Anthony Scaramucci, a finance guy or something who doesn’t seem to understand anything about being a press flack, called the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza last night and ethered every one of his White House enemies in one of the greatest and most surreal interviews in American political history. Here are his best lines, ranked by how insane they are.
1. [On leakers]: “What I want to do is I want to fucking kill all the leakers and I want to get the President’s agenda on track so we can succeed for the American people.”
2. [On White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus]: “ ‘Reince is a fucking paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac,’ Scaramucci said. He channelled Priebus as he spoke: ‘Oh, Bill Shine is coming in. Let me leak the fucking thing and see if I can cock-block these people the way I cock-blocked Scaramucci for six months.’”
3. [On sucking one’s own cock]: “‘I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own cock,’ he said, speaking of Trump’s chief strategist. ‘I’m not trying to build my own brand off the fucking strength of the President. I’m here to serve the country.’”
4. [On digital fingerprints]: “‘O.K., the Mooch showed up a week ago,’ he said. ‘This is going to get cleaned up very shortly, O.K.? Because I nailed these guys. I’ve got digital fingerprints on everything they’ve done through the F.B.I. and the fucking Department of Justice.’”
5. [On “the swamp”]: “‘The swamp will not defeat him,’ he said, breaking into the third person. ‘They’re trying to resist me, but it’s not going to work. I’ve done nothing wrong on my financial disclosures, so they’re going to have to go fuck themselves.’”
6. [On leakers (again)]: “‘What I’m going to do is, I will eliminate everyone in the comms team and we’ll start over,’ he said. I laughed, not sure if he really believed that such a threat would convince a journalist to reveal a source. He continued to press me and complain about the staff he’s inherited in his new job. ‘I ask these guys not to leak anything and they can’t help themselves,’ he said. ‘You’re an American citizen, this is a major catastrophe for the American country. So I’m asking you as an American patriot to give me a sense of who leaked it.’”
7. [On the publishing of a publicly available document]: “‘Well, the felony, they’re gonna get prosecuted, probably, for the felony.’ He added, ‘The lie detector starts—; but then he changed the subject and returned to what he thought was the illegal leak of his financial-disclosure forms. I asked if the President knew all of this.
8. Getting hit by a car
9. [On straight shooters]: “‘Let me tell you something about myself,’ he said. ‘I am a straight shooter.’”