Welcome to the Daily Standard Podcast. I'm Eric Felton. It's another eventful day at the White House. And we've got White House correspondent for the weekly standard Mr.
Michael Warren who's going to be here to tell us all about it. The first, the Daily Standard Podcast is brought to you by the Dollar Shave Club. Stop spending the fortune on gimmicky shave technology you don't need. Make the smarter choice by joining the Dollar Shave Club.
Daily Standard listeners can get their first month for just five dollars with free shipping. Just go to Dollar Shave Club dot com slash weekly standard. Michael Warren, welcome to the Daily Standard Podcast. Thanks for having me Eric.
Now to get things started, we're going to put you on the spot. We're going to have a little listening session here. See if you can identify this. All right, Michael Warren, name that tune.
Is that the mooch I do going to know why you play that song here? The mooch, but you know, a less sophisticated podcast might try to illustrate with music Scarmucci with maybe a little bikini rhapsody from Queen. Not that there's anything wrong with that. We elevate the conversation by turning to do gallon therapy whenever possible.
So the mooch, there's a certain sort of farewell quality to the mooch. We were going to do this podcast this morning. And you in, I don't know, Prashance or just hard one wisdom following this White House. You said, no, let's see what happens throughout the day before we record the podcast.
And what is it that happened today? Yeah, I wish I could say that I had some kind of premonition about this, but I just been covering the White House for six months. And I just kind of knew that Scarmucci and the garbage in the communications right here is gone. Very quickly, very quickly, just so happens to be the same day that the new White House Chief of Staff, John Kelly, the Marine General, the former until last week, the DHS secretary, started his job.
And apparently his first major act, his first decision was to fire Anthony Scarmucci, like 10 days after he was named to the position. It's kind of amazing. And not only fire, but by all accounts, called Scarmucci into his office and brought the hammer down himself. Yeah, that's what has been reported.
Now the official word from the White House is that this is a resignation and that Anthony Starman, which would be best for the new Chief of Staff to start with Queenslight, which was interesting. Let's go down that page six route. But yeah, I mean, it was, it was eerily similar to the statement that came out when what 10 days ago, it was announced that John Spicer was going to resign after the naming of Anthony Scarmucci's communications record. So it has this very strange quality of sort of coming back around to where it all began, the very, very short Scarmucci era.
But I think what it shows there is that John Kelly took his job as Chief of Staff, I'm surprising a lot of people. And basically on his own terms, right, this was a job that he was reportedly offered back in May, and reportedly or clearly declined to take it back in May, and is now taken again two months later. So I think that's the reason why I think we can safely assume that he took the job on some conditions. And one of those conditions may very well have been, I'm going to do it, but not with Anthony Scarmucci on board.
Now Scarmucci is not even, you know, being sort of, you know, giving us off-laning somewhere else at some point, the White House and the administration. He's just going on. Yeah, he's not going back to the accident. But apparently people said the White House that they could see he was being escorted out today in its reful humiliation mode, so our regime was off the grounds by vice-versa.
He wonders if that's the new Chief of Staff's doing as well. In that particular scenario as an illustration to what happens to advisors who embarrass the boss. Maybe, but let's not, let's not, we should get credit for the present here too. This is what happened with Corla Wiedowski when he was five in the campaign.
He was marching out of Trump Tower, and much the same way. So we should emphasize that this is something that the present one as well. It makes you question, well, why? President wanted Anthony Scarmucci on board 10 days ago, what's changed?
Well, maybe what changed was Scarmucci's behavior in the intervening 10 days. Right, it was one of these for a rest of development advances. One of these Joe Bluth, I made a huge mistake in a moment. I mean, the rhineless interview, not just everybody's focused on the vulgarity of the interview, or the conversation that rhineless published with Anthony Scarmucci, but it was more of the tone, I think.
And importantly, for President Trump, I think it was the idea that Scarmucci on orders of Trump was out there to sort of burn previous and torch everybody else I got in his way. I think at first blush, the present probably liked that. You know, Scarmucci pushing back, finding that acting tough. But once the coverage started sort of overwhelmed with the point of this was Trump is in charge.
Once it became Anthony Scarmucci's show, I think that probably became a little too much for the present to handle. And it certainly didn't help that there was a total, there's going to be a total clash between Scarmucci and Marine General John Kelly. Now there is reporting that Scarmucci thought it was going to blow over that the news cycle has become so hyper-kinetic that a huge embarrassment, humiliation for the President on one day. The next day, that's old news.
I think with former White House chief of Staff, I think it was that might have been the case. I think this is an example of how John Kelly's changing things in White House. This is in contrast to previous. In many ways was a weak chief of staff.
And that's not common on his character. It's a way to comment on the fact that he really didn't work in the respect of not only other people he worked with in the work for him. That's a way in White House. What are the present himself?
The chief of staff only has as much power as the President gives him to operate. Now what's your sense? This is day one of the John Kelly chief of staff position. He's got the President behind him 100%.
He's able to block out and make it clear that people aren't going through the President without his permission. He's the gatekeeper. But that only lasts as long as the President exercises some discipline over himself on who he lets go around his own chief of staff. What concerns are there for the President's discipline?
The same as the Alway's heart, Eric. I mean, this is a seven-year-old man who is joining signs of changing who he is. And who he is is something he pulls at these sort of gives into emotions or what anglers him and radiuses him and excites him at any given moment. And it was interesting in the White House, everything this afternoon.
Sarah Huckabee's standard for the Press Secretary said that all of the staff is reporting to John Kelly. That is a significant change from Jared Kushner. Well, that's a good question. She was pressed on this as Jared Kushner, as an honor to do all of these to see them.
And all these people who've been around either through family relations boards and the campaign. They also answer to John Kelly. He was, yes, I think that may be operationally true at this current moment. But what we found with this White House is that that can change very quickly.
And really the question here is how much is John Kelly able, how much is he empowered to enforce this? And how long not only does John Kelly sort of tolerate if Trump returns to his old ways. And how much does Trump tolerate John Kelly trying to enforce this new regime. That's one of these big question marks that we don't really have anything to do.
Do you have any good guesswork? But at least we see from the President's tweets that he is himself realizing that the chaos narrative is bad for business. Absolutely. And there's a lot of evidence that there is chaos.
It's very important to remember that people are talking about, oh, this is chaos. The communications directors out after 10 days, more chaos. I actually think it's going to be a little less chaos. At least in short term, as I think I've demonstrated here with John Kelly in charge.
It's our muchi raw chaos. And I think it's out of that. The President realized maybe that's not what's going to help me get my message out and get my agenda through. Can Ryan Lizas expect to get any late night phone calls from John Kelly?
No. I highly, highly doubt it. Michael Warren, White House correspondent for the Weekly Standard. Thanks for joining us on the Daily Standard podcast.
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That's it for today's Daily Standard podcast. Be sure to tune in to our podcast throughout the week. Just go to iTunes or Google Play for free subscription or go to our website weeklystandard.com. I'm Eric Felton.
Thanks for listening.