The head leaker in chief at the NY Times, beneficiary of her father’s 40 yr career at the paper, Maggie Haberman reported yesterday that Trump and his new chief of staff, John Kelly, are grinding each other’s gears — citing an incident where the President publicly humiliated Kelly in front of staff.
Source: NY Times
President Trump was in an especially ornery mood after staff members gently suggested he refrain from injecting politics into day-to-day issues of governing after last month’s raucous rally in Arizona, and he responded by lashing out at the most senior aide in his presence.
It happened to be his new chief of staff, John F. Kelly.
Mr. Kelly, the former Marine general brought in five weeks ago as the successor to Reince Priebus, reacted calmly, but he later told other White House staff members that he had never been spoken to like that during 35 years of serving his country. In the future, he said, he would not abide such treatment, according to three people familiar with the exchange.
Haberman hemmed and hawed through a garrulous article, filled with gossip and innuendo, extolling the many virtues of John Kelly, even suggesting that he and Mattis were trying, desperately, to keep transgenders inside the military, ‘slow walking’ Trump through the process.
Mr. Kelly is close to Mr. Mattis and supported the Pentagon’s decision to slow-walk Mr. Trump’s order to ban transgender troops from serving in the military, opting for the creation of a panel to study the matter before implementing a policy that is highly popular with the president’s conservative base.
She concluded the column, loyal to her chimerical bias against the President, pejoratively stating: “But one associate who spoke to Mr. Kelly last month said the former commander had remarked that his current assignment was by far the hardest job he had ever had. His favorite gig, he jokes, was his first: Marine grunt.”
This all ties in nicely with the Daily Beast’s “breaking story” today, saying Omarosa Manigault is the next one to be dismissed by Kelly. Her crime: providing the President with negative news articles that would ‘trigger’ him and make him go crazy around the White House, throwing Oscar in the trashcan tirades — which haven’t served the President’s best interests.
Source: Daily Beast
Multiple sources in and outside the Trump White House told The Daily Beast that, until recently, it was common practice for aides to slide into the Oval Office and distract and infuriate the president with pieces of negative news coverage. Manigault, they say, was one of the worst offenders.
“When Gen. Kelly is talking about clamping down on access to the Oval, she’s patient zero,” a source close to the Trump administration said.
The stories Manigault would present to Trump, often on a phone or printed out, would often enrage the president, and resulted in him spending at least the rest of the day fuming about it. For example, one White House source noted that Manigault was one of the people who would bring to President Trump’s attention online articles concerning MSNBC hosts, and former Trump pals, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski “slagging him, and his administration.”
This contributed, at least in small part, to the president’s mounting rage against the MSNBC couple, which exploded in late June when Trump attacked them and tweeted that, among other things, Brzezinski “was bleeding badly from a face-lift.”
To understand why Kelly would want to isolate the President you first have to understand who he keeps company with, a small group of people and at the meridian of that group is former Obama defense secretary, Leon Panetta. It’s becoming exceedingly difficult to give the President a pass for alleged ‘deep state’ swampers, when in fact he’s the one who’s hiring them.
More from the satanic online news rag:
Kelly “is not thrilled by any means by [Manigault],” a West Wing official told The Daily Beast. “He is, however, thrilled that he has been able to stop staffers including Omarosa from bolting into the Oval Office and triggering the president with White House [palace] intrigue stories.”
Of particular concern for Kelly were stories from conspiratorial right-wing websites that occasionally whipped Trump into a frenzy over issues such as the West Wing’s press leak problem. In Manigault’s case, sources said, the stories generally originated at more obscure, gossipy websites, and concerned White House palace intrigue, media personalities, or prominent Republicans in Congress.
Ever since Kelly instituted the new regime, Trump’s former reality-TV co-star’s capacity to influence her boss during the work day has taken a hit.
“She’s not happy about it,” another White House source said. “She has a bond that goes back years with [Trump] and resents being cut off like everyone has.”
To be sure, the president still uses his private cellphone to speak with and solicit advice from a small inner circle of longtime aides and friends, Manigault among them. Though Kelly has sought to limit and streamline the pipeline of information into the Oval Office, there’s not much he can do about the president’s penchant for calling up his closest advisers, even at odd hours, once his staffers depart for the evening.
As Kelly has clamped down on the information that reaches the president through official channels, Trump’s inner circle has increasingly reverted to phone calls with the president directly. The sense is that Kelly is essentially powerless to block Trump off from a coterie of friends and allies that predate the White House by years.
This story is indeed rich with irony, with The Daily Beast attempting to sockdolager the President’s access to ‘gossipy’ websites, when in fact the entire report is kitschy coffee talk. The foreboding winds that sweep in and around Trump are festooned with cheap regalia, harkening back to an era when parvenus beer swillers would profit from the power exerted out of DC. Now that their vainglorious schemes have been upbraided, they’ve resorted to Wagnerian styled outbursts — tangentially scattered about like children commiserating in a lonely and sad room for having their toys taken away.
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