However, the drying up of leaks
will have a positive short term impact on Trump. Sustaining it will be hard longer term. (And by longer term I mean past two news dump Friday afternoons or three horribly stupid tweets from the T-man, whichever comes first.)
Scaramucci will try being nice to the press first, and it
will work for a while, since there are plenty of media whose WH sources will have gone mute, but the publishers still want their gossip crack.
I expect they will go crawling to Scaramucci trying to get more crack. This means now is a dangerous time for staff, we've already seen how misunderstanding from the WH leads to purges.
The funny thing is that the
nicer Scaramucci is to the media the worse he will do. Because in a Republican administration the
worse you treat the media, the
better they respond.
Eric Boehlert wrote about this in his great book Lapdogs. The stories of how Karl Rove and Karen Hughes punished media are nasty, but it worked. The media rolled over for them.
Moochie's Mistakes Will Help Crash The Trump Train
It's not too hard to predict Moochie will make another mistake on a critical sensitive issue. But with no experience and no good will, he will have a hard time recovering. I don't think he is stupid, the issue is can he learn fast enough on the job.
The outdated notions of the media he carries around in his head will be his undoing. For example, just because you are talking to
The New Yorker doesn't mean you talk New York tough guy with them. And NEVER assume that you are off the record. Ryan Lizza isn't Tim "Everything is off the Record" Russert.
We might never know how many times Reince saved Trump from himself, but with Moochie we'll find out soon enough.
What will happen next? Well I don't think I'm violating the temporal prime directive by telling you that there will be some think pieces on "The Mooch" coming out from Axios, Politico CNN, CBS 60 Minutes and MSNBC. They will use some variation of "He's misunderstood, but really wants to turn things around." narrative because they are trying to be fair and balanced.
Then there will be at least one more staff resignation or firing by next Friday. That's designed to cement Scaramucci's badassery.
Without a professional who can stand up to Trump,
the communications problems will not stop. This is bad for Trump, but good for us, because Moochie's mistakes will help send the Trump Train over the cliff.
As Scaramucci himself has said, "The fish rots from the head down." And we all know who has rottenest head in the White House.