Have you seen Anthony Scaramucci‘s absolutely bonkers New Yorker interview? Please say you have. If not, well, you need to read the whole thing right this instant. 
 
 Go ahead, we’ll wait. 
 
 … 
 
 Crazy, right? We told you. 
 
 Twitter, naturally, has just completely flipped out over this stunning interview. Here is a sampling of the social media reaction: 
 
 This interview with Scaramucci is one of the most wtf documents I’ve ever read: https://t.co/N7LRAoGT3d — Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) July 27, 2017 
 
 Say what you will about Sean. He was experienced enough to say ‘off the record’ https://t.co/kmW2Sqlyks — Glenn Thrush (@GlennThrush) July 27, 2017 
 
 Sean Spicer randomly quitting because he didn’t want to work for Scaramucci suddenly makes a lot more sense https://t.co/OIQVDurTO4 — Matt Pearce (@mattdpearce) July 27, 2017 
 
 Today is the day that Scaramucci truly became communications director. — Evan Osnos (@eosnos) July 27, 2017 
 
 fact-checker: i’m calling to run something by mr. bannon 
 
 rep: ok, shoot 
 
 fact-checker (nervous): is bannon currently attempting autofellatio pic.twitter.com/3g5LlkbMl0 — Cecilia D’Anastasio (@cecianasta) July 27, 2017 
 
 scaramucci should do the next boy scouts address — Gideon Resnick (@GideonResnick) July 27, 2017 
 
 So proud to have the sentence “I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own cock” on @newyorker dot com today https://t.co/YMPgIfXdfM — Jessica Winter (@winterjessica) July 27, 2017 
 
 Picturing Steve Bannon trying to suck his own cock is the cure for male homosexuality that Mike Pence has been desperately searching for. — Marie Connor (@thistallawkgirl) July 27, 2017 
 
 for as curious as I was to see Sean Spicer on Dancing With the Stars I’m now even more interested to see Steve Bannon on Americas Got Talent — Matt Oswalt (@MattOswaltVA) July 27, 2017 
 
 <throws sack on White House lawn, Reince Priebus’ severed head tumbles out> 
 
 “No further comment.” https://t.co/Lsi9OH1h2O — Jonah Goldberg (@JonahNRO) July 27, 2017 
 
 “This guy’s fucking out of his mind,” former Cruz communications chief Rick Tyler says of Scaramucci. — Daniel Dale (@ddale8) July 27, 2017 
 
 And again, to be clear, THE MAN TASKED W WHITE HOUSE PRESS JUST TOLD A REPORTER: “I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own cock.” https://t.co/9STON7JORT — Ashley Parker (@AshleyRParker) July 27, 2017 
 
 Congratulations, America. “Can Steve Bannon actually suck his own cock?” is now a reasonable question for White House reporters to ask. — Rex Huppke (@RexHuppke) July 27, 2017 
 
 Related: Steve Bannon is reported to have been alone in his office with the door closed for well over an hour now. — colbyhall (@colbyhall) July 27, 2017 
 
 Basically, Mini-Me is hurling grenades all over the White House, apparently acting on the boss's frustrations. https://t.co/6Rg42G0qkB — David Axelrod (@davidaxelrod) July 27, 2017 
 
 Yes, the legislative branch is trying to destroy healthcare, but the executive branch is forcing us to imagine Steve Bannon's dong. — Josh Gondelman (@joshgondelman) July 27, 2017 
 
 Oh my. I just read this. And I thought it was impossible for today to get more Lord of the Flies. https://t.co/R28AXsdcoT — Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) July 27, 2017 
 
 Mooch should just end every press briefing and interview from here on out with, "The Aristocrats!" — Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) July 27, 2017 
 
 [image via screengrab] 
 
 —— 
 
 Follow Joe DePaolo (@joe_depaolo) on Twitter 
 
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 On Wednesday night, I received a phone call from Anthony Scaramucci, the new White House communications director. He wasn’t happy. Earlier in the night, I’d tweeted, citing a “senior White House official,” that Scaramucci was having dinner at the White House with President Trump, the First Lady, Sean Hannity, and the former Fox News executive Bill Shine. It was an interesting group, and raised some questions. Was Trump getting strategic advice from Hannity? Was he considering hiring Shine? But Scaramucci had his own question—for me. 
 
