Unconventional Hires

One of President Trump’s top selling points — that he would do things differently in Washington, in part by hiring different people — is now one of his biggest public relations headaches.

Trump installed people in power who had little or no government experience but lots of experience in drama. And that has burned him a couple of times, including on Monday, when former White House aide Anthony Scaramucci said he thinks Trump shouldn’t be president anymore.

Because what’s more dramatic than being kicked out of the White House, then going in front of TV cameras to dish all you know about the president and opine about how “unhinged”/racist/undeserving of the office Trump is?

Scaramucci served as White House communications director for 11 days in 2017 before getting fired. He knows his fate is tied to Trump. He was generally supportive of the president, but has changed his tune recently. Which — as he knows well — is a 180 that makes for great TV. And these past few days, Scaramucci went all out in describing the president as a melting-down figure who is bad for the country.

“I think you have to consider a change at the top of the ticket when someone is acting like this,” he said on CNN on Monday morning. (Scaramucci is a regular there.)

Scaramucci has been going after the president so often lately that Trump attacked him in two tweets over the weekend.

Like many of the White House aides who have flamed out and singed Trump, too, his hiring came with warning signs. Now Scaramucci is on cable TV urging the Republican Party to call up its conscience and oust him.

You can’t mention drama and former White House aides without thinking of Omarosa Manigault Newman. She was a little-known contestant on the first season of Trump’s show, “The Apprentice,” whose penchant for ratings-grabbing feistiness fascinated Trump.

Manigault Newman was not a good fit for the White House, and Trump’s chief of staff fired her. She secretly recorded her firing while in the Situation Room, one of the most closely guarded and secretive parts of the White House, and used the recording to publicize her book about Trump: Unhinged: An Insider Account of the Trump White House, where she calls him a racist and narcissist.

Trump called her a “lowlife” “crazed” and a “dog” — sexist and racially tinged insults that only served to prove her point, and get her more attention.

Even Trump’s unconventional hires who aren’t known for drama have sliced Trump on their way down. Perhaps the deepest cut for Trump was Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser for 24 days, who eventually pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and helped out the Mueller investigation into Russia meddling in the 2016 campaign. Trump hired Flynn despite warnings from President Obama that he wasn’t trustworthy.

Another good example is former secretary of state Rex Tillerson, a former oil executive who had no experience in politics and didn’t deny he once called Trump a “moron.” He was fired by Trump by tweet, apparently while Tillerson was using the toilet. A few months later, he described Trump this way: “pretty undisciplined, doesn’t like to read” and someone who regularly proposed ideas that would break the law.

These unconventional hires have left his administration at about the same rate as the more traditional hires. More experienced officials haven’t been able to work with him well, either.

— The Washington Post, 08/12/2019