Sean Spicer has resigned as White House press secretary, bringing to an end a tumultuous six months as the public face of Donald Trump’s administration.
Spicer stepped down after the president tapped Anthony Scaramucci, a New York financier and longtime Trump supporter, as the new White House communications director.
The White House had been without a communications director since May, when Mike Dubke resigned from the role in the first personnel shakeup of the Trump administration. Spicer had taken on the responsibilities associated with the job in the interim and strongly opposed Trump’s decision to hire Scaramucci, according to reports.
In his first public comments since the news broke, Spicer told CNN’s Dana Bash: “I wanted to give the president and the new team a clean slate.”
Spicer, who sounded at peace with his decision, will sit down with the Fox News host Sean Hannity Friday evening.
Talking later to the Associated Press, Spicer complimented Scaramucci, saying: “It’ll be great, he’s a tough guy”, and in a tweet, Spicer said it was an “honor & a privilege” to serve President Trump.
Scaramucci appeared in the White House briefing room with Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who had been Spicer’s deputy, and announced she would be replacing him as press secretary.
He praised Spicer for doing a “great job” and told reporters that the president was not off track but there was some “media bias” against him.
Scaramucci offered a marked contrast to Spicer from the White House lectern. The hedge fund mogul seemed relaxed and expressed a desire to improve the administration’s relationship with the media.
The newly minted communications director also lavished accolades on his new boss, saying Trump had “some of the best political instincts in the world and perhaps in history”. Scaramucci even said several times that he “loved” the president.
Trump’s plan to hire Scaramucci was first reported by Axios late Thursday, kicking off a fresh round of allegations of infighting within the White House. Scaramucci is a major Republican donor who supported Trump in the general election, but initially backed the Wisconsin governor, Scott Walker, and the former Florida governor Jeb Bush in the Republican primaries.
His appointment was apparently fought not just by Spicer, but also by Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, according to a source close to the White House. But the prominent Wall Street backer had the blessing of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, the president’s son-in-law and daughter, who maintain a strong influence in the West Wing. Reince Priebus, the chief of staff, was reportedly also against the move, but the chief of staff sought to downplay the discord, telling the AP he was “100%” behind Scaramucci.
The shakeup was nonetheless considered a sign of Priebus’s diminished power in the administration. If Trump’s legislative agenda on Capitol Hill had been more successful, the chief of staff might have had more sway, a Trump ally said, while noting the White House had been aware Spicer would resign if Scaramucci was hired.
“They needed to make a change. They needed someone who could go on television,” said the ally, who added the move to bring in Scaramucci had been under discussion for six weeks.
“This was the president’s decision.”
Scaramucci disputed suggestions of tension within the administration, telling reporters: “I don’t have any friction with Reince [Priebus]. I don’t have any friction with Sean [Spicer].”
Spicer’s future behind the briefing room’s podium had long been tenuous, as his tenure was marked by almost continuous controversy.
From his very first appearance before the cameras, when he angrily chastised the media over the crowd size at Trump’s presidential inauguration, Spicer swiftly emerged as a ridiculed figure for his aggressive attitude toward journalists, false statements and gaffes.
He was memorably mocked by the actor Melissa McCarthy on NBC’s Saturday Night Live, an act that deeply irked Trump, who saw Spicer’s portrayal by a woman as a sign of weakness. Reports would frequently surface of the White House searching for possible replacements for Spicer, with some candidates acknowledging to the media that they had been interviewed for the job, an unusually public slight for an administration official of such high rank.
Perhaps the most damaging blow to Spicer came during Trump’s first foreign trip as president, when the press secretary, a devout Catholic, was shut out of a meeting with Pope Francis at the Vatican.
Spicer’s presence behind the podium was substantially scaled back following the trip, with Huckabee Sanders, the principal deputy White House press secretary, regularly conducting the daily briefings.
One of Spicer’s most egregious gaffes came in April when, in an attempt to highlight the barbarity of Syria’s embattled president Bashar al-Assad, Spicer stated that “not even Hitler” employed the use of chemical weapons, despite the fact that Nazis killed millions with poison gas during the Holocaust.
Spicer apologized repeatedly, saying he had “made a mistake” and “screwed up”.
It was one of a series of gaffes in his short career as Trump’s press secretary.
The Trump-Spicer marriage may have been destined for an early divorce from the start. Spicer, who previously worked as the communications director of the Republican National Committee, was the choice of the former RNC chair Priebus, who, following the election, was appointed as Trump’s chief of staff. Lon part of the Washington establishment, both Spicer and Priebus have often been viewed with skepticism by Trump supporters, even as they have proven fiercely loyal to the president.
Trump, however, questioned Spicer’s loyalty since early in his tenure, when the press secretary struggled to adjust to the high-profile role. The press briefings transformed into must-see TV, with millions tuning in daily to witness regular clashes between Spicer and the White House press corps.
Spicer’s resignation, first reported on Friday by the New York Times, comes amid a turbulent period for the Trump administration, even by its raucous standards.
The White House has been plagued by the federal investigation into potential ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, with fresh revelations involving a meeting with a Russian lawyer that included the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr, Kushner and Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort.
According to emails released last week, Trump Jr accepted the meeting under the pretense that he would be offered damaging information on Hillary Clinton and was explicitly informed of an effort by the Russian government to prop up his father’s campaign.
The exchange offered the first glimpse of the Trump campaign’s willingness to collude with Moscow. Kushner, a senior adviser in the White House, is poised to testify before the Senate intelligence committee on Monday. Trump Jr and Manafort will separately appear before the Senate judiciary committee on Wednesday.
It was disclosed on Thursday that Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, will no longer lead the legal team tasked with responding to the Russia investigation.
Also this week, Trump publicly regretted appointing Jeff Sessions as attorney general over Sessions’ recusal from matters to do with Russia, and for his deputy’s appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel investigating the Russia links.
In recent months, Spicer’s briefings frequently occurred off-camera, a move that he said was taken in part to de-escalate the confrontational nature of the encounters. “We’re not here to make it a spectacle,” Spicer told the Christian Broadcasting Network.
“We want to make sure that we do things that are informative and helpful to get the president’s message out, to answer the key questions.”
The saying nonetheless looming over Spicer’s on-camera appearances was that he was performing for an audience of one: the president.
Scaramucci, on his own first day on the job, largely played it safe, dodging policy questions and noting the Russia investigation was “not in his zip code”.
He lent credence, however, to Trump’s unfounded claim of massive voter fraud in the 2016 election, saying: “If the president says it, let me do a little more research on that but there’s probably some level of truth in it.”
Eventually, Scaramucci left the lectern to Huckabee Sanders – but not before blowing an air kiss to the assembled press.
(TheGuardian US)