 “Who leaked that to you?” he asked. I said I couldn’t give him that information. He responded by threatening to fire the entire White House communications staff. “What I’m going to do is, I will eliminate everyone in the comms team and we’ll start over,” he said. I laughed, not sure if he really believed that such a threat would convince a journalist to reveal a source. He continued to press me and complain about the staff he’s inherited in his new job. “I ask these guys not to leak anything and they can’t help themselves,” he said. “You’re an American citizen, this is a major catastrophe for the American country. So I’m asking you as an American patriot to give me a sense of who leaked it.” 
 
 In Scaramucci’s view, the fact that word of the dinner had reached a reporter was evidence that his rivals in the West Wing, particularly Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, were plotting against him. While they have publicly maintained that there is no bad blood between them, Scaramucci and Priebus have been feuding for months. After the election, Trump asked Scaramucci to join his Administration, and Scaramucci sold his company, SkyBridge Capital, in anticipation of taking on a senior role. But Priebus didn’t want him in the White House, and successfully blocked him from being appointed to a job until last week, when Trump offered him the communications job over Priebus’s vehement objections. In response to Scaramucci’s appointment, Sean Spicer, an ally of Priebus’s, resigned his position as press secretary. And in an additional slight to Priebus, the White House’s official announcement of Scaramucci’s hiring noted that he would report directly to the President, rather than to the chief of staff. 
 
 Scaramucci’s first public appearance as communications director was a slick and conciliatory performance at the lectern in the White House briefing room last Friday. He suggested it was time for the White House to turn a page. But since then, he has become obsessed with leaks and threatened to fire staffers if he discovers that they have given unauthorized information to reporters. Michael Short, a White House press aide considered close to Priebus, resigned on Tuesday after Scaramucci publicly spoke about firing him. Meanwhile, several damaging stories about Scaramucci have appeared in the press, and he blamed Priebus for most of them. Now, he wanted to know whom I had been talking to about his dinner with the President. Scaramucci, who initiated the call, did not ask for the conversation to be off the record or on background. 
 
 “Is it an assistant to the President?” he asked. I again told him I couldn’t say. “O.K., I’m going to fire every one of them, and then you haven’t protected anybody, so the entire place will be fired over the next two weeks.” 
 
 I asked him why it was so important for the dinner to be kept a secret. Surely, I said, it would become public at some point. “I’ve asked people not to leak things for a period of time and give me a honeymoon period,” he said. “They won’t do it.” He was getting more and more worked up, and he eventually convinced himself that Priebus was my source. 
 
 “They’ll all be fired by me,” he said. “I fired one guy the other day. I have three to four people I’ll fire tomorrow. I’ll get to the person who leaked that to you. Reince Priebus—if you want to leak something—he’ll be asked to resign very shortly.” The issue, he said, was that he believed Priebus had been worried about the dinner because he hadn’t been invited. “Reince is a fucking paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac,” Scaramucci said. He channelled Priebus as he spoke: “ ‘Oh, Bill Shine is coming in. Let me leak the fucking thing and see if I can cock-block these people the way I cock-blocked Scaramucci for six months.’ ” (Priebus did not respond to a request for comment.) 
 
 Scaramucci was particularly incensed by a Politico report about his financial-disclosure form, which he viewed as an illegal act of retaliation by Priebus. The reporter said Thursday morning that the document was publicly available and she had obtained it from the Export-Import Bank. Scaramucci didn’t know this at the time, and he insisted to me that Priebus had leaked the document, and that the act was “a felony.” 
 
 “I’ve called the F.B.I. and the Department of Justice,” he told me. 
 
 “Are you serious?” I asked. 
 
 “The swamp will not defeat him,” he said, breaking into the third person. “They’re trying to resist me, but it’s not going to work. I’ve done nothing wrong on my financial disclosures, so they’re going to have to go fuck themselves.” 
 
 Scaramucci also told me that, unlike other senior officials, he had no interest in media attention. “I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own cock,” he said, speaking of Trump’s chief strategist. “I’m not trying to build my own brand off the fucking strength of the President. I’m here to serve the country.” (Bannon declined to comment.) 
 
 He reiterated that Priebus would resign soon, and he noted that he told Trump that he expected Priebus to launch a campaign against him. “He didn’t get the hint that I was reporting directly to the President,” he said. “And I said to the President here are the four or five things that he will do to me.” His list of allegations included leaking the Hannity dinner and the details from his financial-disclosure form. 
 
