The NPR Politics Podcast - White House Chief Of Staff John Kelly Is Out; Trump Searches For Replacement

Episode Date: December 10, 2018

President Trump's chief of staff John Kelly will leave the White House at the end of the year. The administration's search for the new chief of staff is under way. This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, national political correspondent Mara Liasson and congressional correspondent Scott Detrow. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

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Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. President Trump's chief of staff, John Kelly, is finally officially leaving the White House at the end of the year. So who is going to fill his shoes? I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. So Mara and Tam, let me start with this question. Do either of you want to be the next White House chief of staff? We are with the bipartisan consensus in Washington. No. So, yeah, that is a real story.

President Trump is having a hard time finding a next chief of staff. We'll talk about that a lot in a moment. But first, John Kelly. Tam, you were reporting on this over the weekend. How long has John Kelly been on the he may be on his way out clock? Approximately since about two months after he started on the job. So he arrived as chief of staff via a tweet announcement that in the course of two tweets said that Reince Priebus, his predecessor, was fired and that John Kelly was starting on the job. And then I found a press

conference from about two months after that, where he came into the White House press briefing room and said, Although I read it all the time, pretty consistently, I'm not quitting today. I don't believe and I just talked to the president, I don't think I'm being fired today. And I am not so frustrated in this job that I'm thinking of leaving. I would tell you this is the hardest job I've ever had. This is, in my view, the most important job I ever had. Given the way that President Trump organizes both his company and now the White House, and given the way that he chafes both his company and now the White House, and

given the way that he chafes on people over time, certainly a challenging job under the Trump White House. Can we talk more broadly about how important the chief of staff position is in a typical White House? It's very important in a typical White House. He's the gatekeeper. He sets up the process for policy decisions, for how the president's time is used, all of the things that Donald Trump just has no interest in at all. Controls what the president sees, what paper gets to his desk, what paper leaves his desk. Well, Mara, John Kelly is a Marine general, had briefly run the Department of Homeland Security before he became chief of staff, and his job was to impose some order on the chaotic Trump White

House. Did he succeed? I think he succeeded in some ways. He got rid of some of the most chaotic players in the White House. Steve Bannon's no longer there. Omarosa Manigault is no longer there. He always said that his job was to be the chief of staff, not to be the chief of the president. So he did manage the staff, but he wasn't able to bring order to the president's interactions with people or his schedule. That he wasn't able to do. Well, and over time, I would argue that he didn't even manage as much of the staff as he previously had. President Trump started bringing in different people, you know, a new national security advisor, a new communications director. And instead of having those people report to the chief of staff,

as would be traditional, they reported directly to the president of the United States. So he was, you know, by the end, he was depleted. His sphere of influence was much smaller. He himself became part of the chaos through a series of missteps and also with all these questions about will he or won't he be fired or will he or won't he storm out? And I guess one argument that maybe he didn't succeed is that we are just wrapping up the second full year of the Trump administration and we are going to be on to chief of staff number three. Right. And three chiefs of staff in less than 24 months is a record. I mean, there are so many records that have been set by the Trump White House in terms of turnover. This is just another one. But since Truman created the position of chief of staff, no president has had more than two chiefs of staff in the first two years and only three have had two. And those left for very different reasons. In both cases, with the turnover that's happened in the Trump White House, these chiefs of staff have left in a cloud and have basically been fired, which is unusual this early in a presidency.

Right. Donald Trump wanted to be more or less his own chief of staff, his own press secretary, his own communications advisor, because he makes his decisions from his gut. And as he said famously, my gut is better than many people's brains. And John Kelly really had an impossible job. And over time, even though Trump really liked him and chose him because he wanted a general, he originally stocked his administration with a lot of generals, they really became like oil and water. And the thing that's interesting to me is in the early days, there was conventional wisdom that people like Kelly, Rex Tillerson, the Secretary of State, Gary Cohn, the top economic advisor in the White House,

H.R. McMaster, who was the former National Security Advisor, and then Jim Mattis at the Defense Department. They were sometimes referred to as the adults in the room or jokingly the Committee to Save America. And there was some thinking that if Donald Trump tried to fire one of them, then they could or would all resign in solidarity. Of course, that didn't happen. He's picked them off one by one until really only Jim Mattis is left at the Pentagon. And he got along very well with John Kelly. He doesn't get along as well with John Bolton, who is the new national security advisor. So I would just say one takeaway from Kelly's departure is Mattis diminished, Bolton ascended. Well, and already President Trump in an interview said Mattis is basically like a Democrat,

which does not bode well for how the president views his secretary of defense. So after all this speculation, Kelly is finally on his way out. But Trump doesn't have anybody to replace him with yet. We will talk about why that is such a big deal after a break. from America's largest mortgage lender. To get started, go to rocketmortgage.com slash NPR politics. Rate shield approval only valid on certain 30-year purchase transactions. Additional conditions or exclusions may apply. Based on Quicken Loans data and comparison to public data records, Equal Housing Lender, licensed in all 50 states.

