The new White House chief of staff, John Kelly, is reportedly already reeling over the chaos engulfing the administration.
The new White House chief of staff, John Kelly, is reportedly already reeling over the chaos engulfing the administration.
According to the Daily Beast, insiders have indicated that he had been prepared to deal with mental and emotional strain, staff infighting, and Trump’s unpredictability including his tweeting.
However, the media outlet says “Kelly was floored, as are many of his fellow staffers, by Trump’s unexpectedly shambolic detour into loudly defending Nazis and white-supremacist agitators. It really ‘threw [Kelly] for a loop,’ one senior White House official told The Daily Beast.”
The piece adds that “another White House official, when asked by [the publication] what Kelly’s current mood or state of mind is, would only say, ‘bad.’”
The president’s controversial comments were made during a Tuesday press conference when he said that both sides--the white nationalists who organized the Charlottesville rally and those who showed up to protest them--had some “very fine people.”
An inside White House source has since told NBC News that Trump “went rogue.”
The plan was said to be for him to talk about infrastructure and then leave, but he ended up staying to answer questions about the violence in Charlottesville.
Despite Kelly’s off-side position during the press conference, some media outlets have pointed out that he could be seen wincing during certain parts of Trump’s comments.
And the aftermath may be proving to be just as bad, with the Washington Post reporting that the ensuing “uproar...left Kelly deeply frustrated and dismayed just over two weeks into his job, said people familiar with his thinking. The episode also underscored the difficult challenges that even a four-star general faces in instilling a sense of order around Trump, whose first instinct when cornered is to lash out, even self-destructively.”