 I got the sense that Scaramucci’s campaign against leakers flows from his intense loyalty to Trump. Unlike other Trump advisers, I’ve never heard him say a bad word about the President. “What I want to do is I want to fucking kill all the leakers and I want to get the President’s agenda on track so we can succeed for the American people,” he told me. 
 
 He cryptically suggested that he had more information about White House aides. “O.K., the Mooch showed up a week ago,” he said. “This is going to get cleaned up very shortly, O.K.? Because I nailed these guys. I’ve got digital fingerprints on everything they’ve done through the F.B.I. and the fucking Department of Justice.” 
 
 “What?” I interjected. 
 
 “Well, the felony, they’re gonna get prosecuted, probably, for the felony.” He added, “The lie detector starts—” but then he changed the subject and returned to what he thought was the illegal leak of his financial-disclosure forms. I asked if the President knew all of this. 
 
 “Well, he doesn’t know the extent of all that, he knows about some of that, but he’ll know about the rest of it first thing tomorrow morning when I see him.” 
 
 Scaramucci said he had to get going. “Yeah, let me go, though, because I’ve gotta start tweeting some shit to make this guy crazy.” 
 
 Minutes later, he tweeted, “In light of the leak of my financial info which is a felony. I will be contacting @FBI and the @TheJusticeDept #swamp @Reince45.” With the addition of Priebus’s Twitter handle, he was making public what he had just told me: that he believed Priebus was leaking information about him. The tweet quickly went viral. 
 
 Scaramucci seemed to have second thoughts. Within two hours he deleted the original tweet and posted a new one denying that he was targeting the chief of staff. “Wrong!” he said, adding a screenshot of an Axios article that said, “Scaramucci appears to want Priebus investigated by FBI.” Scaramucci continued, “Tweet was public notice to leakers that all Sr Adm officials are helping to end illegal leaks. @Reince45.” 
 
 A few hours later, I appeared on CNN to discuss the overnight drama. As I was talking about Scaramucci, he called into the show himself and referenced our conversation. He changed his story about Priebus. Instead of saying that he was trying to expose Priebus as a leaker, he said that the reason he mentioned Priebus in his deleted tweet was because he wanted to work together with Priebus to discover the leakers. 
 
 “He’s the chief of staff, he’s responsible for understanding and uncovering and helping me do that inside the White House, which is why I put that tweet out last night,” Scaramucci said, after noting that he had talked to me Wednesday night. He then made an argument that journalists were assuming that he was accusing Priebus because they know Priebus leaks to the press. 
 
 “When I put out a tweet, and I put Reince’s name in the tweet,” he said, “they’re all making the assumption that it’s him because journalists know who the leakers are. So, if Reince wants to explain that he’s not a leaker, let him do that.” 
 
 Scaramucci then made a plea to viewers. “Let me tell you something about myself,” he said. “I am a straight shooter.” 
 
 More: David Remnick and Ryan Lizza listen back to audio of the phone call from Anthony Scaramucci. 
 
 David Remnick on why Scaramucci’s attack on Priebus and Bannon matters.
– To say this New Yorker interview with the new White House communications director is unusual is an understatement, especially when it includes accusations of autofellatio against Steve Bannon. Anthony Scaramucci called Ryan Lizza on Wednesday, upset the New Yorker reporter had tweeted about a dinner Scaramucci attended with President Trump, Sean Hannity, and others and demanding to know "who leaked that." When Lizza wouldn't reveal his source, Scaramucci threatened to fire his own White House communications staff. “They’ll all be fired by me,” he said. “I fired one guy the other day. I have three to four people I’ll fire tomorrow. I’ll get to the person who leaked that to you." The threat was ineffective. And then things got real weird. “Reince is a fucking paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac," Scaramucci said, apparently convinced Reince Priebus had leaked the info about the dinner. He then did an impression of Priebus: "Let me leak the fucking thing and see if I can cock-block these people the way I cock-blocked Scaramucci for six months.’" Scaramucci went on to say that, unlike other White House officials, he doesn't want media attention. “I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own cock ... I'm here to serve the country," he said. Mediaite is rounding up the incredulous social media responses to the Scaramucci interview, but you should read the full thing here for Scaramucci saying he wants to "fucking kill all the leakers" and implying White House aides will be prosecuted for "the felony."