Last Wednesday, newly appointed White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci gave an apparently unwitting interview to the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza.
The interview (which Scaramucci seems to believe was supposed to be confidential) was filled with vulgarity and extreme statements. At one point, he mentioned that he wanted to “kill all the leakers.”
At another, he called White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus “a fucking paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac.”
Unsurprisingly, left-leaning news outlets and satirists rejoiced at the brazenly controversial interview. The Guardian’s Richard Wolffe connected Scaramucci’s negative traits on display in the interview (namely his petty and vindictive nature) to President Donald Trump’s weaknesses, saying that Scaramucci is the “perfectly coiffed face of the Trump presidency.”
Stephen Colbert opened his monologue Thursday night by stating that he was “feeling blessed” and had to warn the CBS censors of the expletives that would be prevalent during his monologue. The Daily Show’s Facebook page published some of the interview’s highlights overlaid on inspirational backgrounds.
Posted by The Daily Show on Thursday, July 27, 2017
For conservative outlets, however, this interview was a step too far. Scaramucci appears to now have very few supporters among conservative media.
On Fox News, Charles Krauthammer called the interview a “degradation of the presidency.” In the clip below, Laura Ingraham calls Scaramucci’s behavior “very frustrating” and “not helping [the president’s] agenda,” despite remarking that those statements come from “deep love and affection” for Scaramucci.
Prior to the publishing of the interview in The New Yorker, longtime Trump ally Newt Gingrich stated in a radio interview with Ingraham that the beleaguered communications director is “full of himself.”
At online conservative outlet RedState, Susan Wright’s discussion of the interview and its ensuing fallout implied that Scaramucci was “off [his] nut” and called the White House the “House of Horrors,” ending the article by commenting that “somewhere in the world, Sean Spicer is breathing a sigh of relief.”
She’s probably right.
Even Breitbart, well-known for championing the Trumpian “speak-your-mind” style, found this interview to be too much.
Last Thursday, they published an article by Tony Lee calling the attacks “nasty,” and decrying the media frenzy now surrounding Scaramucci. The rest of the article contained seemingly unrelated information about the communications director that painted him in a negative light.
It should be noted that Steve Bannon, one of Scaramucci’s targets during the interview, previously served as the chairman of Breitbart News.