Life After Trump

AS THE MOOCH VOWS TO “KILL ALL THE LEAKERS,” SPICER RECEIVES A HERO’S WELCOME IN NEW YORK

With his West Wing nightmare finally drawing to an end, the beleaguered press secretary is fielding offers for a lucrative new life after Trump.



BY EMILY JANE FOX
 JULY 28, 2017 10:23 AM




Sean Spicer, outgoing White House press secretary, waved while walking to the West Wing on Tuesday, July 21, 2017.
By Zach Gibson/Getty Images.

Surrounded by a group of media executives mid-week in Midtown Manhattan, a cheerier Sean Spicer unloaded. A week earlier, these were the sorts of people he might have referred to as “the fake news media” from behind the lectern in the White House briefing room in his role as press secretary for President Donald Trump. But a lot had changed in a matter of days for Spicer, who suddenly stepped down from his position last Friday in protest of the president’s decision to hire Anthony Scaramucci, who he thought would drum up unnecessary chaos in an already drama-ridden administration. He was right, it turned out, but he was far away from that bedlam now, spending a day getting wooed in Manhattan as he considered the doors that could open to him in his post-White House life.

He had been apprehensive about making the trip to New York, one person who spoke with Spicer told me, because he wasn’t sure what kind of reception he would receive in a city that overwhelmingly voted against his former boss (some say Trump has not been back to his hometown since he moved to D.C. as a result). New Yorkers are tough, after all, and Spicer had just spent six months and a day getting beaten up in the press and skewered on Saturday Night Live. Manhattan’s streets didn’t seem like the friendliest place for a guy like Sean Spicer.

On this, though, he was wrong. Spicer, this person recalled him saying, was given a hero’s welcome around town, because he said people believed he resigned in protest. “People were yelling his name and greeting him nicely,” this person said. (Spicer himself did not respond to requests for comment.)
Perhaps that is part of the reason Spicer looked lighter when he returned to the White House on Thursday, as Politico reported. It could have been, too, that he’s being courted for all sorts of plum jobs, which, according to Page Six, included meetings with a handful of networks and the chance at a spot on Dancing with the Stars. Axios added that he also sat down with William Morris Endeavor, where, according to an agent, they see him making up to $400,000 for a contributor role on a network and possibly landing a seven-figure book deal, depending on how dishy he’s willing to be. His newfound buoyancy could also have been due to the fact that he wasn’t the one defending the president’s tweets or bracing for a barrage of reporters’ questions at that day’s briefing. Instead, as Politico reported, he skipped onto the grounds just as the briefing wrapped up, and later was thanked by reporters for putting in his time.

WATCH: Sean Spicer’s 7 Best Moments as Press Secretary

The spring in Spicer’s step must have been stratospheric on Thursday afternoon, when The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza published the remarkable details of a phone call he had received from the new White House communications director the night before. “The Mooch,” as he is known, no stranger to Long Island-lilted locker-room talk, unleashed on Lizza after the reporter said he was tipped off to a dinner Scaramucci and the president were having with Sean Hannity and several other Fox News characters at the White House that evening. He had already been riled up about leakers at the White House, vowing to fire them all in his first few days in the West Wing, and still stewing about his feud with Chief of Staff Reince Priebus,who had previously blocked him from a job in the administration.

In what was probably the least profane of the quotes reported, the Mooch told Lizza that he wanted to “****ing kill all the leakers.” He chased that by referring to Priebus as “a ****ing paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac.” This call came hours before an interview on CNN’s New Day, in which Scaramucci referred to their relationship as similar to the one between Cain and Abel. Cain, as we know, killed Abel as they duked it out for God’s favor.

It is not just Priebus who stokes the Mooch’s ire. He explained to Lizza that he joined the administration to serve the president, not himself, unlike Steven Bannon, the White House chief strategist. “I’m not trying to such my own cock.”

The comments have led many to wonder how long Priebus and Bannon might stick around, given such public humiliation at the hands of their colleague, whose attacks were reportedly sanctioned by the president. But many in Trump’s orbit have been routinely debased by their boss and rumored to be halfway out the door for months, only to stick around interminably in a strange sort of limbo. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who has endured a barrage of insults from Trump over the last several weeks, recently told Fox News that the comments are “hurtful” but that he understands the president is passionate. Despite speculation that Trump is trying to shame him into quitting, allowing him more control over the Justice Department’s Russia investigation, Sessions has no plans to resign from his post. Secretary of StateRex Tillerson has also been rumored to be frustrated with the president after finding himself sidelined by the White House, although he, too, has said he plans on sticking around as long as Trump will have him. National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster has reportedly clashed with Trump over military policy in Afghanistan, and is said to have become isolated within the administration. Defense SecretaryJames Mattis learned the danger of taking a vacation this week when the president gave him only one day’s notice before tweeting that the government would no longer allow transgender people to serve in the military, a policy that Mattis had been taking six months to review.

For months, Spicer’s fate was at the center of this deranged game of Clue, as Washington took bets on where and when the beleaguered press secretary would leave, and whether it would be the president who would toss him out or Spicer who would ultimately tire of being the nation’s punching bag.

Ultimately, it was Spicer in the Oval Office on the day of Scaramucci’s sudden appointment.

With Spicer on his way out the door, the Beltway parlor game has turned to the blood feud between Priebus and Scaramucci, whose brief tenure has already sent the White House spiraling into new levels of dysfunction, as Spicer predicted. As right as Spicer has, so far, turned out to be about the Mooch, the Mooch could possibly be equally as right about Spicer. Last Friday, in his first turn in the briefing room, he thanked Spicer for doing an “amazing job,” adding, “I love the guy. I hope he goes on to make a tremendous amount of money.”

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/...-heros-welcome