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Anthony Scaramucci, Donald Trump’s latest hiring, has US reeling

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There have been many strange and unexpected weeks since Donald Trump became president in January, but none has matched the past seven days for human drama, political dysfunction and sheer pinch-yourself-is-this-really-happening news bombshells.


What last week demonstrated was that American politics has become a giant cauldron of froth and fury, with a government that is struggling to function and a political system in disarray.


As Washington flounders, the distance between the White House and the Republican Party establishment grows wider by the day.


By the time chief of staff Reince Priebus was apparently fired via tweet on Friday afternoon, to be replaced with the former Marine Corps general John Kelly, Americans felt they were binge-watching a box set of history, skipping through months of plot twists in a matter of hours.


Every political writer in America is searching for the right historical or pop culture reference to describe the current moment. The new season of Game of Thrones seems too tame. When Donald Trump Jr takes the stage, it is The Godfather that is raised, with the gormless son resembling Fredo Corleone’s hapless attempts to please his mafia don father and take on the family business

Historical events such as the Watergate scandal and even the fall of the Roman empire seem to be echoed at every step.

But in truth none of these analogies quite holds up. Washington last week was its very own reality TV show, a febrile combination of The Apprentice, The Hunger Games and the political satire Veep.

On Monday Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, testified to the Senate intelligence committee, denying collusion with Russia. Trump Jr, his eldest son, and Paul Manafort, his former campaign manager, met the Senate judiciary committee behind closed doors.

Meanwhile, Congress managed to pass a bill, infuriating Vladimir Putin by slapping new sanctions on Russia and restricting the president’s ability to weaken them. Despite his professed opposition, Trump has signed this bill, backed into a corner over Russia because of suspicions about collusion during the US election campaign.

But for once Russia, the running sore of this administration, was not the main story. Instead the psychodrama inside the West Wing took centre stage.

The entry of Anthony Scaramucci as White House communications director set an already smouldering arena fully alight. “The Mooch”, who has been compared to Mini Me from the Austin Powers films because of his uncanny ability to channel Trump, declared open war on Priebus from day one.

He came at the new job hard, as if to make up for the six months he was delayed by his original appointment being blocked.

“Reince is a f****** paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac,” Scaramucci declared in a bizarre and foul-mouthed magazine interview with The New Yorker. He has reportedly drawn up a list of White House leakers - which if comprehensive would surely include the entire senior staff - and warned that “the entire place will be fired over the next two weeks”.

The sharp-talking New York hedge funder proved himself capable of biblical foresight when he declared that he and Priebus were “like Cain and Abel”. Priebus was whacked a few days later, with Kelly being brought into the job from his role as secretary of homeland security, further satisfying Trump’s penchant for highly decorated generals.

Along the way Kelly said he “won’t suffer idiots and fools” and Scaramucci lost his wife, Deirdre Ball, who filed for divorce last week. According to the New York Post she finds Washington “insane” and is tired of his naked ambition.

Priebus now has the unwanted accolade of having the shortest tenure as chief of staff. His exit follows that of press secretary Sean Spicer and severs another key link between the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress.

Trump is less and less constrained by the ideology and aspirations of the party that he still nominally leads. He also spent much of last week publicly humiliating his attorney-general, Jeff Sessions, one of his earliest and most prominent Republican supporters, whom he described as “beleaguered” and “weak”.

Trump should be cautious, though; it is the Republican Party that stands between him and impeachment proceedings. Yet as well as embarrassing party figures, he is also failing to help them with the one thing they really want: passing some meaningful legislation.

For last week also saw the collapse of the party’s seven-year attempt to repeal Obamacare. In a dramatic late-night session on Thursday, Republicans tried to ram through a “skinny repeal” of the controversial healthcare bill, giving Democrats just two hours to see it before the vote, a ploy that the Democratic senator Chris Murphy described as “nuclear-grade bonkers”.


Outside the Senate a crowd of angry protesters gathered. Inside, beds were wheeled in for senators to rest between negotiations and cheeseburgers were ordered.

The Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell pulled out every procedural trick and arm-twist in his vast arsenal, but three Republican senators defied their party to kill the bill. Most notably John McCain, reeling from a diagnosis of brain cancer and newly arrived from his hospital bed in Phoenix, Arizona, made a late entry.

“Watch the show,” the maverick war hero said tantalisingly to a colleague as he made his way into the chamber. He proceeded to deliver a fatal thumbs-down to the bill, causing gasps and applause from Democrats across the aisle.

The Republicans will have to start again on their pet project, but many feel that passing complex legislation is near-impossible amid the flurry of distractions and rancour emanating from the Oval Office.

Alongside all this, Trump still found the time to declare that he was banning transgender servicemen and women from the military, without gaining full Pentagon agreement. He also encouraged police to use violence while arresting criminals and thanked a large crowd of underage Boy Scouts in West Virginia for their vote while regaling them with tales of “hot” New York cocktail parties.

With Congress having begun its summer recess on Friday, Trump and the Republicans have now failed to achieve anything on healthcare, infrastructure, the debt ceiling or tax reform.

Congressional Republicans now face a choice: whether to try again on healthcare or move on to tax reform. But with a divided party increasingly alienated from and frustrated with the White House, passing any key laws is likely to prove challenging.

This week the White House’s agenda is expected to shift its focus back onto North Korea, which on Friday again tested a ballistic missile.

The president’s strategy in this area is not entirely clear, but his willingness to engage could make for more hair-raising headlines. For in the field of foreign policy and sabre-rattling, Trump finds himself far less restricted.

If all this really were the plot of a television show, critics would say it was unfeasible. Perhaps only Shakespeare could have described Washington over the past week. “Hell is empty,” he wrote in The Tempest. “And all the devils are here.”

The Times



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