Right-wing talk radio icon Rush Limbaugh reacted live on his show as the news broke Monday that President Donald Trump had fired Anthony Scaramucci from the White House communications director position after only 11 days.
Limbaugh said he could imagine Gen. John Kelly, who was just named as Trump's White House chief of staff, calling for his firing and Trump saying, "Mooch, you gotta mooch off somebody else now, because it's over!"
"Now, the word on Kelly is, you know," Limbaugh said, "he’s a military man. He’s a lieutenant general. He’s a button-down, kick-ass guy, and he was gonna bring discipline to the White House. The leaking was gonna stop and all these individual contractors in there trying to ply their own secrets and their own leaks to advance their own careers, not being on the team, that was gonna stop."
"And so Kelly getting rid of Scaramucci, after I’ve read this profile," he continued, "makes perfect sense. That a guy like Scaramucci would be somebody that Marine Lieutenant General Kelly would have literally no use for. 'I’m not gonna do the job if that guy is gonna be out there speaking for you every day.' I can hear him saying it. And so Trump said, 'Well, if that’s what you want, Mooch, you gotta mooch off somebody else now, because it’s over.' Yeah."
Limbaugh appeared to say the firing was reasonable in order to aid in the effort to root out the leakers that have plagued the Trump administration.
"I can no more imagine," he explained, "if Trump called me — this will never happen, just an illustration — if Trump called me, and said, 'I want you to do X.' I can’t imagine taking the job and then leaking things every day to undermine. I just can’t."
"And that’s apparently been going on a lot," he said. "It just befuddles me. I can understand Obama holdovers in the deep state, and I can understand Republican and Democrat establishment types who hate Trump. But people Trump asked and hired, some of those people have been leaking too, and to the detriment of Trump."
"Which means that the effort to undermine Trump is deep, intricately woven and consists of a lot of phonies who somehow convinced Trump that they were huge," he concluded, "100 percent supporters when they weren’t. They wanted these positions just to be able to undermine and so forth."
The firing of Scaramucci Monday came as a surprise as he had only been announced for the position 11 days prior. A report coming from the White House says that Gen. Kelly told him that he would need to directly answer to Kelly as the new White House chief of staff. When he refused, Kelly fired him on the spot. Scaramucci was escorted off the premises.
In an apparent reference to the firing Monday, Trump tweeted just seven words Monday:
