the national interest

John Kelly Probably Shouldn’t Buy Any Green Bananas

White House Chief of Staff (at this very moment) John kelly Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post/Getty Images

The Trump administration is going through a process of full Trumpization, as the president removes every official who is there to babysit him and replaces them with officials who will carry out his whims. This bodes very ill for Chief of Staff John Kelly, who is one of the few remaining officials whose termination has been floated in the media repeatedly but has not yet been terminated.

Earlier this week, Gabriel Sherman reported that, according to an outside adviser, President Trump “has recently mulled the concept of creating a new West Wing structure without a chief of staff, one that would instead have four co-equal principals reporting directly to him.” Of course, if you have four “chiefs of staff,” you have none. And that might be the idea. NBC today reports Trump “considered firing his chief of staff this month and not naming a successor” and “envisioned a scenario in which a handful of top aides would report directly to him — bypassing the traditional gatekeeper position.” This would be “a more open-door policy that allowed him unfettered access to outsiders and fewer roadblocks to decision making.” In other words, total chaos.

John Kelly Probably Shouldn’t Buy Any Green Bananas