The Machine and The Misfits
I was at home on Friday evening when the news finally broke, crashing like a tidal wave across the shores of CNN. The White House Press Secretary and poster child for the early, combative days of the Trump presidency, Sean Spicer, had resigned without seemingly any warning whatsoever. True, I had been out of town for a couple days and not getting my proper dose of daily news, but this one felt a little out of leftfield, even for a Presidency that from its inception has been so weird you wonder if David Lynch might have made it up. Was it drugs? Was it gambling? Was it a rampant cocaine addiction and penchant for taking pictures of young boys wearing nothing but the suit God gave them? I needed to know right away. Jesus, I thought, as the mushroom cloud began to rise before me; Spicer is really gone.
I had been reading an account of the World Series winning 2010 San Francisco Giants team, entitled A Band of Misfits, when John King cracked the news story open like a ripple through a glacier some time around midday. He had been waffling on about Trump reshuffling his legal team, and I barely listened as I read an account from wildman Giants pitcher Brian Wilson about closing out the final game. Wilson was a stone-cold nut, and I loved him for it. He had the name of a Beach Boy and the look of Charlie Manson. If he hadn’t had forearms like Zeus and a fastball like Uzi fire, people would cross the street when they saw him coming. So I was mildly irritated at having my reading interrupted when King began deftly changing his footing like a veteran boxer that has been here a hundred times before. What was happening?
Well, it seems that President Trump does not consider his staff to be sufficiently ugly, obnoxious or bullying enough right now, and decided somewhere between rambling late-night Tweets to make former hedge fund manager Anthony Scaramucci his new White House Communications Director. Scaramucci. Scaramucci. Where had I heard that name before? Of course! I had to scroll back through the archives but, eventually, there it was. Footage of Scaramucci, no doubt reeking of cologne and hair product, beady little eyes like two piss holes in the snow, being owned on national television by then President Barack Obama. Scaramucci had tried to kiss the ring of Obama while simultaneously trying to flex his own muscles in front of his pathetic band of overgrown frat boys and dead eyed sorority wives who had long ago forgotten what good sex felt like. He began his question by reminding the President that he had gone to law school with him.
“It’s great to see you” the President replied coolly, confidently. “You’ve done very well.”
The crowd erupted into a gleeful kind of sniggering. As knockout blows go, it was perfect. Scaramucci was already on the ropes, laughing like some wheezing nerd with a bad dose of asthma.
“If I fouled you on the hoop court it wasn’t intentional. You would remember if I fouled ya, I’ve got a low centre of gravity.”
And low tolerance for being embarrassed, it seemed. Low morals. Low fight IQ. Low chance to win this thing if that was his best shot. Fouled him on the hoop court? Who the hell did this low rent moron think he was tangling with now? This was not some intern desperate to be one of the guys. This was The President of The United States, POTUS, The Undisputed Heavyweight Champion of the World, and his smack was heavy as all thunder. His punching prowess was legendary. He ate geeks like this on his way to work each morning. The gloves were coming off.
Obama went on to savage his opponent for complaining that the President’s administration was causing Scaramucci and his Wall Street cronies to be feeling the pinch.
“If you’re making a billion dollars a year after a very bad financial crisis where 8 million people lost their jobs, and small businesses can’t get loans, then you shouldn’t be feeling put upon. The notion that me saying you should be taxed more like your secretary when you’re pulling down 100 million dollars a year I don’t think is me being extremist or anti-business.”
Crack! Take that! You’ve just been hit with an uppercut from the reigning commander in chief. And Scarammuci had to sit there and eat it, his face lurching from a tight grimace to a death mask in a matter of seconds. It was beautiful to watch.
That was in September of 2010. It was the same year the Giants won the pennant, of course, and something about that made me oddly nostalgic for a very different time. They would never allow a gang of crazies like that to win the Big One these days, and Barack Obama is never coming back. Neither is Sean Spicer, for that matter, because he does not think Scaramucci is sufficiently qualified to boss him around. And he is right, of course. Or it could be that Spicer simply wanted out of this hideous freak show of a Presidency any way he could. It is no secret that the President hates his guts. He is jealous, they say, of Spicer’s popularity with the press corps and constantly undermines him with vicious tweets he sends out at strange hours of the night like some bored and attention seeking teenage girl. Well, Don, Sean here has had enough. So have I. So has everyone. I go back to my book about a gang of misfits that ruled all of baseball for a brief, shining moment, and am still reading as Scaramucci takes the podium to announce his arrival, speaking dumbly into a broken mic, repeating himself moronically, before floundering around like some helpless fish flapping on the floor, desperately beseeching some guy named ‘John’ in the front row to bail him out or back him up. Anthony Scaramucci once called Donald Trump ‘a hack’. I go back to my book.
As Bob Dylan once sagely sang, “’it takes one to know one’, she smiles.”