The campaign manager for former President Obama’s 2012 reelection bid mocked remaining members of the Trump administration in an interview with MSNBC on Friday.
Speaking on the network’s “Morning Joe,” Jim Messina called aides still working for the Trump administration “the dumbest of the dumb.” The remark follows weeks of high-profile departures from the White House.
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“[It’s] a problem across the administration,” Messina said. “You have all these jobs open, and you have no competent people, you and I know this, who want to work in that administration.”
“You’ve got kind of the dumbest of the dumb hanging out,” he continued.
Messina took specific aim at White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, saying that she had lost her ability to be taken seriously by reporters after Sanders claimed that she and President Trump had no knowledge of a $130,000 payment made to adult-film star Stormy Daniels.
“This was information the president didn’t know at the time, but eventually learned,” Sanders told reporters at a press briefing Thursday.
The claim comes days after Trump’s newly appointed lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, told Fox News’s Sean Hannity that Trump reimbursed his longtime personal lawyer Michael Cohen for the payment.
“When I was deputy chief of staff for operations, I would have walked in [to Sanders’s office] and said ‘do you want to quit, or do you want me to fire you?'” Messina said.
Sanders has “no ability to talk to the press anymore,” due to reporters’ skepticism of her answers, Messina continued.
“And it’s not her fault. It is the leader of the country’s fault. There is no process in there, there’s no communications director, there’s no functioning chief of staff. The president and his lawyer decided to go out and completely blow up their strategy.”
Sanders dodged questions about Giuliani’s revelations on “Hannity” at Thursday’s daily briefing, stating only that she first learned about the reimbursement from the interview.
“The first awareness I had was during the interview last night,” Sanders said.
“The White House press office wouldn’t coordinate with the president’s outside legal team on legal strategy,” she added.