Chief of staff quitting Trump’s team
Expert says John Kelly helped improve efficiency but ultimately failed
WASHINGTON— John Kelly, the retired marine general U.S. President Donald Trump hired as chief of staff to bring order to the White House, will leave his job by year’s end, Trump told reporters Saturday. An announcement about Kelly’s replacement was expected in the coming days, the president said as he left the White House for the Army-Navy game in Philadelphia.
Kelly’s exit, which had been rumoured off and on since last year, intensifies the unprecedented personnel upheaval that has plagued the administration from the start. Trump’s announcement comes the month after he fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
“John Kelly will be leaving — I don’t know if I can say retiring — but he’s a great guy,” Trump told reporters. “John Kelly will be leaving at the end of the year. We’ll be announcing who will be taking John’s place — it might be on an interim basis. I’ll be announcing that over the next day or two, but John will be leaving at the end of the year ... I appreciate his service very much.”
Kelly presided over Trump’s first major legislative success, the passage of a substantial tax cut. He made changes to the disorganized and acrimonious internal operations of the administration, pushing out controversial officials like Steve Bannon and Omarosa Manigault Newman.
But he appeared unable to do anything to fix the ultimate source of the frequent dysfunction: the president himself, who furiously resisted being managed. And he damaged his own reputation with false claims, incendiary statements and a decision to protect an aide who had been accused of abusing his exwives.
“Kelly has made the West Wing more efficient — but in every other way I think he has failed as White House chief,” said Chris Whipple, author of
The Gatekeepers, a book on the people who have held the role.
“There were huge expectations for Kelly coming in. Everybody thought, I think unrealistically, he was going to be the grown-up in the room who would somehow smooth the rough edges off of Trump. And I think he’s been the opposite of that. I think he’s reinforced Trump’s worst partisan instincts.”
Trump had begun “gradually freezing out” Kelly, The Associated Press reported in April, and had told one associate “he was ‘tired of being told no’ by Kelly and has instead chosen to simply not tell Kelly things at all.”
In July, Politico ran an article in which an anonymous Republican called him “chief in name only.”
“Look, we get along well. There are certain things I love what he does. And there are certain things that I don’t like that he does, that aren’t his strength. It’s not that he doesn’t do — you know, he works so hard. He’s doing an excellent job in many ways. There are a couple of things where it’s just not his strength,” Trump said in a Fox News interview in November.
White House chief of staff is one of the most demanding jobs in Washington, and people generally hold the post for two years or less. Trump, though, has now churned through two chiefs in under two years.
Chafing at attempts to impose discipline on him, Trump went to elaborate lengths to circumvent Kelly’s efforts to corral his interactions with aides and friends. In 2018, the president appears to have embarked on an effort to surround himself with people he personally likes. He replaced chief economic adviser Gary Cohn with television economic pundit Larry Kudlow, national security adviser H.R. McMaster with former UN ambassador and Fox News contributor John Bolton, secretary of state Rex Tillerson with CIA director Mike Pompeo.
Kelly had replaced Reince Priebus in July 2017. His tenure was tumultuous from the start. He sometimes seemed to be visibly pained by Trump’s behaviour, though he insisted he was merely “thinking hard.” In one memorable case, he was shown on camera in August appearing dismayed by Trump’s ad-libbed incendiary remarks about the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Va.
Trump was also angered at times by Kelly.
He was said to be upset in January when Kelly told Fox News that Trump had “evolved in the way he’s looked at things” on his proposed border wall. After Trump berated Kelly in August 2017, the New York Times reported, Kelly told colleagues that he had never been spoken to in such a manner in 35 years of public service. In October 2017, Vanity Fair cited a source close to the White House saying the two men were “fighting a lot.”
In public, though, Trump had only praise.
“The fake news is at it again, this time trying to hurt one of the finest people I know, General John Kelly, by saying he will soon be fired,” Trump wrote on Twitter in October 2017. “This story is totally made up by the dishonest media. The chief is doing a FANTASTIC job for me and, more importantly, for the USA!” Trump’s announcement about Kelly’s exit comes nine months after the eruption of a scandal over his handling of the domestic violence allegations against Trump’s then-staff secretary, Rob Porter. By the time of his departure, he had lost the confidence of many of the subordinates he had been tasked with leading.
Kelly was sharply criticized, inside and outside the White House, for virtually every decision he made regarding Porter. He declined to fire Porter when he first learned of the allega- tions, praised Porter even after the allegations became public, and then offered up a timeline of events that appeared obviously inaccurate.
Kelly generated outrage on several other occasions. In October 2017, Kelly told a false story to attack a Democratic member of Congress, Frederica Wilson, who had criticized Trump’s phone call to a war widow. Kelly refused to apologize even when the lie was exposed by video evidence. Later that month, Kelly praised Robert E. Lee, a general for the pro-slavery Confederate forces in the U.S. Civil War, as an “honourable man,” and he claimed the war started because of a “lack of an ability to compromise.” That assertion was widely rejected by historians.
And in August of this year, Manigault Newman released a surreptitious recording of Kelly firing her, in which he seemed to be attempting to pressure her to keep quiet about her time in the White House.
“Other chiefs have had high profiles, but few have been as politically inept as Kelly,” Whipple said. In October 2017, Trump predicted Kelly would remain for “the entire seven remaining years,” calling him “one of the best people I’ve ever worked with.”
“He told me for the last two months he loves it more than anything he’s ever done,” Trump said then — compelling Kelly to note that his actual favourite job remained enlisted Marine sergeant, as he has always said.