The retired Marine general was brought in to tame the president, but in the end Trump boxed him in.
John Kelly got the official news of his promotion a year ago the same way a select few in the Trump administration have — by presidential tweet.
Kelly, then the secretary of homeland security, had talked with the president about coming on board as White House chief of staff, but the two had yet to discuss the timing of an announcement or an official rollout when Trump tweeted from aboard Air Force One: “I am pleased to inform you that I have just named General/Secretary John F Kelly as White House Chief of Staff. He is a Great American ….”
The announcement’s unexpected timing and the unorthodox forum may have represented a feature of the Trump presidency that Kelly sought to normalize when he took the job, but those hopes have not materialized. (A White House spokeswoman said that at the time of Trump’s tweet, Kelly had received a formal job offer and “was aware his promotion would be announced in the coming days.”)
A year into the job, Kelly’s attempts to implement traditional processes in an untraditional White House have failed, according to a dozen people in and outside the administration — though virtually all concede the West Wing runs better than it used to.
Kelly’s allies say he took the job out of a sense of duty, and he has suggested he doesn’t enjoy it much. “It is not the best job I ever had,” he told reporters in October. Increasingly, the sober-minded Marine seems to be in on the joke about the relative futility of his labors: “I’m leaving and I’m not coming back,” he has told his aides, only to show up for work the following day. Early mornings in the office have been supplanted by sweat sessions at the gym.
Many of Trump’s friends and advisers have concluded the president doesn’t really want a chief of staff — and he has several confidants urging him to operate without one. But for this president, keeping Kelly around offers the best of both worlds: somebody to blame when things go awry but nobody fettering his freedom of action.
Kelly, people around him say, no longer works to keep his mercurial boss on task or on message, with a Republican close to the White House referring to him as a “chief of staff in name only.”
“The president knows that it is necessary to have a chief of staff that allows him to do things that only he, as president, can do,” said White House deputy press secretary Lindsay Walters.
But nearly all the traces of the martial regime Kelly initially sought to impose have vanished. His efforts to centralize lines of reporting — he made a point of asking Trump’s own daughter Ivanka to report to him — have gone by the wayside.
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Reports of Kelly’s diminishing influence and of his ultimate demise have ebbed and flowed. But White House officials are nearly unanimous in their agreement that Kelly is an improvement over what came before. “He improved a bad situation so it looked like he was making advances and now, it’s not so much that he has lost any kind of standing, it’s that the whole operation is run more smoothly and so there’s less need for what he was doing,” said a senior administration official.
On Capitol Hill, Republicans also say matters have improved, and Kelly remains a reassuring presence to lawmakers. “I believe every day he puts out fires, sometimes from the staff, sometimes from Cabinet members, and sometimes in the Oval Office itself,” said Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio). “But he does it quietly.”
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How John Kelly became ‘chief in name only’ https://t.co/CO5daZ13ql
— POLITICO (@politico) July 29, 2018
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