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Access

With the hiring of Scaramucci, both Spicer and Priebus had had enough. After Scaramucci’s position as communications director was announced at a senior staff meeting, Spicer went into the Oval Office and told the president he disagreed with the pick and quickly resigned.

Given his long background as a press spokesman for the RNC and then the White House and Scaramucci’s lack of any experience in that profession, Spicer saw it as a personal affront to work for him. He told the president the arrangement couldn’t work. Once he had turned over the podium to Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Spicer had assumed his role would evolve into more of a full-time communications director.

Spicer had an impossible job. It was difficult to respond to Trump’s misstatements without contradicting him. No communications plan could stay on track because of the president’s Twitter finger. The warring factions of the White House made it impossible to know exactly what was going on.

On the one hand, Trump wanted him to be combative, but then Trump would say he was too combative. Spicer could never get past that first day’s briefing, when Trump pressured him to nitpick at a press briefing about the inauguration crowd size. Spicer was also kept out of the loop on why Trump fired FBI director James Comey. He then gave the explanation that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had written a memo saying he had no faith in Comey because Comey, instead of leaving it to senior Justice Department officials, had taken it upon himself to decide whether to indict Hillary Clinton. However, Trump undercut Spicer by contradicting that version, saying he had previously decided to fire the FBI director.

“Everyone just assumed, oh, there’s no way that anyone would walk,” Spicer says. “And I think that was what shocked people, is that I said this is ridiculous. Do what you want, but I’m not going to be a party to it.”

Spicer told Priebus, whom he had worked for at the RNC, that he had resigned. A week later, Priebus told Trump that he was leaving as well.

For Priebus, the final straw was when Scaramucci announced he would be reporting directly to the president. Communications was perhaps the most important job in the White House. What was the point of being chief of a staff he could not control?

The president was alone in the Oval Office when Priebus walked in and told him he was resigning. Trump asked him what he thought of General Kelly, the secretary of Homeland Security, as a new chief of staff. Priebus said he thought Kelly would be a good choice. Trump had talked with Kelly the previous evening but did not offer him the job at that point.

Priebus would have liked to have stayed on for a year or two. But he knew what he was getting into before he accepted the job. As Priebus saw it, rather than being ineffective, he was the one who had made the White House work under very difficult circumstances.

“I actually had product that I was responsible for,” Priebus says. “There was a product every day. There was the schedule, the meeting, the vetting. There was a product every day that had to be produced. Then there was this speech over here, and the right people were in the room, and the executive orders and proclamations were properly vetted through the usual White House review process.”

But the job became a nightmare. For all the chaos that Trump presided over, no one questioned that the logistics, meetings, speeches, vetting, and appointments that Priebus oversaw went smoothly. But when it came to hiring decisions, Ivanka would bring up a comment about Trump someone had made years ago and underscore it with her father. Yet Trump hired Democrats like Gary Cohn on the spot as well as Scaramucci, who had belittled Trump. And Kellyanne Conway, who had no job description except to appear on TV, made it a practice to deride Priebus to reporters on a background basis.

Priebus said in a statement, “It has been one of the greatest honors of my life to serve this president and our country. I want to thank the president for giving me this very special opportunity. I will continue to serve as a strong supporter of the president’s agenda and policies. I can’t think of a better person than General John Kelly to succeed me, and I wish him God’s blessings and great success.”

Going back to his days at the military academy, Trump had been drawn to military leaders—“my generals,” he calls them—and by appointing Kelly, the president hoped to bring military discipline to his often unruly West Wing. As secretary of Homeland Security, Kelly had formed a bond with the president that was fortified when he aggressively defended the travel ban policy. Trump told aides that he saw Kelly as someone who dutifully followed through on his agenda—including a border security crackdown and sharp reduction in illegal immigration—and would not cause him problems.

“He is a Great American and a Great Leader,” Trump tweeted about Kelly. “John has also done a spectacular job at Homeland Security. He has been a true star of my administration.”

After his exit, Priebus gave classy interviews to Wolf Blitzer of CNN and Sean Hannity of Fox News, refusing to criticize anyone. Finally, with Kelly as the new chief of staff, Trump, who was troubled by Scaramucci’s profanity-laden interview with Lizza, dismissed him as White House communications director. He had lasted ten days.

