Washington: As the newly minted White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders spent most of her first briefing on Friday standing off to the side.

Anthony Scaramucci, the just-named communications director, was dominating the lectern that Sanders had inherited only hours earlier, professing his love - 20 times - for US President Donald Trump and his administration. 

It was an awkward convergence for the first on-camera news briefing in weeks, even in a White House split by warring factions. Where Sanders tends to the dry and sardonic, Scaramucci is over the top.

Four times Scaramucci said, "I love the President." He also expressed his affection for Sanders; Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff; and Sean Spicer, Trump's first White House press secretary, who had resigned earlier on Friday to protest Scaramucci's appointment.

"I love these guys; I respect these guys," Scaramucci gushed. Later, he said: "The President has really good karma, OK? And the world turns back to him. He's genuinely a wonderful human being."

The uneasy alliance between Scaramucci and Sanders will help determine the fate of Trump's efforts to reboot his message and survive amid the escalating scandals engulfing his presidency.

The pair represent the competing power centres still vying inside Trump's West Wing: Sanders, the Southern-drawling, political operative installed by Priebus; and Scaramucci, the gregarious New York hedge fund manager who has grown close with the Trump family and is new to politics.

Known throughout Manhattan as "the Mooch", Scaramucci, 53, grew up a scrappy son of blue-collar Long Island, attended Harvard Law School and became a wealthy hedge fund manager and Wall Street fundraiser. Along the way, he cultivated political and business relationships, including with the Trumps.

Telegenic and smooth-talking, he was an eager face of the Trump campaign on television and in the halls of Trump Tower, bringing a brash style and disarming humour to his tussles with reporters.

By contrast, Sanders, 34, came of age in politics as the daughter of former governor Mike Huckabee of Arkansas. After doing field work for his campaign for governor, she served as political director for his 2008 presidential bid, during which she was steeped in the combative media world of a national election race.

Sanders, who until Friday had served as a deputy press secretary, also managed Huckabee's brief 2016 campaign before joining Trump's White House bid. A mother of three young children whom she often mentions in tense moments in the White House briefing room, she inherited her father's folksy style, his Christian conservatism and his biting sarcasm.

"If you want to see chaos," she told a reporter on Friday, when asked about the West Wing turmoil, "you should come to my house early in the morning, when my three kids are running around. That's chaos; this is nothing."

In their back-to-back performances from the briefing room, Sanders and Scaramucci highlight the contrasts of the Trump White House, where Washington veterans vie with New York insiders and family members for personal clout and control of the president's message.

"It's not clear yet what the overall effect will be. But what is clear is that to the extent that there's a New York-versus-Washington dichotomy here, New York is winning," said Anita Dunn, a one-time communications director for former president Barack Obama. "For me, the question is, is this going to help the White House move its agenda forward, and the jury is very much still out on that."

Sanders began Friday's session with a recitation of talking points and statements from the President before ceding the podium to Scaramucci, who launched into a 33-minute Q&A session with reporters, repeatedly assuring them he would get to every question as he bantered confidently with a press corps that has lately become more accustomed to lectures.

"I'm going to get to everybody," he said repeatedly.

Trump announced Spicer's departure and Scaramucci's arrival in statements that Sanders read verbatim from the podium. But in a break with custom, it was left to Scaramucci, not the President, to announce that Sanders would be his new press secretary. The slight did not go unnoticed by veteran communicators, who said it could undercut her at the outset.

"It would have been appropriate for him to announce Sarah," said Ari Fleischer, who served as press secretary for former pesident George W. Bush. "It empowers her, it sends the message that the President appointed her, he's standing next to her, and that signal was not there."

Later on Friday evening, Trump issued a statement formally announcing Sanders' new role and praising her for having done "an outstanding job".

The White House podium that Sanders won Friday is among the most coveted jobs in Washington, where power is often measured by proximity to the president and minutes on camera.

Sanders said having the opportunity to "speak on behalf of the president is absolutely an honour and something that I will cherish".

But, by design or otherwise, Sanders was upstaged and outshone at her first briefing in the job by Scaramucci, an outsider tapped by Trump to fix all that ails his dysfunctional White House.

That may have been the point. Sanders has embraced the antagonistic tone set by Spicer since the earliest days of Trump's presidency, often objecting to critical coverage that she brands as "fake news" and complaining about "dishonesty" by the media.

While Trump all but invented the "fake news" moniker himself, some of his advisers, including Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, have told him that he cannot afford to have a spokeswoman who has such a poisonous relationship with reporters. That was one of the reasons that Scaramucci was brought in.

Scaramucci finessed the topic on Friday, gently suggesting there was bias by the media even as he joked with reporters and said he would try to "de-escalate" the bitter dynamic between the Fourth Estate and the White House.

New York Times