The shortest-tenured White House communications director in US history has now weighed in on Liz Truss’s announcement that she will resign as soon as Conservative party members choose a new leader.
Ex-Trump White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci took to Twitter on Thursday just after Ms Truss made her announcement in front of No 10 Downing Street, writing that the soon-to-be ex-prime minister’s time in office lasted just “4.1 Scaramuccis”.
The hedge fund manager turned short-lived Trump spokesperson’s surname came into use as a unit of temporal measurement in mid-2018 when he was dismissed from his White House post after just ten days.
Mr Scaramucci began his tenure in government service in July 2017 with a marathon press conference in which he effusively praised Mr Trump. Mr Trump fired him ten days later amid fallout from a vulgar interview Mr Scaramucci had given to The New Yorker in which he suggested then-White House chief strategist Steve Bannon was a practitioner of autofellatio.
Mr Scaramucci has insisted that his tenure lasted 11 days, not ten. Since then, political commentators — and Mr Scaramucci himself — have taken to using his name as a unit of measurement for the same time period.
Meanwhile, there was a mixed reaction to the resignation in the US media.
CNBC TV personality Jim Cramer went on air and called the UK a “giant clown show.”
“There isn’t anything that impresses me as valid right around the country. This was a great country, could be a great country again,” he said.
Brian Klass wrote in The Atlantic that the US still leads the UK in political dysfunction overall and that the resignation shows democracy still works in Britain.
“As an American living in the United Kingdom, I am tempted to marvel at the disarray and breathe a sigh of relief: In the transatlantic political sweepstakes deciding which political system is more broken, Britain has, at least briefly, retaken the lead from the United States,” he wrote.
“But a victory lap would be misplaced. When you juxtapose the events of the past 44 days in Westminster with the past six years in Washington, it’s clear that America’s democratic dysfunction is far worse.
“Paradoxically, Truss’s downfall shows that British democracy is still working. Polarization is so toxic in the U.S. that Trump never dipped below about 35 per cent approval, no matter what he did. Truss, who was incompetent but far less dangerous, saw her approval ratings flirt with single digits before she was forced out. Her political party and political base turned on her.”
