Former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci, part of the Trump team for a brief two-week stint in 2017, likened POTUS to a melting nuclear reactor, suggesting that Republicans have singled out and placed bets on another candidate among their ranks for the 2020 presidential elections.
Scaramucci invented a condition that Trump, he believes, should satisfy: if the president “doesn’t reform his behaviour,” the former communications chief told Axios, he and other Republican supporters would consider replacing him as a 2020 GOP presidential hopeful.
He thereafter resorted to metaphor to describe the current situation in Washington:
"We are now in the early episodes of 'Chernobyl' on HBO, where the reactor is melting down and the apparatchiks are trying to figure out whether to cover it up or start the clean-up process," Scaramucci said, continuing that the party “can’t afford a full nuclear contamination site post 2020.”
According to him, it will become reality if the “country over party” approach lasts for “a couple more weeks like this.”
Despite Scaramucci having shown loyalty to the Trump administration, notwithstanding his extremely short White House tenure, he has been at odds with the president for the past few days after Scaramucci told MSNBC's Chris Matthews on "Hardball" that Trump "didn't do well" on his trips to El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, in the wake of two deadly mass shootings last week.
You are losing your fastball— very weak troll. Bullying is the most anti-American thing in our culture and it is emanating from the Oval Office. Many have called and are willing to work on a necessary replacement. Time to call in a good relief pitcher. @potus is lost. https://t.co/7fiFHbd7O6
— Anthony Scaramucci (@Scaramucci) August 12, 2019
Trump hit back at Scaramucci's comments on Saturday in a series of tweets that referred to him as “totally incapable:”
"Like many other so-called television experts, he knows very little about me," Trump wrote in his typical manner, continuing:
"Anthony, who would do anything to come back in, should remember the only reason he is on TV, and it's not for being the Mooch!"
The exchange saw the discussion spiral still further, with the ex-White House official bringing up Trump's recent attacks on Democratic congresswomen of colour – something he blasted as “unacceptable” and divisive.
"For the last 3 years I have fully supported this president," Scaramucci pointed out in a tweet, further referencing the president’s earlier words and Trump’s tactics, as he personally sees them: "Recently he has said things that divide the country in a way that is unacceptable. So I didn't pass the 100% litmus test. Eventually he turns on everyone and soon it will be you and then the entire country.”
Scaramucci, who began his work in the White House on 25 July 2017 without being sworn in, quit shortly after in an expletive-laden interview to The New Yorker in which he made obscene and derogatory statements about White House officials. In many of his post-White House TV appearances he has defended Trump, but also publicly called him to change his policies.
