The rise and fall of Anthony Scaramucci and John McCain saves Obamacare

Post-covfefe, the White House’s messaging would only get more farcical on 21 July 2017 when Donald Trump brought in one Anthony Scaramucci, a brawling Long Islander and ex-Goldman Sachs trader popularly known as “the Mooch”, as a substitute for the beleaguered Sean Spicer.

Trump had grown dissatisfied with the future Dancing with the Stars contestant’s performance behind the lectern, Spicer having lost face over the inauguration crowd spat and become a meme when he unwisely wore an emerald-coloured tie on St Patrick’s Day, inadvertently providing internet wags with the perfect greenscreen backdrop for photoshopping surreal images onto his chest.

The Mooch certainly talked a good game, assuring the BBC’s Emily Maitlis he would restore order because he was a “straight shooter” who came from a long line of “front stabbers” (shivving an enemy between the shoulder blades, rather than confronting them face to face, was the work of a craven coward in his book).

But it was precisely this bullish tough guy act that led to his dismissal just 11 days into his job as White House communications director, on 31 July, after he called Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker demanding to know the identity of a leaker, only to disparage Trump’s outgoing chief of staff Reince Priebus and chief strategist Steve Bannon in flavoursome terms while wrongly assuming the conversation was off the record.

Priebus, he said, was “a f***ing paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac,” before accusing of Bannon of “trying to build [his] own brand off the f***ing strength of the president” and, er, much worse.

John Kelly, Priebus’s successor, found himself firing the Mooch on his very first day in office, erroneously believing, just like the man he was shoving towards the exit, that he could be the new broom to sweep out a government quickly becoming known for revolving-door chaos.

There was a happy ending though.

Scaramucci became a committed anti-Trump critic in the aftermath of his humiliation while his name lives on in Washington as a handy unit of measurement.

“That’s right folks, it’s just 11 days until the presidential election, we’re one Scaramucci away from knowing who will be our next commander-in-chief…”

In the middle of the Mooch’s meteoric flight, Trump suffered a major setback on Capitol Hill when his Health Care Freedom Act, intended to replace Obamacare, was shot down in the Senate.

Three Republicans broke ranks to ignore his call for party unity and rebelled: Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska plus their Arizona counterpart John McCain, the GOP’s 2008 presidential candidate, who was then suffering from brain cancer but rose from his sick bed to cast the pivotal vote and strike down the president’s half-baked bill.

This was surely a moment of sweet revenge for McCain, an admired politician and Vietnam War hero who served as a combat pilot and was shot down over Hanoi in October 1967 during Operation Rolling Thunder, held captive by the north Vietnamese for six long years thereafter.

“He is a war hero because he was captured? I like people who weren’t captured…” Trump notoriously said on the campaign trail, a staggeringly spiteful response to McCain’s refusal to endorse his candidacy and criticism of his “uninformed and indeed dangerous statements on national security issues”.

Even for Donald Trump, attacking McCain’s military record was astonishingly rich.

As a young man, he himself had received at least five draft deferrals excusing him from the bloody conflict in southeast Asia, his doctor’s note citing bone spurs.

However, Trump’s private attorney, Michael Cohen, would tell Congress in February 2019 that his employer had once implied to him that the condition was a fabrication, saying: “You think I’m stupid? I wasn’t going to Vietnam.”

Trump had also disrespected veterans by telling radio shock jock Howard Stern in 1997 that avoiding contracting a sexually-transmitted disease while dating was “my personal Vietnam” and would do so again by ducking out of a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in France in November 2018 because it was raining.

In their book A Very Stable Genius, Washington Post reporters Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig meanwhile give an account of the president telling senior Pentagon generals they were “losers” and “a bunch of dopes and babies” for failing to end long-running wars in the Middle East during a West Wing meeting in summer 2017.

That first slur was actually one he habitually applied to people who volunteer for service, according to one particularly damning story by The Atlantic published in the run-up to the 2020 election, which also claimed he once asked that disabled veterans be kept away from the cameras during military parades.

The president’s feud with McCain – compounded by his discovery that it was the senator who had passed the leaked Steele Dossier, alleging nefarious dealings between Trump and Russia, onto James Comey’s FBI in December 2016 – would continue even after his death in August 2018.

Ahead of Trump’s Memorial Day visit to the Yokosuka naval base in Japan in May 2019, the White House sent word ahead asking that a warship named after the deceased be kept “out of sight”.

That story breaking sent the president into a spiral, insisting he was “not a fan” of the dead man on a tour of an Ohio tank factory and even berating him for not coming back from the grave to thank him for his grand state funeral, a row that rumbled on for several days and left many Republicans ashen with disbelief.

Cindy McCain, his widow, would later endorse Joe Biden, you will not be altogether surprised to learn.

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