The Los Angeles Times is the victim of bad timing: Four days before Anthony Scaramucci’s profanity-filled New Yorker interview, in which he accused Steve Bannon of trying to “suck his own c—,” the paper ran a headline calling him “polished, smooth and noncombative.”
The story, written largely in response to Scaramucci’s no-drama Sunday talk show appearances, described him as “resolutely genial”:
During appearances on three major news talk shows, Scaramucci artfully pivoted away from troublesome topics — with a burst of candor, by changing the subject, by evoking the blue-collar roots he shares with many in Trump’s base, or just with a disarming quip.
Even amid sharp exchanges, his manner remained resolutely genial.
As of this writing, the headline on the story remains: “Anthony Scaramucci, the new face of the White House, is polished, smooth and noncombative.”
Of course, the paper had no way of predicting Scaramucci’s New Yorker meltdown, in which he also called now-former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus a “f—ing paranoid schizophrenic” while correctly predicting that Priebus’ hours were numbered.
Asked about the story by TheWrap, the story’s author, Laura King, noted that while elements of the story were “hilarious in retrospect,” they “weren’t actually off the mark at the time.”
And it’s safe to say that on Sunday, no one could have guessed that by Wednesday night, Scaramucci would accuse Bannon of “trying to suck his own c—.”
“I’m not sure I have a sufficiently vivid imagination, or enough of a knack for sear-your-eyeballs imagery, to have anticipated the tenor of his mid-week remarks,” King wrote in an email. “I wish it had all come to me in a vision as I was watching him.”
“No, wait,” she added. “I don’t.”