From the moment his hiring as communications director was announced, Anthony Scaramucci seemed like a high-risk choice for a White House already struggling with messaging — but one with a potentially high reward.

A well-groomed and carefully dressed hedge-fund type who had wanted to be an actor and who, upon meeting almost anyone, would tell them what movie star they resembled, Scaramucci lacked traditional political or even PR experience. He talked casually and — as the world now knows — "colorfully." He didn't quite grasp the meaning of rudimentary journalistic terms that could protect a person dealing with the press in any circumstance, like off the record and background, often confusing the two. Steve Bannon — the president's chief strategist, who is defined in many ways by his dislike and distrust of the Establishment — had cautioned against Scaramucci's hiring. What he suggested instead was that they find a professional, someone who had displayed an ability to do the job in a competent but unremarkable way.

But the counterargument was compelling: How much worse could things get? The so-called professionals who'd been running the show previously weren't exactly nailing it. And besides, Scaramucci — or Mooch, as he's known — was well liked by not only Donald Trump, but by operatives and reporters, too. He was fun and he had heart, and maybe a character foreign to this swamp was precisely what the president needed. Promising that much had gotten Trump elected, after all.

In the end, this new era would last just eleven days, including two weekends — one of which he spent not in Washington but on Long Island caring for his mother, who has leukemia, and visiting his newborn son. Scaramucci was fired around 9:30 a.m. Monday morning, 15 days before he was scheduled to officially begin the job. He departed before he had time to staff the comms shop with his own employees, and before Sean Spicer, the press secretary who resigned to protest his hiring, had stopped showing up to work. "Anthony represents a truly fresh start for the president in terms of that, and uh, it's different people and different times," Spicer told me soon after he resigned. "You know, who knows, if he'd been the guy first out of the gate, who knows? I was the first guy out of the gate."

The first signs that the "fresh start" would end in calamity were apparent by the afternoon of Wednesday, July 26.