Monday’s firing of recently hired White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci along with the replacement of Reince Priebus with John Kelly as Chief of Staff has left the media in an uproar about the “chaos” in the White House. On CNN’s New Day Tuesday, political analyst and former host of NBC’s Meet the Press David Gregory argued that the firings and hirings undermined the integrity of the presidency. “Well I mean, I just think it’s been a joke,” Gregory scoffed.
That response came after host Chris Cuomo asked Gregory what he thought about the White House’s “problem” with staff, and what Kelly’s solution to fire Scaramucci “may yield.”
Gregory bluntly called the “behavior within the White House” a “joke,” even going on to call Trump a liar for saying he could run an organized White House because he was a business leader.
Well, I mean I just think it's been a joke. The behavior within the White House. I mean the lie from the president that as a business leader he was going to come in and run a great organization like his own organization, and then he has this nonsense. Scaramucci acting like this is seventh grade home room, instead of the west wing, and the presidency. I mean, really a joke.
Gregory then took the Dowd approach in treating Trump as if he was a child that Congress needed to shield from the public:
Now at least Congress has tied his hands on the sanctions. The issue now is the potential to turn the corner. There are people like General Mattis, and now General Kelly who are close enough on really big issues to have the president's ear and apparently have his respect to potentially instill some real discipline in Trump. The question is whether Trump listens to anybody, and that will be the ultimate test, and this whole issue with the misleading comment that The Post is reporting on this morning, what does General Kelly do with that, do with the response to that? That's what we're going to be keeping our eyes on, because you have a chief of staff who has got this kind of power. Let's see him, the evidence of him actually using it on issues that matter, real problems, like North Korea, things like that. Not this nonsense about gossip between advisors.
Gregory has a tendency to react with hyperbole to anything Trump does such as when he compared the so-called “Muslim ban” to the Holocaust. While tending to blow up everything out of proportion that Trump does, Gregory also tends to downplay anything negative found on the Democrats side. Despite the conflicts between Bernie Sanders and Clinton supporters and the DNC’s efforts to push out Sanders, he called the infighting “overblown” and “not as big” as the GOP’s problems.
As much hoopla the media has made of the recent turmoil in the White House staff, this isn’t completely new. As NewsBusters noted after Spicer’s resignation, even the Clinton Administration had similar shakeups, with communications director George Stephanopoulos being fired by President Clinton after just five months on the job.
