Daunting tests as White House reshuffles staff
WASHINGTON — President Trump enters a new phase of his presidency Monday with a new chief of staff but an old set of challenges as he seeks to get back on course after enduring one of the worst weeks that any modern occupant of the Oval Office has experienced in his inaugural year in power.
With his poll numbers at historic lows, his legislative agenda stalled and his advisers busy plotting against each other, Trump hoped to regain momentum by pushing out his top aide, Reince Priebus, and installing a retired four-star Marine general, John Kelly, to take command. But it is far from certain that the move will be enough to tame a dysfunctional White House.
The shakeup followed a week that saw the bombastic, with-me-or-against-me president defied as never before by Washington and its institutions, including Republicans in Congress, his own attorney general, the uniformed military leadership, police officers and even the Boy Scouts. No longer daunted by a president with a Twitter account that he uses like a Gatling gun, members of his own party made clear that they were increasingly willing to stand against him on issues such as health care and Russia.
The setbacks came against the backdrop of a West Wing at war with itself, egged on by a president who thrives on conflict and chaos. Kelly, who had been serving as secretary of Homeland Security, brings a career of decisive leadership to his new assignment as White House chief of staff. But he confronts multiple power centers among presidential aides, all with independent lines to the man in the Oval Office, who resists the discipline and structure favored by generals.
“Everybody knows what needs to be done to fix it, and I think everybody is coming to accept that they’re not going to happen,” said Sara Fagen, a White House political director under President George W. Bush. “And the reason they’re not going to happen is the person at the top of the food chain is not going to change. This is the new normal.”
The palace intrigue spilled into public last week with a vulgarity-laced rant by Anthony Scaramucci, the new White House communications director, who called Priebus a “paranoid schizophrenic” and pledged to take him down. While aides fought with one another, Trump’s signature promise to repeal and replace President Barack Obama’s health care program went down in flames.
“Anyone in a position of responsibility in GOP politics is quickly losing patience with President Trump,” said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist and former adviser to Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida. “The dysfunction is beyond strange — it’s dangerous.
Presidential historians found it hard to recall precedents for the combination of internal warfare and external legislative troubles. Jeffrey Engel, director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University, said the best examples were John Tyler and Andrew Johnson in the 19th century. Both men were serving as vice president when their bosses died in office, each during a time of great turmoil in his political party.
“In either case, we are forced to go well back over a century in the past to find an administration in such an open state of infighting coupled with legislative disarray,” he said.
The repeated defiance of Trump this past week indicated diminishing forbearance. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, publicly derided by Trump as “VERY weak,” refused to resign under pressure. Senate Republicans forced the president to back off his threats by warning that they would block any effort to replace Sessions, either during their recess or through the confirmation process.
The House and Senate Intelligence committees, both led by Republicans, summoned Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, to Capitol Hill to explain his contacts with Russia during and after last year’s campaign. With near-unanimous, vetoproof bipartisan majorities, Congress passed legislation curtailing Trump’s power to lift sanctions against Russia, a measure the president had to swallow and agree to sign.
After Trump abruptly wrote on Twitter that he was barring transgender people from the military, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff declared that the policy would not change unless the president gave a proper order. The Boy Scouts of America condemned Trump’s speech to its national jamboree as overly political and apologized to Scouts, while some police organizations repudiated his call to be rougher on suspects.
And a Republican senator, John McCain, repaid Trump’s 2015 insult to his war service by torpedoing the president’s health care agenda with a dramatic middle-of-the-night thumbs-down vote on the Senate floor.
“Think about this week. Not once, not twice — any of these things would have been a nail in the coffin,” said Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago, a White House chief of staff under Obama and a Democratic member of the House before that. “They told the president to pound dirt. That’s an unbelievable statement on where his presidency is only six months in. And nobody fears the political repercussions.”
Indeed, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, received a call from Trump’s interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, reportedly warning of repercussions for the state after her initial vote against proceeding with the health care debate. Undeterred, she voted against the president again on a bill to repeal parts of Obama’s program.
Aides insisted the president would keep fighting.
“People are counting him out after health care,” Kellyanne Conway, a White House counselor, said on Fox News. “I would never bet against Donald Trump. He’s not going to allow one mis-vote by the Senate to stop him to provide relief for all of these Americans who are suffering.”
Fagen said that tapping a general for the White House staff chief might be successful, but that it depended on whether he would be empowered in a way that Priebus had not been. Neither Trump nor Kelly disclosed what commitments if any were made to Kelly.