Anthony Scaramucci must have really seen his phone calls from journalists dry up in recent days. That would explain why he broke the emergency glass to bring out the tried and true “Trump is mentally declining” tool.
The playbook to get noticed by the media in President Trump’s Washington is so worn-out and old that I’m worried New York Times reporter Ali Watkins might want to date it. When your status in the swamp is just on the verge of “flameout,” you have two options to give it one final boost: call Trump a racist or else question his mental state.
During an interview with Eric Bolling on Wednesday, Scaramucci, who served as White House communications director just long enough to check out the office Keurig, called Trump “nuts,” “completely crazy,” and a “narcissist.” He also said Trump was “mentally declining.” In short, he repeated everything David Brooks said in 2015.
White House adviser Kellyanne Conway’s husband George Conway got in on that sweet action, tweeting Thursday morning that Trump is suffering from a “deteriorating mental capacity,” which will surely serve as a preview to the longer piece he’ll write for the Washington Post saying the same thing.
In similar fashion, this is how Michael Wolff made his name in 2018. (By the way, have you heard much out of Wolff since then?) And it’s what every pundit, commentator, and journalist needing to boost his own profile did thereafter. How many times did we read stories about administration officials potentially invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office because he’s supposedly “mentally unfit” to do the job?
It all comes to nothing, and that is especially true when it comes from Scaramucci and Conway. The former was almost literally thrown out of the White House after he called up a reporter and went on a maniacal rant about how he was going to fire everyone. Conway has called Trump a racist — but then, what does that say about Conway’s own wife, Trump’s most loyal defender?
If we’re going to continue acting like accusations of Trump’s mental state are new, rather than ploys for media attention, can’t the allegations at least come from people who aren’t so crazy?
