“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,” Scaramucci said, adding, “Reince is a fucking paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac.”

He also had choice words for Steve Bannon, the chief White House strategist, who like Priebus had opposed his hiring. “I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own cock,” he said. “I’m not trying to build my own brand off the fucking strength of the president. I’m here to serve the country.” (Anyone even sparingly familiar with Scaramucci knows that the idea that he is not out to promote himself is risible.)

These quotes make for incredible copy—Lizza’s story should be read repeatedly for full effect—but they are also fantastically revealing about the inner workings of the Trump administration. It is not unusual for the West Wing to be full of feuding factions. It is also not unusual for officials to vent in blunt and vulgar terms to reporters. And fury about leaks is endemic to all presidential administrations at some point or another. It is, however, unusual for any official—much less the chief messaging guru for the White House, in his first week on the job—to speak on the record in this way. (Typically, a source has to request that an interview be off the record before speaking, but Lizza offered no indication that Scaramucci had done so, either before unloading or later in the conversation.)

No one can be surprised by the antipathy between top Trump advisers—for months, the press has been full of reports about skirmishes between various, rotating cliques—but such fights have not been not discussed this openly. This was true even in the early days of the Clinton White House, the previous gold standard for early-term dysfunction. Though staffers were frequently stabbing each other in the back, including undercutting the then-chief of staff (sound familiar?), they were not calling up The New Yorker to speak about it on the record. (They were also living in a pre-internet era, though that would change by the second term, when Drudge Report first revealed the Monica Lewinsky scandal.)

But Scaramucci put it best on CNN Thursday morning: “The fish stinks from the head down.” President Trump has set the tone for making these fights public with his own bizarre, cruel treatment of Attorney General Jeff Sessions. In two newspaper interviews and in a series of tweets, Trump has lambasted Sessions—one of his earliest and most loyal supporters—as weak and ineffective, and has complained about his decision to recuse himself from investigations of Trump’s relations with Russia, calling it “unfair” to the president. Not since the Andrew Johnson administration has a president so viciously attacked one of his own Cabinet members.