With every staff move, Trump seems to be moving ever further away from the Republican establishment and building a much more insular team that fits his narrow worldview. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Priebus-Kelly switch.
.. He’s a retired Marine Corps general who has expressed no nuance about the war on terrorism. He has described terrorists as a “savage” enemy and publicly clashed with former president Barack Obama on whether to close Guantanamo Bay.
.. Priebus, along with Vice President Pence, was Trump’s connection to Capitol Hill insiders.
.. “It’s almost as if Trump has managed to combine the two — inexperience and lack of knowledge about Washington from Clinton with the palace intrigue of early LBJ,” he said.
.. He’s tried to play nice with the Republican Party establishment and appears to have concluded that is what has plagued his presidency.
John Kelly, Trump’s new chief of staff, ‘won’t suffer idiots and fools’
a friend of the Homeland Security secretary told The Washington Post that Kelly, a tough talking Bostoner who spent 45 years in the Marines, is ideally suited to confront the challenges he’ll face.
.. Kelly did not gel with the previous administration, and his military career ended on a sour note in January 2016 after he repeatedly clashed with the Obama White House.
.. Officials there had grown tired of the four-star general speaking off message — about the president’s plan to shut down the prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, about the perceived vulnerability of America’s borders, about the threat posed to American interests by any number of terrorist organizations. Their relationship had become so strained that in the weeks before he retired, multiple administration officials went to the media and accused Kelly and other military leaders of endeavoring to undermine the Guantánamo closure plan.
.. His final job in the military, as head of U.S. Southern Command in Miami, gave Kelly deep insight into the criminal networks ravaging South America, Central America and the Caribbean, and their illicit trafficking pipeline — for drugs, guns and people — running north through Mexico and into the United States. He has long argued that transnational organized crime is among the greatest threats to U.S. national security.
.. A big piece of that will be addressing leaks and the president’s portrayal in the media.
.. “There’s a way to handle it,” Kelly’s friend said. “Simply go dark and do not engage.”
Krauthammer’s take: Kelly replaces Priebus
Syndicated columnist and Fox News contributor on John Kelly replacing Reince Priebus as White House chief of staff, whether chaos in the Trump White House will end #Tucker
- The test case is Scaramucci. Is he going to have direct access to the President, or will he have to go through Kelly?
- Will Ivanka and Jared have to go through Kelly?
Five Facts About New White House Chief of Staff John Kelly
#2: Kelly served three tours in Iraq, commanding as a two-star general from 2008 to 2009. He commanded a Marine task force as a one-star general during the initial assault into Iraq. Asked then by a Los Angeles Times reporter if he was concerned about Saddam Hussein’s forces, he reportedly said, “Hell these are Marines. Men like them held Guadalcanal and took Iwo Jima. Baghdad ain’t sh-t.”
.. #4: As a Marine general during the Obama administration, he opposed opening combat jobs to women in the Marine Corps, and closing the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. He rejected the argument that the prison served as terrorist recruitment propaganda as nonsense. He told Defense One: “Bombing the living sh-t out of ISIS in Iraq and Afghanistan, Syria, that would maybe irritate them more than the fact we have Guantanamo open.”