Anthony Scaramucci used to work at Goldman Sachs before founding his own investment company SkyBridge Capital in 2005. He supposedly supported Obama in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012, but subsequently became involved in Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016. He was appointed as White House communications director on July 21st, 2017, despite not being a career political press officer. Initially he publicly had verbal brawls with then Trump chief of staff Reince Priebus, calling him a ‘paranoid schizophrenic’ in a conversation with a reporter from The New Yorker. He also hammered the rumpled strategist Steve Bannon verbally in the same interview1.
It was reported that Priebus and Sean Spicer, then White House spokesman both resigned supposedly because of Scaramucci’s appointment2, although a spokesman for Priebus has denied this3. In much of his time, short as it was, Scaramucci railed against ‘leakers’, and it was, ironically, leakers who the New York Times relied on to report his dismissal1.
After Priebus and Spicer had left, John Kelly, a former general was appointed Trump’s chief of staff3, and it was he who dumped Scaramucci after 10 days in an effort to reinstate some discipline into the White House staff3. After his short tenure in the job, a 10 day stint started to be called a ‘Scaramucci’ or a ‘Mooch’, which had been his nickname from his years in Wall Street.
Leap forward just over 9 years and after the professional liar, Karoline Leavitt, had resigned from the job, it was given to Katie Zacharia, another blonde white woman. Zacharia has a law degree, and soon after graduating, worked in China (2011-2013) in a law firm, and as a commentator on Faux News and Newsmax, another far right outlet, and more recently became a senior communications adviser at Trump Media and Technology Group which runs Trump’s social media outlet Truth Social4,5.
She has referred to herself as a lawyer and elsewhere she has been referred to as an ‘attorney”. The only problem was that she failed the California Bar Examination, and was not licensed to practice law in any of the 50 states of the US. In California, calling yourself a lawyer without having a licence is a crime6.
After a disastrous first press briefing which lasted all of 14 minutes (only about a third of the time of a usual press conference), and a series of stilted media interviews, including on Faux News where she had admitted she had failed the Bar Examination, Trump basically told her that the job was ‘not for her’7.
So, now we have a Zach which is about half a Mooch. You have to laugh.
Sources
- https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-40684697
- https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-22/donald-trumps-press-secretary-sean-spicer-resigns/8733790
- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jul/28/trump-fires-white-house-chief-of-staff-reince-priebus#:~:text=Priebus%20told%20the%20Wall%20Street,now%20lost%20a%20chief%20of
- https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/national-international/questions-new-white-house-press-secretary-katie-zacharia/4167493/
- https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/katie-zacharia-trumps-press-secretary-152927176.html
- https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/national-international/questions-new-white-house-press-secretary-katie-zacharia/4167493/
- https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6e3xnjlz12do