Kelly is a no-nonsense leader who does “not suffer idiots and fools,” in the words of one colleague. Born in 1950 to an Irish Catholic family in Boston, Kelly enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1970.

As a condition to taking the job, Kelly made it clear to Trump that he expected aides to report to him. Before Kelly took over, aides would either walk into the Oval Office unannounced or gather outside, hoping that Trump would see them and summon them in. Staffers would drift into the Oval Office to push their points with Trump as if it were a Turkish bazaar. That traffic diminished with Kelly, who imposed some order to having access to the president. Aides can no longer linger outside the chief of staff’s office, either. White House staff waiting to see Kelly or other senior advisers in nearby suites are asked to remain in the lobby, where White House visitors sit on couches and can read a selection of daily newspapers.

Like the majority of Trump’s cabinet picks, Kelly was more impressive than many Cabinet officers in previous administrations. While many like Priebus and Pence were part of the Republican establishment that Trump had railed against during his insurgent presidential campaign, Trump had long ago come to recognize that if he wanted an outstanding Cabinet to move his agenda, he would have to pick candidates with solid experience either in government or in the private sector. At the same time, as part of his promise to “drain the swamp,” Trump imposed a five-year ban on executive branch officials engaging in lobbying the government after leaving their jobs. Former government officials were banned entirely from lobbying the United States on behalf of a foreign government.

Kelly devoted his first three weeks to determining how to create a less chaotic environment around the president. In two memos, signed by Kelly and Robert Porter, the assistant to the president for policy coordination and staff secretary, Kelly codified rules and procedures that a White House typically sets at the outset of an administration. While Priebus had done the same, given his lack of authority, they were often disregarded.

One of Kelly’s memos told White House aides that all material prepared for the president was to undergo a vetting process first, reaffirming what Priebus’s instructions to the staff had been. Then Kelly would sign off on it before it landed on Trump’s desk. But as happened under Priebus, those orders were not always obeyed.

The new chief of staff instructed the often-feuding factions in the White House to “get their act together” before bringing an issue before Trump. As was the practice with Priebus, Kelly listens in on the line when Trump makes a call.

At the same time, Kelly made it clear that he would not seek to directly control the president’s behavior. Just before Election Day, Trump had blown up publicly on Twitter after the New York Times reported that his aides had succeeded in keeping him off Twitter for the final stages of the campaign. Nor did Kelly succeed in controlling Trump’s impromptu comments, as when he doubled down at Trump Tower on blaming “both sides” for the racially charged violence in Charlottesville. Kelly had advised Trump to deliver a more somber, traditional statement. He and other advisers also had urged the president to avoid taking questions from the news media at Trump Tower, a request that the president ignored.

As before under Priebus, the draft of an executive order goes through several stages of development, involving the White House Counsel’s Office and vetting by relevant staff and agency officials. Then Kelly gives it final approval before it goes to the president.

Kelly is also supposed to control access to Trump in the Oval Office. The exceptions are Melania and the president’s son, Barron, as well as Ivanka if she is speaking to her father as his daughter. But Jared and Ivanka can still lobby the president outside the White House.

In one senior staff meeting, Kelly made clear that any policy issues on Capitol Hill must all run through Marc Short, Trump’s director of legislative affairs, who had previously seen his authority undermined by conflicting messages from within the West Wing.

As Kelly was wrapping up a meeting in the Oval Office, National Security adviser H. R. McMaster approached the president to further discuss an issue they had been debating. Infuriated, Kelly got into H. R.’s face. As their noses came within an inch of each other, Kelly screamed at him that the meeting had concluded and that he needed to leave.

“Everyone acknowledges that Kelly is clearly in charge, and they don’t want to run afoul of him,” Spicer says. “Authority is two things, the reality of it and the perception of it, and in his case, he has both.”

“Kelly has brought order and discipline where there once was chaos,” Kellyanne Conway says. “Kelly understands how to literally exercise command and control over large structures. He exemplifies and expects of us the major qualities that he has exemplified in his forty-five years of public service—integrity, focus, discipline, performance, results, team cohesion.”

