The unease in certain quarters of the Trump administration with the president’s decision to bring on former hedge fund manager Anthony Scaramucci as his new director of communications speaks volumes, both about the source of Trump’s current difficulties in getting momentum behind his policy agenda, and about why it was a masterstroke to make this move at this crucial time.
There are two main reasons for the president’s frustration about the slow pace at which the Trump agenda is advancing.
{mosads}The first, and most obvious, is that Republican members of Congress and members of his own cabinet have done nothing to stop an open-ended, politically motivated investigation of “Russian collusion” on the part of his presidential campaign, including members of his own family. That false narrative, which has not yet produced evidence of any crimes, is a massive distraction from getting the political focus back on the Trump policy agenda.
Not only that, the Republican-controlled Congress has shown little interest in holding hearings on matters of far more serious import with far more evidence of criminal wrongdoing, such as pay-for-play corruption in the Obama State Department, massive illegal surveillance during the Obama administration of American citizens, and unprecedented leaks on the part of an intelligence community determined to harm — and even bring down — the president of the United States.
The second reason is more pernicious: Large swaths of the GOP establishment, including many who hold key posts in the administration, are not on board with that agenda.
The fact that Scaramucci himself has, in the past, differed on policy issues with Trump is not at issue. The key question is whether underlings see themselves as extensions of the chief executive and the agenda he was elected to implement — as Scaramucci does — or whether they see themselves as independent operators, using their perches to play the angles, leak to the media, and push personnel for the express purpose of promoting their own agenda, even if it is at direct odds with the president’s.
That pernicious and dangerous disloyalty was exactly Scaramucci’s criticism of existing White House staff in his interview this week with The New Yorker. His comments upbraiding Sean Spicer and Reince Priebus have been criticized in the mainstream press but even The New Yorker writer acknowledged Scaramucci’s “campaign against leakers flows from his intense loyalty to Trump. Unlike other Trump advisers, I’ve never heard him say a bad word about the president.”
Loyalty. What a refreshing change.
Rather than putting the president’s interest and agenda first, many inside-the-Beltway Republicans have a sense that they are the adults in the room and that Trump is a lucky political neophyte. For them, the election of Donald Trump represents not a fundamental reordering of policy priorities to put them more in line with the interests of Americans who have been ignored and disdained by the political and media elite, but an opportunity to seize the levers of executive power to advance the same old losing GOP agenda. Scaramucci is right to purge that attitude from the White House.
The sad fact is that these disloyalists, scattered throughout agencies and even ensconced in the West Wing, aren’t on board with the core of the Trump agenda on central issues like trade, immigration enforcement, infrastructure renewal and reducing interventionism abroad. Many were bitter political opponents during the campaign, working furtively to undermine his chances even after he won the party’s nomination.
This fifth column of saboteurs has more loyalty to the old GOP establishment than they do to a president who threatens the old balance of power in Washington and portends a national political realignment that they have no desire to effectuate. Some, like members of the inaptly-named “Freedom Caucus,” are even more insidious since their loyalty is not to the old party establishment, but largely to big-money libertarian overlords like the Koch brothers, whose priorities are in direct opposition to the president’s agenda. Trump could be a mortal blow to their faux-populist credentials back home in their own districts because his nationalist agenda threatens to expose them as the Koch sock puppets that they are.
Whatever their motivation, the unfortunate truth is these disloyalists are at work undermining the very policies Trump is promoting — consider the Iran nuclear deal, or the future of the Ex-Im Bank. There has been no one in the West Wing who has been effective at cracking the whip and keeping these disloyal forces at bay, perhaps because they secretly have more sympathy with the fifth column than they have with their boss.
Scaramucci is not aligned with the traditional GOP policy agenda — he acknowledged as much to The New Yorker — and therefore perfectly positioned to push through Trump agenda items that go against party orthodoxy if they are in the president’s political interests in the face of a divided Congress. One ally in this effort is Steve Bannon, who has, once again, shown a willingness to think outside of the box and depart from stale GOP orthodoxy with his proposal to boost the income tax rate on the super rich to 44 percent, completely in keeping with Trumpian populism but totally unacceptable to GOP regulars.
There is an old saying in Washington that whoever does the hiring sets the policy, and it couldn’t be any more relevant than it is now, starting at the top. That’s why the Mooch is such a breath of fresh air: He is transparently loyal to the president’s agenda, and wholly dedicated to seeing it pushed through.
If that means breaking some eggs and showing the door to those who put their own agenda above that of the duly elected president, so be it.
Robert Wasinger served in senior advisory and liaison roles in President Trump’s campaign and transition team, after extensive experience on Capitol Hill.
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Editor’s note: This column was updated after publication.