Trump tries again to reset WH
WH chief of staff Kelly to leave at year’s end
WASHINGTON, Dec 9, (RTRS): Nick Ayers, in talks with President Donald Trump to become his new White House chief of staff, is a 36-year-old political whiz-kid who could help with the looming reelection campaign, but critics question whether he has the grit needed to keep Trump and an often chaotic administration under control.
A photogenic Georgia native, Ayers has advised a series of high-profile Republican governors and has been Vice-President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, running one of the most effective political teams in Washington.
He has spent his entire career in Republican politics – a sharp contrast to the man he would replace, retired Marine Corps general John Kelly – and earned a fortune selling ads to political campaigns.
Still, Ayers has little experience wheeling and dealing on legislation in Congress and would take the reins at a time when Trump is weakened by Democrats winning control of the House of Representatives at midterm elections last month.
Trump now faces House probes into his businesses and most controversial policies, and special counsel Robert Mueller is investigating possible collusion between Trump’s election campaign team and Russian officials in 2016.
Chris Whipple, who wrote a book on White House chiefs of staff called “The Gatekeepers,” said he is skeptical that Ayers has enough clout to be effective as Trump’s chief of staff.
“I think Donald Trump desperately needs in that job someone who can walk into the Oval Office, close the
not to raise taxes to meet her goals of boosting spending on public schools and social services. Republicans who control the Legislature argue that a tax increase is coming even if state politicians do nothing.
One of the first big political fights Govelect Laura Kelly faces upon taking office in January will be over cutting income taxes. The state is receiving a revenue door, and tell him what he does not want to hear,” Whipple said.
“I’m not sure he (Ayers) has the gravitas to do that,” Whipple said.
Kelly won credit for imposing some degree of order on the White House but he struggled with Trump’s habit of throwing the focus off-course with rogue tweets and personal attacks, including against members of his own administration and party.
“The question is going to be whether a new chief of staff can have the same kind of gravitas that John (Kelly) did, which is the ability to stop the wrong decision from being made,” said Leon Panetta, who was chief of staff for former president Bill Clinton from 1994 to 1997, and later became CIA director and Secretary of Defense in the Obama administration.
Advice
Even the best counsel will matter little unless Trump trusts his new chief of staff and will listen to frank advice, said Panetta.
“You’re not going to be a good chief of staff if you can’t speak truth to power ... I don’t get the impression that this president particularly likes people speaking truth to him.”
Trump said on Saturday his next chief might be in place only for “an interim basis” and that he would announce his pick in coming days.
A White House official said that Trump had wanted a two-year commitment from Ayers, who was unsure that he could stay that long. Ayers has young children, and had been planning to leave the White House in December, the official said.
Ayers notched his first political win
windfall thanks to changes in the federal tax code at the end of 2017.
Kansas has been roiled by a debate over tax cuts for most of this decade, since a previous Republican experiment in slashing income taxes went awry and most voters came to view it as a failure. Lawmakers rolled back most of the experiment, and Kelly built her campaign on a pledge that at age 19, when he left college to join Sonny Perdue’s successful gubernatorial campaign in Georgia.
Perdue, now Trump’s agriculture secretary and a key link to his rural supporters, introduced Ayers to his future wife, Jamie Floyd, a second cousin of Perdue. The Ayers are parents to five-year-old triplets.
In related news, Trump said Saturday that chief of staff John Kelly will leave his job by year’s end amid an expected West Wing reshuffling reflecting a focus on the 2020 re-election campaign and the challenge of governing with Democrats reclaiming control of the House.
Nick Ayers, Vice-President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, is Trump’s top choice to replace Kelly, and the two have held discussions for months about the job, a White House official said. An announcement was expected in the coming days, the president told reporters as he left the White House for the Army-Navy football game in Philadelphia.
Kelly had been credited with imposing order on a chaotic West Wing after his arrival in June 2017 from his post as homeland security secretary. But his iron first also alienated some longtime Trump allies, and he grew increasingly isolated, with an increasingly diminished role.
Known through the West Wing as “the chief” or “the general,” the retired Marine Corps four-star general was tapped by Trump via tweet in July 2017 from his perch atop the Homeland Security Department to try to normalize a White House riven by infighting and competing power bases.
Kansas wouldn’t repeat it.
Now, according to a spokeswoman, Kelly wants to “let the dust settle” and stabilize the budget before considering new tax changes. But there will be no hiatus: Top Republicans are saying that an early priority for them is rewriting income tax laws to cancel out the unintended revenue increase from the federal tax changes. (AP)
Canada clash over immigration:
Right-wing protesters opposed to Canada joining a UN pact for better regulating worldwide migration clashed Saturday with pro-immigration groups in the biting cold outside parliament.
An estimated 200 members of far-right groups and 100 counter-protesters lobbed expletive-laced insults at each other on the snow-covered lawn, resulting in one arrest.
Scuffles erupted just as the event got underway, but riot police quickly separated the two sides.
The crowd then began chanting “Reject immigration pact,” but was drowned out by shouts of “Shame” and “Refugees welcome, racists go home.”
Sylvain Brouillette, spokesman for the protesters, said the United Nations pact risks eroding sovereign immigration policies – a view echoed by opposition Conservative leader Andrew Scheer, and conservative politicians in other countries, but roundly dismissed by its proponents.
“Canada was built on immigration. We have learned to live together and we have found a way to do it well, so we don’t need a UN migration pact to tell us what to do and change a system that works,” Brouillette said. (AFP)