While Trump privately expressed appreciation for the order Kelly imposed, he has also said he has mixed feelings about the restrictions Kelly has placed on daily access to him, particularly when they encroach on Jared’s and Ivanka’s ability to see him. While no one can keep Jared and Ivanka from influencing the president outside of the White House, their vendetta against Bannon, Priebus, Spicer, and other White House aides had backfired because Kelly put a crimp in their power. Yet given the fact that they were behind the worst decisions of Trump’s presidency, they remained the Teflon aides.

Nor did Kelly’s strictures stop the leaks or impinge on Trump’s Twitter habits. In the middle of Senate deliberations over his tax plan, Trump retweeted videos from an anti-Muslim group in Great Britain that purported to show a Muslim migrant beating up a Dutch boy on crutches and a Muslim destroying a statue of the Virgin Mary. But the assailant in one of them was not a “Muslim migrant,” and the other two showed four-year-old events with no explanation.

In an opinion piece titled “Trump’s ‘Muslim Video’ Retweets Go Too Far,” Joel Pollak, Breitbart News’s senior editor at large, wrote that one of the tweets “simply refers to a ‘Muslim’ shown destroying a statue of the Virgin Mary.” Another tweet “refers to a ‘Muslim migrant.’ These references seem intended to conflate the misdeeds of one person with the behavior of a group as a whole.”

Thus, by branding the vast majority of peace-loving Muslims as terrorists, Trump’s retweets not only were unfair and inflammatory, they undercut the FBI’s efforts to counter terrorism. As William H. Webster, the former FBI director and former director of Central Intelligence, told me, conflating terrorists with all Muslims is dangerous because the United States is “trying to build relationships with Muslims now in order to be sure that their good citizens help us in keeping terrorist attacks from happening. We need the people who are most likely to know about a plot in time to do us some good, and they are often the people that will be blackened because of their religion or ethnicity.”

In other respects, nothing changed. Trump continues to play one aide against another and erupts in screaming tirades, as he once did with his new chief of staff, General Kelly. After a rally in Phoenix, Trump was in a cantankerous mood when staff members gently suggested he refrain from injecting politics into the day-to-day issues of governing. He reacted by lashing out at Kelly, the most senior aide giving him this advice. Kelly kept his cool, but he later told other White House staffers that during his thirty-five years of service to his country, he had never been spoken to like that. In the future, he told them, he would not abide such treatment.

The paradox of Trump was that he could be generous, supportive, and considerate and at other times treat his aides like dirt. In effect, some aides felt, Trump manages through chaos by pounding someone down to the ground to build someone else up for a couple of weeks. While the team-of-rivals game sparks competition, it also stirs resentment among the staff.

When it came to his tirades, Trump seemed to lack empathy, aides thought. While Trump could make an aide feel like a million bucks, at other times he seemed incapable of understanding how his humiliation of them made them feel. Yet if Trump treated an aide rudely, an hour later he acted as if nothing had happened, as if the incident had vanished from his brain. Since he did not view the humiliation of an aide as awkward or strange, it did not exist in his head.

Despite Kelly’s calming influence, Trump continued to fume on a daily basis about the Russia investigation and to bypass some of the processes Kelly had tried to impose.

“It is very distracting to the president, as it would be to any citizen, to be investigated for something, while at the same time trying to carry the weight of what being president of the United States means on his shoulder,” General Kelly told Fox News. Kelly said the investigation prompted “multiple conversations a day, generally in the morning when we first talk.” Many days begin with a “general conversation” about the investigation before they start other business, “but it is very distracting for him.”

After Priebus left as chief of staff, he and Trump continued to talk, exchanging advice. As with other trusted aides, Trump would invite Priebus to lunches in the White House. The fact that Trump never forgave Priebus for saying he should drop out of the race and finally pushed him out of the White House yet, once he was gone, still continued to treat him as a friend and adviser was one of the many mysteries of Donald Trump.

To be sure, Trump was operating strategically, forestalling criticism by maintaining good relations with his former aides. But Trump also seemed to enjoy staying in touch with those who had helped him, valuing their advice and displaying loyalty, even if he had treated them at times with disdain. In keeping former aides close, Trump is thinking long term, Priebus says. “He thinks long term a lot.”