Mick Mulvaney has been Donald Trump’s acting Chief of Staff for five minutes and there’s already a scandal

| 6:04 pm EST December 15, 2018
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This week we saw Donald Trump scrape the bottom of the barrel in his search for a new White House Chief of Staff, come up empty, and then reach beneath the barrel to offer the job to right wing punchline Mick Mulvaney, only for Mulvaney to say he’s only willing to take the gig on an acting basis. As if that weren’t bad enough, five proverbial minutes after Trump announced the Mulvaney move, there’s already a scandal.

Mick Mulvaney is the kind of corrupt con artist who gets a kick out of taking money away from the poor, so you’d think he and Donald Trump would be two birds of a feather. But it turns out Mulvaney has a rather low opinion of Trump. How do we know this? Just before the 2016 election, Mulvaney called Trump a “terrible human being” while the cameras were rolling. So this is going to be a problem.

When Donald Trump first took office, he refused to hire or appoint anyone who had made negative remarks about him at any point during the 2016 election, with only a very small handful of exceptions. We can only assume that Trump was willing to hire Mick Mulvaney as his budget director because he didn’t know about Mulvaney’s remarks – and the media never thought to make a story out of it because Mulvaney was never in a public-facing role in the administration.

But now that Trump has temporarily elevated Mick Mulvaney to the highest ranking job in his White House, suddenly the video of Mulvaney is going viral. Trump is usually the last to hear about anything, but this is already a scandal; it’s just a matter of whether a critically weakened Trump has the political muscle and/or willpower to send Mulvaney packing once he finds out about it.