New White House Chief of Staff Has an Enforcer
Source: New York Times
New White House Chief of Staff Has an Enforcer
By MAGGIE HABERMAN and GLENN THRUSH SEPT. 8, 2017
Lost in the scramble to cope with Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, the response to North Korea’s nuclear provocations and the shock at President Trump’s instant alliance with Democrats was a little-noticed bureaucratic earthquake that shook the White House this week.
At a staff meeting on Wednesday, Mr. Trump’s new chief of staff, John F. Kelly, announced a number of seemingly quotidian internal moves, capped by the appointment of Kirstjen Nielsen — his brusque, no-nonsense longtime aide — as an assistant to the president and his principal deputy.
Few outside the White House marked the moment, but inside the building, this was a big deal. Mr. Kelly had just handed day-to-day operations to a forceful, empowered aide some of her new colleagues are already comparing to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the feared Vatican enforcer who eventually became Pope Benedict XVI.
Perhaps the biggest problem Mr. Kelly, a retired Marine general, faces in taming his meandering, leaky, infighting-plagued West Wing staff is getting them used to the idea of functioning more or less the way previous White Houses have.
Call it the old normal.
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Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/us/politics/john-kelly-white-house.html
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but Kelly works for Rump, not vice versa.
And it wasn't "even" the GOP members who were pissed, it was them specifically. I hadn't realized it, but Rump uses Ivanka to end meetings. The pubs were anxiously trying to turn things around in that disastrous (for them) meeting when Ivanka showed up early.
Witnesses said a couple were visibly shocked at this railroading by Rump. And the Dems smiled pleasantly.
