toward others on the show.
“The primary attribute for a successful tenure in the Trump White House is masochism,” tweeted Rick Wilson, a longtime Republican operative and Trump critic.
The repeated evidence of dysfunction and the high level of insecurity among Trump’s core aides help explain the White House’s inability to focus on its agenda.
Trump’s critics voiced suspicions on Twitter that the public staff blow-up was a deliberate distraction from the struggle in Congress to pass a health care bill, as well as from the ongoing investigations into potential collusion between his presidential campaign and Russia and the backlash to Trump’s surprise Twitter announcement on Wednesday that transgender people will be barred from military service.
But those issues also were being heavily covered on cable news. The stories that were overshadowed were those Trump was trying to promote: a deal his administration helped strike with Foxconn to build a production facility in Wisconsin, possibly creating thousands of new jobs, and nascent efforts to craft a tax overhaul plan.
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