John Kelly is out as White House chief of staff. He apparently has been forced out, making him the second individual to lose that post involuntarily during the Donald Trump administration.
Reince Priebus was the first chief of staff to get the boot from Trump.
This all begs the question: If you’re watching these developments up close and you are on some sort of presidential short list for chief of staff, would you want the job?
If it were me, I would head for the hills, hide in the tall grass, plunge into a cave. I wouldn’t want the president to know where to find me.
Office and Management Budget Director Mick Mulvaney is the current acting chief of staff, which in itself is a bizarre development. Trump is looking for a permanent chief. Where he’ll find it is a mystery to most, perhaps even to the president himself.
I had high hopes for John Kelly. He’s a retired Marine Corps general, a Gold Star dad whose son died in action in Afghanistan. He was Homeland Security secretary when he got the call to run the White House staff after Trump fired Priebus. Kelly is a take-charge guy. I had hope he would calm the White House chaos.
He didn’t do it, but it’s not entirely his fault. He works for a guy — Donald Trump — who cannot be managed. The president has no understanding of the limitations of his office and so he tries to do things that are impossible. He relies on his “gut” more than he relies on “other people’s brains.”
The president’s gut is betraying him — and the country — every single day.
I have no clue how he’s going to find a chief of staff who is willing to tolerate the idiocy that flows out of the Oval Office. Reince Priebus couldn’t hit his rear end with both hands; Gen. Kelly brought a much greater level of competence to the job, but he couldn’t work with a president who is wired the way Donald Trump is wired.
Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, Nick Ayers, bailed on Trump. Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie did, too.
It well might be that it won’t matter one damn bit who Trump selects as chief of staff. He tells us he is the smartest man on Earth. I am partly of a mind to let this bozo try to prove it.
I might take it, provided I get a Contract that is Binding and states that if I’m fired, I still get paid under the contract until the end of Trump’s term