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Available now at the Google Store and leading retailers. Compatible smart devices required. Hey there, we're going to get back to the show in a second, but I wanted to give you another reminder that if you like what you hear, you can support this podcast by supporting your local public radio station. Just go to donate.npr.org slash politics to support fact-based journalism. Okay, back to the show. And we're back. And it seems to me that now would be a really good time where you want a close ally as a chief of staff, because let's just tick through some of the challenges the Trump

administration faces going forward. One, Democrats are taking control of the House starting in January. Two, the Trump administration's legal troubles coming from the Mueller investigation and the political troubles that come along with it seem to be getting increasingly serious, especially given those filings that came out on Friday that we talked about in our Friday podcast. Three, the economy, which has been going so well, suddenly looks shaky. Are there more things? I feel like there could even be more things. But the bottom line is it's about to get pretty rocky for the Trump administration. But here he is with his chief of staff outgoing and he doesn't seem to know who's going to replace him.

And I would add just a quick number four, which is that his chief of staff is now a lame duck at a time when there is a potential government shutdown and some very serious negotiating that needs to happen between the White House and Congress. And typically, a chief of staff would be integral in those conversations. Can Kelly do that? Good question. And he doesn't have a lot of time left. Yeah. So let's talk about the fact that it's not clear who is going to take over. First of all, it looked like somebody named Nick Ayers, who serves as chief of staff to Vice President Pence, was going to take the job. Mara, what happened? This is the most extraordinary thing that I have ever seen in Washington. Yes,

I said that. OK. You've seen so much. I know. I know. Now I'm interested. Since 1892. But look, this is incredible. The White House chief of staff is the plum job in the universe of Washington. First, the fact that he doesn't have anybody lined up to take it, or he doesn't have a line of people at the door wanting to take it, but that Nick Ayers, 36 years old, was offered the White House chief of staff job, and he turned it down. I mean, that is just extraordinary. That tells you a lot about what this job is about. This job is probably about lawyering up. This job comes with a big risk of getting fired and then insulted on Twitter. This job might entail coming in with your whatever status and stature you have and leaving

with it very diminished. So that is an incredible thing that I have never seen before. But Nick Ayers, who is a very skilled political operative, young guy, he was the vice president's chief of staff. Trump really liked him. He wanted him as the chief of staff, but they were unable to agree on the terms. Nick Ayers said in the end that he only could serve for a couple of months. He has six-year-old triplets. He wants to go back to Georgia. He's widely considered to be considering a run for office

at some point. And the president, I think correctly, said, no, I need somebody who's going to stay throughout the whole election cycle. And Nick Ayers is somebody who has good political instincts, which may have come into play as he made this choice. So, Tam, we have all this reporting that Ayers turned the job down, that Trump doesn't know who he's going to go with now. President Trump, of course, is disputing this view of the situation. What is the president saying about all of this? Well, the president on Twitter is saying, oh, the fake news was saying it was Nick Ayers all along.

No, no, no. I've got lots of options. I'm working on it. Does he have a lot of options? Well, it's a good question because every name that we have heard floated as a potential chief of staff, we have also then heard is not interested in the job. Now, is that public negotiating and playing hard to get? Or is it a reflection of the fact that this is not a great job? I mean, it has traditionally been a great job, a job that you would want, one that chews you up and spits you out and is incredibly hard and all consuming. But when you have President Trump being President Trump, it is a very different job. When you have a president who just doesn't want to be managed or have things around him be managed, it's just different. because the organizational problems of the White House have been there all along. President Trump's tendency to turn on people, turn fast publicly,

and insult them on their way out has been there all along. And yet a lot of high-profile Republicans have said, that's worth it to be the secretary of whatever. That's worth it to work in the White House. It seems like those calculations may be shifting a little bit as the terrain gets rockier for this White House. Yeah, the terrain is rockier. It's not just the economy. It's not just a difficult re-election cycle coming up. It's the legal cloud. And nobody in the White House is quite sure what the president's exposure is. You know, this is not a White House where people have left and gone on

to fabulous other jobs. As a matter of fact, Tam and I both know there are people in the White House who want to leave and haven't found another position. So this is a really extraordinary situation. But the president had the right instincts, I think, when he wanted Nick Ayers, not just because he liked him, but because Nick Ayers was a political operative. That's a skill set that John Kelly didn't have. And he's going into a reelection cycle that's going to be very difficult. And he wanted somebody who was more suited to that period. Other names that we've heard about, Mark Meadows, the Freedom Caucus member of the House, maybe Mick Mulvaney, who already has 100 jobs in the cabinet,

maybe he could add one more. These are people who have other positions they might not want to give up. The president of the New York Yankees was briefly floated, but tells Fox News he is not interested in the position. That is remarkable. So obviously, at some point, the president is going to find somebody to fill this role. Like you said, it's an important position. It's a high profile position. What do you think we'll be able to learn from that ultimate pick in terms of the direction that President Trump wants to go or how he views the seriousness or non-seriousness of these challenges coming up? Well, if he picked somebody from the Freedom Caucus, I would say that was very in sync with

the base first, base second, and base third strategy that Donald Trump has already pursued. In other words, it would show that he wants to double down on his base. He is not looking for some kind of triangulation or bipartisan compromise with the Democratic House, that he just wants to dance with those who brung him and see if he can get a second term that way. And the Freedom Caucus is, of course, a group of extremely conservative Republicans that, when Republicans have the majority in the House, we're able to really dictate the terms of legislation

by holding out or supporting legislation. They're going to have a lot less power next year when Democrats are in charge. And they have been powerful defenders of the president. All right.

Well, we will keep tabs on this. Not quite sure if we will get to another five podcasts this week like we had last week. But, you know, it's Monday. Who knows what the week has in store? In between those podcasts, you can head to npr.org slash politics newsletter to subscribe to our weekly newsletter. It gives you a digest of the biggest stories of the week and our best online analysis.

I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.