The Leaker-in-Chief

It’s true that the Trump administration is flailing. The president hasn’t managed to accomplish a single major reform or win a single policy victory. The investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller, moreover, seems likely to bring charges against one or more people associated with the administration or with the 2016 campaign. But there’s an explanation for all these failings: leaks.

That seems to be the president’s interpretation, anyway. He has complained repeatedly about leakers and leaking, and now his newly appointed communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, has vowed to stop all the leaking. “I’m going to fire everybody,” he explained on Tuesday, “that’s how I’m going to do it, ... You’re either going to stop leaking or you’re going to be fired.” When asked whether he’d be firing assistant press secretary Michael Short, Scaramucci wasn’t happy. “This is the problem with the leaking. This is actually a terrible thing. Let’s say I’m firing Michael Short today. The fact that you guys know about it before he does really upsets me as a human being and as a Roman Catholic.”

This last remark was a particularly weird one, since it was Scaramucci himself who originally “leaked” the news that Short was likely to be shown the door.

It’s not that the White House doesn’t have a first-order problem with the leaking of sensitive information. It does. But the most serious and damaging leaks rarely originate from the White House communications office, and for a simple reason: Political comms officers typically don’t have anything to leak, their purview being official messaging and prefabricated statements, not sensitive or classified information.

Donald Trump is widely known to phone political reporters for their opinions. Often he wants to protest specific criticisms or the tone of their stories. Sometimes he asks how the reporter would react if he, Trump, decided to do this or that. When the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman recalled that during the 2016 campaign, “several advisers privately called Trump ‘leaker-in-chief’ [because] of his tendency to be blurt stuff 2 friends on phone,” we can believe it. And when Mike Allen writes at Axiostoday that “President Trump, in one of his hallmark rituals, recently called a longtime political associate and asked out of the blue: ‘What would happen if I fired Sessions?’” we can remember many similar stories told by “longtime political associates.”