White House: Inside the end of the Priebus era

Reince Priebus spent his last day as White
House chief of staff like nothing was out of
the ordinary.
He held his regular morning meeting, where
he talked about the failure of the GOP health
care reform to pass the Senate early Friday
morning, after a fatal no vote from Arizona
Republican Sen. John McCain.
Story Continued Below
On Air Force One up to Long Island, where
President Donald Trump gave a speech about
the MS-13 gang, Priebus sat at the conference
room table going over the top issues of the
day. “We were talking about the speech in
New York, North Korea, health care, tax
reform,” said New York Republican Rep. Peter
King, who accompanied Trump. “He was
talking, we were talking.”
By 4:49 p.m., it was over. “I am pleased to
inform you that I have just named General/
Secretary John F Kelly as White House Chief
of Staff,” Trump tweeted from the tarmac at
Andrews Air Force Base, where Priebus still
sat waiting in a black SUV. Other aides riding
with him hopped into a different car once the
tweet posted. His SUV separated from the
motorcade and went on a rainy ride through
Washington alone.
Priebus, in an interview on CNN Friday
evening, tried to downplay his tensions with
Trump, while saying it was his decision to
resign. “This isn’t a situation with a bunch of
ill-will,” he said. “I think the president
wanted to go in a different direction. I
support him in that.”
It was an ignominious close to an operatic six
months during which Priebus was sidelined
from the outset, first by chief strategist Steve
Bannon, then by Trump’s children and finally
by Anthony Scaramucci, whose arrival last
week as communications director heralded
the imminent end of Priebus’ tenure.
But finally it was the absence of progress on
Trump’s legislative agenda—health care,
taxes, infrastructure—that prompted the
president, in consultation with his family, to
finally tell people around him it was time “to
try a different approach,” said one senior
administration official.
The most reliable politics newsletter.
Sign up for POLITICO Playbook and get the latest
news, every morning — in your inbox.
By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters
or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any
time.
“It’s hard to overstate how much the family
had to do with this,” this person added.
Over the past week, multiple West Wing aides
and people close to the White House have
described new levels of dysfunction.
The day Scaramucci was named, Priebus tried
to convince others the two men were friends,
but no one in the West Wing believed it. Press
secretary Sean Spicer quit, but Priebus
stayed, determined to make it a year. Other
senior officials said Trump wanted Priebus to
get the hint and leave on his own.
After Scaramucci shredded Priebus in a
vulgar rant to the New Yorker, published
Thursday just as the health care debate was
coming to its fruitless end, Priebus expressed
his frustrations inside the White House. But
the president took Scaramucci’s side—and
Spicer’s successor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders,
went on television to excuse the comments.
One White House official said Priebus had
become so marginalized in the West Wing
that people had started questioning his ability
“to even perform basic tasks.”
The official said Priebus’ departure wasn't
about any one issue, but a pile-up of sorts. “It
was only a matter of time but Trump just
wouldn’t pull the trigger,” the official said.
An aide said Priebus wasn’t available for
comment.
Trump thrived on rivalry and drama in his
campaign, and he guaranteed it would
continue into his administration when he
decided last November to jointly announce
that Priebus and Bannon would be joining his
West Wing.
From the start, Priebus—whose presence was
intended to give the Establishment wing of
the Republican Party a line into the White
House, and to smooth Trump’s relations with
House Speaker Paul Ryan and other GOP
leaders on Capitol Hill—was hemmed in, with
senior advisers like Bannon, Trump son-in-
law Jared Kushner and Kellyanne Conway
reporting directly to the president.
Donald Trump
and John Kelly
are pictured. |
How John Kelly got West Wing
cleanup duty
By BRYAN BENDER, TED HESSON
and STEPHANIE BEASLEY
Known for being a well-organized taskmaster
at the Republican National Committee,
Priebus was perplexed by his famously
mercurial boss, who can make spur-of-the-
moment decisions based on hallway
conversations, associates say.
The unpredictable nature of the information
flow in the White House made him uneasy,
several administration officials say. He lost
his cool when other West Wing staffers knew
things that he didn’t, and he would call people
who had spoken to the president to ask them
what Trump had told them. He would run
from meeting to meeting trying not to miss
anything. He would corner people who
criticized him publicly and ask them to stop –
but admit the criticisms were close to
accurate.
