Up until this morning, my favorite description of Anthony Scaramucci was "hair gel in human form," from an August 1 article at New Republic titled "Hold The Applause for Trump's New Chief of Staff." (Read it here.) Now Charles Krauthammer takes the prize with this description of the Scaramucci soap opera: A "cocksure sycophant's gobsmacking spectacle." From an opinion piece at the Washington Post; read it here.
Tuesday afternoon update #2: Yes, it looks like The Mooch will pay the taxes. Here's how CNN Money explains it:
Scaramucci's lawyer said
Tuesday that he will pay capital gains tax when he completes the sale of his
investment company, SkyBridge Capital.
Government employees can seek
permission to defer that tax when they sell investments to avoid conflicts of
interest.
…Scaramucci's lawyer had told
CNN, several days before he resigned the White House job, that government
officials, including a White House lawyer, were recommending he apply for the
tax deferral.
To get it, a government
employee has to put the money from the sale into approved investments like U.S.
Treasurys or highly diversified mutual funds.
Deferring capital gains tax
is also valuable because a person can invest that money in the meantime and
make money on it. (Read the article here.)
Tuesday morning update #1: Yes, there is schadenfreude. From Slate this morning:
Donald
Trump’s communications director was Trumpism distilled, so pure a concentrate
of wocka-wocka salesmanship and aggro preening that the West Wing could contain
him for only so long. If Hesiod stipulated a Heroic Age of Man, Anthony
Scaramucci belonged to and shaped the Heroic Age of Trump—that halcyon 10-day
period when the White House achieved a level of maximalist ridiculousness that
even a president who brags to Boy
Scouts about sex yachts could never hope to attain on his own.
…Mooch
burst onto the scene with stratospheric, imperial levels of confidence. He
promised his boss (and us) he’d get the Good Ship White House sailing smoothly,
powering the heretofore sinking vessel with his own deep reserves of charm and
ingenuity. Where his timid predecessors hid among bushes, he verily somersaulted to the podium. But no
more than a few days passed before Scaramucci revealed his congenital tendency
to say one thing and do the exact opposite. For the sake of “transparency,” he
vowed, he would delete his old
tweets. And for the sake of efficiency, he would get himself canned in
less than two weeks. Why delay the inevitable? (Read the article here.)
On our way to Youngstown OH 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/wGUBU2tvps— Anthony Scaramucci (@Scaramucci) July 25, 2017
This picture, taken on Tuesday, the first full day of his son James's life, may represent the pinnacle of Anthony Scaramucci's life.
True story: I was having lunch with a friend this afternoon. She had been mostly off social media over the week-end and therefore wasn't up-to-date on the Scaramucci soap opera, so I filled her in. The vulgar phone call to the New Yorker, his wife filed for divorce, his son was born and he waited 5 days to see him, etc. Then I excused myself for a trip to the ladies room. When I returned to the table my friend had her phone in her hand and a shocked look on her face. "Scaramucci is out," she said and we both had a good laugh, rolling our eyes at how strange the whole saga was.
Strange, and yes, sad. (In a "karma's a bitch" kind of way. I admit, I don't admire what I know about The Mooch.) He hitched his wagon to the president out of ambition and hunger for power; apparently spending the past six months scratching and clawing for a high-profile job in the White House. He finally got one and it lasted 10 days. Now his life is a dumpster fire. His wife is leaving, the whole world knows he's a lousy father, his career is in ruins and if he can't find another administration position, he's apparently at risk of owing several millions in taxes on the sale of his business. (I also saw a tweet that suggested that now that he's not tethered to power, the selling price of said business may tank. Yikes.)
There's a lot being written about this, of course, for now I'm enjoying Slate's take:
The
Mooch was a refreshing break from the Trump administration norm. Other Trump
appointees are taking nunchucks to environmental protections, immigrant
communities, and funding for essential global health aid to women and children.
The Mooch’s muck-ups were a lot friendlier: They only caused injury to people
inside the White House’s festering inner circle of incompetent egomaniacs. We
could laugh, because Scaramucci’s messes were funny—he said the word cock a
lot, for one thing—and they didn’t cause irreparable damage to humanity. His
shifty eyes were a window into the administration’s desperate,
loyalty-obsessed, insecure soul. In Mooch’s very public missteps and power
grabs, it was easier to see that Trump and his cronies weren’t just bent on
doing evil—they were also way, way out of their depth.
But
in Scaramucci’s departure, some may feel a familiar twinge of sadness with
their schadenfreude. According to some delicious reporting from the New York Post,
Scaramucci’s wife, Deidre Ball, filed for divorce at the beginning of July when
she was nine months pregnant, in part because she hates Trump and was “tired”
of the Mooch’s “naked political
ambition.” “She would mock him for being a Trump sycophant,” one source
said. Scaramucci allegedly missed the birth of his son last week in order to
attend Trump’s Boy Scout address; afterward, he reportedly texted Ball,
“Congratulations, I’ll pray for our child” and didn’t go to Long Island to meet
his son, who was premature and in the hospital’s intensive care unit, until the
end of the week.
(Read the Slate article here.)
