Amid crises, Trump chafes against criticism, new controls
Friends say president is bothered by treatment by media, chief of staff
President Donald Trump spent the final days of August dutifully performing his job. He tended to the massive recovery from Hurricane Harvey. He hit the road to sell his tax-cut plan. And he convened policy meetings on the federal budget and the North Korean nuclear threat.
Behind the scenes during a summer of crisis, however, Trump appears to pine for the days when the Oval Office was a bustling hub of visitors and gossip, over which he presided as impresario. He fumes that he does not get the credit he thinks he deserves from the media, or the allegiance from fellow Republican leaders he says he is owed. He boasts about his presidency in superlatives, but confidants privately fret about his suddenly dark moods.
And some of Trump’s friends fear that the shorttempered president is on an inevitable collision course with White House Chief of Staff John Kelly.
Trump chafes at some of the retired Marine Corps general’s moves to restrict access to him since he took the job almost a month ago, said several people close to the president. They run counter to Trump’s love of spontaneity and brashness, prompting some Trump loyalists to derisively dub Kelly “the church lady” because they consider him strict and morally superior.
“He’s having a very hard time,” one friend who spoke with Trump this week said of the president. “He doesn’t like the way the media’s handling him. He doesn’t like how Kelly’s handling him. He’s turning on people that are very close to him.”
Aides say Trump admires Kelly’s credentials, respects his leadership and management skills, and praises him often, both in private meetings and at public events. In a tax policy speech Wednesday in Missouri, Trump singled out Kelly’s work to decrease the number of illegal border crossings when he was secretary of homeland security.
Meanwhile, people close to the president said he is simmering with displeasure over what he considers personal disloyalty from National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn, who criticized Trump’s responses to a deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., on Aug. 12. He also has grown increasingly frustrated with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who has clashed with the president on issues including Afghanistan troop levels, the blockade on Qatar and Cuba policy.
This portrait of Trump as he enters what could be his most consequential month in office is based on interviews with 15 senior White House officials, outside advisers and friends of the president, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to share candid assessments.
In September, Trump will face deadlines to raise the federal debt ceiling and pass a spending bill possibly tied to his campaign promise to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border; make his first big push for tax cuts; and oversee a potentially historic disaster recovery in Texas and Louisiana.
If Trump’s 75-minute rally performance on Aug. 22 in Phoenix served as a public testimonial to his rage over the media and Congress, he is agitating privately about other concerns as well.
Trump lashed out at George Gigicos, one of his original campaign staff members, for what the president considered unflattering television camera angles at the Phoenix rally, which Bloomberg News first reported. The president also was distressed by a New York Times report that was posted a few hours before the event documenting the turmoil between him and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. Trump was especially angered by something he learned about at his stop earlier in the day, a border visit in Yuma, Ariz., several of his associates said.
A group of border patrol agents who had endorsed him and become campaign-trail buddies initially were blocked by the Trump administration from attending. Although the agents eventually were allowed into the event, the president made his displeasure about their treatment known to Kelly, said multiple people who were briefed about the incident. Two of those people said Trump raised his voice with his chief of staff, whom he faulted for trying to restrict outside friends from having direct access to him.
“It is not unusual for staffers to hear him bluster about things,” said Barry Bennett, a former campaign adviser. “That doesn’t mean it’s real. There were people on the campaign staff that he said to fire a dozen times, but he never did it. It was just bark. And some people don’t know the difference between the bark and the bite.”
Kelly took the job with the express goal of implementing strict order on a West Wing that had become rife with turmoil, infighting and damaging leaks to the media.
Friends used to be able to call the White House and be patched directly through to Trump; now those calls are routed through Kelly, and do not always make it to the president. Friends used to drop by the West Wing when they had time to kill, wandering to the Oval Office to say hello; now they must have an official appointment — and a clear reason — to visit.
The changes are largely welcomed by senior administration officials, who say the president’s time is too valuable to be wasted.
But Trump sometimes defies — and even resents — the new structure. He has been especially sensitive to the way Kelly’s rigid structure is portrayed in the media, and strives to disabuse people of the notion that he is being managed. The president continues to call business friends and outside advisers, including former chief strategist Stephen Bannon, from his personal phone when Kelly is not around, said people with knowledge of the calls.
“Donald Trump resists being handled,” said Roger Stone, a former Trump adviser and longtime confidant. “Nobody tells him who to see, who to listen to, what to read, what he can say.”
Kelly has told colleagues he has no intention of controlling what Trump says or tweets. Although he has tried to manage the information the president receives, Kelly recognizes there are limits to what he can do, according to White House officials.
“The president can turn on the television, the president can call people and the president can read the newspaper,” said one Republican close to the White House. This person said the onus is on Trump, not his staff, to control his impulses.