Scott Reid is an owner-principal at Feschuk Reid and was the director of communications to former prime minister Paul Martin.
Any idiot can curse and swear. But Anthony Scaramucci isn't just any idiot. He's Donald Trump's idiot. He's a bigly idiot.
He's an idiot who speaks – or, in his case, shouts expletives – on behalf of the President of the United States. He's an idiot who can move markets and awake generals with his words. In fact, that's his job: to use words to represent and advance the President's interests.
So by long-established convention, when Mr. Scaramucci muses to a reporter that his own colleague, the White House chief of staff, is a double-dealing treasonous rat-fink or that his other senior colleague, Mr. Trump's top strategist, attempts routinely to make oral congress with himself, he is saying so, unless otherwise rebuked, with the full authority and approval of America's Commander-in-Chief.
Read more: Scaramucci attacks Trump advisers Priebus, Bannon in profanity-laced tirade
Editorial: The Trump administrationis at war with itself, and Trump loves it
Even in the wretched, blasphemous pig circus that is the Trump White House – where decorum is routinely trampled and each day brings a fresh exploration of the bottom of human behaviour – what Mr. Trump's swaggering, rooster-tongued communications director unleashed in his rant to The New Yorker was remarkable. It was remarkably stupid and ugly.
In fact, his comments – including the forehead-slappingly awful next-day interview on CNN's morning show – was historically unprecedented. It was, literally, the worst thing that anyone who has ever served as the White House communications director has ever done.
The most stupid. The least dignified. The bastard child of South Park and House of Cards, but with fewer laughs and more venality.
Mr. Scaramucci has defended himself by saying that he was wrong to trust the reporter, which amounts to an admission of gross incompetence. If you're stuffed so full of ego that you don't even bother to place your words off the record, then you can hardly blame the reporter to whom those words were uttered. It's news.
Reporting news is what reporters do. It's troubling that such an elementary concept needs to be explained to the country's most senior communications professional.
The other defence offered is a re-heated return to Mr. Trump's old line about "locker room talk." Mr. Scaramucci apologized for his passionate nature and "colourful language." Implicitly, it's suggested that he just got carried away, saying in public what everyone else says in private.
It's true – they all curse. In every White House. In every PMO. In every political office, large and small. With only rare, individual exceptions, they all swear among each other and sometimes at each other. These are stressful jobs and they regularly bring out the profane in people.
But no one does what Mr. Scaramucci did. They don't swear about each other – at least not on the record and at the top of their lungs. They don't openly disparage their own tribe and denigrate all others in order to elevate their own profile and position. They don't casually and falsely accuse colleagues of criminal malfeasance and use public airwaves to threaten internal purges. They don't do these things because such behaviours are repugnant and dumb and would, in any proper-functioning office, get them fired immediately.
Mr. Scaramucci, of course, hasn't been fired. Nor has he been dressed down or forced to retract. He will suffer no sanction whatsoever for his actions. Because Mr. Trump sees nothing wrong with what he read in The New Yorker. To the contrary, he almost certainly likes it. Mr. Trump, in his mad-King Aerys court, approves of Mr. Scaramucci's conduct. The President likes the conflict. It conforms to his perverted, self-absorbed notion of what constitutes loyalty.
In Mr. Trump's view, Mr. Scaramucci's willingness to openly war with figures as powerful as Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon is proof of his new hire's commitment. Only someone wholly dedicated to the President's best interests, to rooting out the so-called leakers, as the President calls them, would go to such lengths and behave so wantonly.
The hardcore love it. They praise Mr. Scaramucci as a true loyalist and pay him the ultimate compliment by whispering that he not only acts like Donald Trump, he is like Donald Trump.
And therein lies the risk.
In this world, there is an inescapable contradiction. The President's vanity and narcissism are such that he insists on advisers who sound and act just like him, who do as he would do. But in this world, there can be only one President Trump. Those who tread into his spotlight or steal the slightest measure of his media profile will eventually end up deposed and dismissed.
So Anthony Scaramucci will survive. For now.
But like Jeff Sessions and Sean Spicer and Mr. Priebus and Mr. Bannon, the brash new White House communications director will eventually discover the truth: There is no such thing as loyalty from Donald Trump. Not even for those closest to him.
Especially not for those closest to him.