For the longest time, Anthony Scaramucci (who likes to be called ‘The Mooch’) was a punch line. Although he had supported Demcorats like Barack Obama and later Hillary Clinton, he somehow became a member of the Donald Trump transition team after the 2016 election. He was appointed by Donald Trump on July 21, 2017 as White House Communications Director and was fired just ten days later after he gave an expletive-laden interview where he blasted some members of the Trump administration.
For some time after that he continued to be a Trump supporter but recently the relationship has gone sour big-time. When Scaramucci made some mild criticisms of Trump, the latter of course took extreme umbrage and in his usual manner ridiculed Scaramucci. Scaramucci in turn has upped the ante and said that Trump eventually turns on everybody. Most recently has been saying that he thinks that Trump is mentally incompetent and should be removed from office. He says that he is rounding up former members of the administration who feel the same way to publicly come out and say so.
Former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci said on Monday that he’s assembling a team of former Cabinet members to speak out against President Trump in an effort to find a Republican challenger to the president in 2020.
“I’m in the process of putting together a team of people that feel the exact same way that I do. This is not a ‘Never Trump’ situation, this is not just screeching rhetoric. This is, ‘OK, the guy’s unstable, everyone inside knows it, everyone outside knows it, let’s see if we can find a viable alternative,’” Scaramucci said Monday on CNN’s “New Day.”
“Moreover, I’ve got to get some of these former Cabinet officials in unity to speak up about it.”
…“I predict in middle or late fall there will be a trove of people that will come together in unity to say this is what’s going on. This is how the person’s acting. This is why there’s nobody inside the White House he’s taking any advice from,” Scaramucci said.
What is surprising is that Scaramucci is correct. Trump is unstable. But is he actually nuts? It is always dangerous to make such diagnoses but in this case it may not be necessary for the argument that he should not be president because it goes without saying that Trump is utterly unfit to be president. The evidence is just overwhelming.
I doubt that anything can be done to remove him from office, though. There is a chance that the House of Representatives may impeach him but the Republican-controlled senate will never convict him. All the other scenarios about removing Trump are just fantasy. We just have to grit our teeth and live with this man until the next election and hope that enough members of the voting public see that he must never be re-elected. For whatever reason, his behavior has been steadily deteriorating and becoming more erratic and incoherent and the chief worry is how much worse it might get in the next 18 months.
I can sort-of understand why the always-hungry-for-material-that-doesn’t-require-any-real-work media give Scaramucci attention, but have no clue why any ex-even-Trump™-cabinet-member would do so.
These days, I’m just gritting my teeth and saying “Pence would be worse, Pence would be worse.” Let’s just hope we can survive the next two years without major wars. (A financial collapse is probably unavoidable.)
brucegee1962,
I used share with you my concern that Pence would be worse than Trump but my conviction is no longer so strong. Yes, Pence is a committed hard-right ideologue while Trump is an opportunist who uses those same issues to serve his own ends. But whether we like it our not, Trump seems to have charisma for his base and can mobilize them. Can Pence do the same? Would he have the same ability as Trump to cow Republican lawmakers and make them accept everything he does? I am not sure.
“his behavior has been steadily deteriorating ”
The more the better, because the smaller the chance that he’ll start some war. As a non-American I greatly prefer this to a mentally stable extreme-right ideologue like Pence, thank you very much. That your country is going down the drain is something I can’t influence either; my only hope is the USA not drag the rest of the world with it.
That or someone like Sanders as president. If you don’t understand what I mean go ask the Jemenites how much they like Obama, Clinton and Joe Biden.
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/01/12/reflecting-on-obamas-presidency/obamas-embrace-of-drone-strikes-will-be-a-lasting-legacy
I think there’s a difference between how a student of psychology and non-psychologists think about mental illness. To a lay person the idea of mental illness is a catch-all for anything that leads to clearly bad outcomes. With this way of thinking one would assume most people in prison were mentally ill for example and they might have quirky thoughts about the legal insanity plea.
I’m not a psychologist but I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. I haven’t had the chance to run this idea past an expert in the field but it looks to me as if mental illness means a person lacks the tools to make choices as effectively as most other people. It isn’t about making right or wrong choices, it’s about being able to make the choices at all or being able to make them without impairment. It’s the difference between having impaired vision because you’re nearsighted and having impaired vision because you’re drunk and can’t see straight. Even if you get drunk all the time you still don’t really have a problem with your eyesight and it makes no sense to think nearsighted people are always drunk.
It seems to me that in these discussions, psychologists want to define mental illness as divergence from the norm, whereas the non-experts want to define it as divergence from the ideal. To use non-mental medicine as an analogy, it seems that, if, say, 80% of the population had the cold, a psychologist would say that those people were perfectly healthy, because having a cold was normal. And the rest of us said, it may be normal, but we refuse to call it healthy. Those people are sick.