Anthony Scaramucci, who was (very briefly) the
White House communications director, has broken down the three stages of what he called “Trump Employment Syndrome” in a scathing opinion piece for The
Washington Post.
Namely, the cycle that people go through working for the president.
“The typical person who has worked for Trump or who currently supports him at one point found him very odd,” wrote Scaramucci, whose tenure as communications director in 2017 ended after just 11 days. He has since become a fierce critic of the Trump administration.
Scaramucci noted how himself, senator Ted Cruz, White House counsellor
Kellyanne Conway, senator Lindsey Graham and others prior to the 2016
election “made public statements against then-candidate Trump and criticised his bizarre taunts and misbehaviour.”
But after Trump won, Scaramucci said the second part of the cycle kicked in and they tried “to see the positives, beginning a process of cognitive dissonance and moral equivocation” during which “respect for the office of the presidency” allowed them “to normalise what he is doing.”
The third stage, he wrote, is binary. Scaramucci explained: Eventually, after you’ve realised you can’t mitigate the worst outcomes or moderate the president at all, you must either disavow your self-worth and personal integrity or else stand up and speak out.Scaramucci’s column ostensibly was a letter of support for
John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser who nows finds himself at the centre of a pro-Trump disinformation campaign after reportedly confirming the Democrats’ case for the impeachment of the president in his forthcoming book.
“I, for one, never felt more alive than when the president of the
United States called me an ‘unstable nutjob’ on
Twitter,” Scaramucci concluded his op-ed.
“His bullying and intimidating methods have frozen many in his party, but when I began receiving them myself, I realised I was finally free,” he wrote. “Bolton might learn that speaking the truth is the best method of recovery for Trump Employment Syndrome.”