He would rarely leave Trump's side and rush
into the Oval Office when he saw others were
in the room. "He would literally sprint," one
West Wing official said back in the spring.
He also tried to control some of the
president’s media consumption, to little
effect.
Trump never seemed to fully trust Priebus,
who called for him to drop out of the
presidential race after the Access Hollywood
tape emerged in October, even recalling the
episode in front of senators at the White
House in March. And he never fully
empowered him, softly undermining him by
calling him “Reince-y” and making strange
asides, officials said. At one point, he told
associates that Priebus would make a good car
salesman. At another, he mocked him for
expressing excitement when he spotted his
house from Air Force One, flying over
Wisconsin.
Trump exacerbated Priebus’ status by
frequently complaining about him to other
staffers and outside advisers to whom he
would ask, “What do you think of Reince?”
As Priebus’ stock fell, Trump was growing
increasingly enamored of Kelly, his secretary
of Homeland Security, a retired general who
first landed on the administration’s radar
after Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton,
who has a friendly relationship not only with
Priebus but also with Bannon and Kushner,
recommended him early in the transition “for
any high-level cabinet role,” according to a
Cotton aide.
Kelly stepped up to implement the president’s
controversial travel ban executive order in
January, despite the chaos it created at
airports around the country, and has praised
Trump for his efforts to clamp down on
illegal immigration at the southern border
with Mexico.
In May, when Trump was under fire for his
abrupt dismissal of FBI director James Comey
amid the growing investigation into whether
any Trump campaign associates played a role
in Russian meddling during the 2016 election,
Kelly signaled his support for the president
against the media during a commencement
address at the Coast Guard Academy. “Use
that on the press, sir,” Kelly told Trump, who
was given a ceremonial saber.
WHITE HOUSE
Priebus out as chief of staff,
Gen. John Kelly to replace him
By TARA PALMERI , JOSH DAWSEY
and ALEX ISENSTADT
Priebus’ failure to smooth passage of health
care legislation through the GOP-led House in
March infuriated the president, according to
people close to him, and may have made his
departure inevitable.
After that first health care bill failed to get a
vote, his deputy chief of staff Katie Walsh was
ousted. She was never replaced.
Communications director Mike Dubke quietly
resigned following Trump’s first foreign trip,
after Trump criticized him for not fiercely
defending the firing of former FBI director
James Comey.
Spicer, who led a communications and press
shop of former RNC staffers, was the most
high-profile aide to leave, a move that came
last Friday after it was clear Scaramucci
would be above Spicer in the White House
pecking order. His press shop was criticized
for fighting for protecting Priebus in the
press over other staffers and the president.
For some, defending him was just an old
habit. One senior administration official even
called the communications office’s fixation
with defending Priebus an “inappropriate use
of government funds.”
Priebus, who has always been obsessed with
his media coverage, grew even more attentive
to the press in the months after joining the
White House. He would ask Spicer to scream
about negative tweets, and whenever he
caught wind that a negative story about him
might be coming, “the whole West Wing
practically shuts down,” said one senior
administration official.
Another senior administration official said in
June: “If Reince spent as much time worrying
about his job as what you all write about his
job, we’d all be better off.”
Earlier in the week, Priebus was bracing for
the worst as the Senate struggled to pass its
version of an Obamacare repeal-and-replace
bill. He was left out of crucial meetings on
Capitol Hill, according to aides,
and left much of the arm-twisting to get votes
to Vice President Mike Pence and the
legislative affairs shop, as well as to former
campaign staffers Corey Lewandowski and
David Bossie.
GOP aides on the Senate side said that they
didn’t want to deal with Priebus because he
was considered weak and lacking in
influence. “He doesn’t get much respect on
the Hill, because we know he doesn't have
power in the White House,” said one senior
aide.
By the end, senior staffers stopped taking
Priebus seriously – and often skipped his
morning meetings. He would beg staffers not
to leak, only to find himself accused by
Scaramucci of being a leaker.

Tweet