Newly minted White House chief of staff John Kelly has sought to put a dent in the influence of one of President Donald Trump’s most famous advisers: Omarosa Manigault.
The former Apprentice co-star—who currently serves as the communications director for the Office of Public Liaison—has seen her direct access to the president limited since Kelly took the top White House job in late July, sources tell The Daily Beast. In particular, Kelly has taken steps to prevent her and other senior staffers from getting unvetted news articles on the president’s Resolute desk—a key method for influencing the president’s thinking, and one that Manigualt used to rile up Trump about internal White House drama.
Multiple sources in and outside the Trump White House told The Daily Beast that, until recently, it was common practice for aides to slide into the Oval Office and distract and infuriate the president with pieces of negative news coverage. Manigault, they say, was one of the worst offenders.
“When Gen. Kelly is talking about clamping down on access to the Oval, she’s patient zero,” a source close to the Trump administration said.
The stories Manigault would present to Trump, often on a phone or printed out, would often enrage the president, and resulted in him spending at least the rest of the day fuming about it. For example, one White House source noted that Manigault was one of the people who would bring to President Trump’s attention online articles concerning MSNBC hosts, and former Trump pals, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski “slagging him, and his administration.”
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Manigault earned a reputation within the White House for this kind of stuff, and, to many of her colleagues, it quickly overshadowed her comms duties and pro-Trump outreach to African-American audiences.
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Of particular concern for Kelly were stories from conspiratorial right-wing websites that occasionally whipped Trump into a frenzy over issues such as the West Wing’s press leak problem. In Manigault’s case, sources said, the stories generally originated at more obscure, gossipy websites, and concerned White House palace intrigue, media personalities, or prominent Republicans in Congress.
Ever since Kelly instituted the new regime, Trump’s former reality-TV co-star’s capacity to influence her boss during the work day has taken a hit.
“She’s not happy about it,” another White House source said. “She has a bond that goes back years with [Trump] and resents being cut off like everyone has.”
To be sure, the president still uses his private cellphone to speak with and solicit advice from a small inner circle of longtime aides and friends, Manigault among them. Though Kelly has sought to limit and streamline the pipeline of information into the Oval Office, there’s not much he can do about the president’s penchant for calling up his closest advisers, even at odd hours, once his staffers depart for the evening.
As Kelly has clamped down on the information that reaches the president through official channels, Trump’s inner circle has increasingly reverted to phone calls with the president directly. The sense is that Kelly is essentially powerless to block Trump off from a coterie of friends and allies that predate the White House by years.
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Kelly is not the first to attempt to limit access by some of Trump’s longtime confidants, including Manigault. His predecessor, former chief of staff Reince Priebus, tried to restructure West Wing meetings in May to cut down on the number of aides with direct access to Trump in those settings.
The New York Times reported at the time that Priebus had sought to exclude Manigault in particular from as many meetings as possible.
But Priebus mostly failed to meaningfully limit the steady flow of information to the president. The optimism aides expressed at the time about his effort to restructure internal White House operations could be warning for Kelly, who is attempting to succeed where Priebus failed.
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- Discussion
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Daily Beast: John Kelly is working to push out Omarosa for 'triggering' Trump with negative news.https://t.co/SLEK0vyK49
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) September 2, 2017
Hitler had Barbarossa.
The ChiComs are eyeing Formosa.
But it's Kelly's mission,
I have a suspicion,
To ease out Omarosa.— Jay Nordlinger (@jaynordlinger) September 2, 2017
You'd struggle to find anyone in WH – w possible exception of POTUS – who would protest this firing. https://t.co/TsInaxNWzN
— Jonathan Swan (@jonathanvswan) September 2, 2017
Here we have a president that needs a babysitter like a little child. Kelly, the new babysitter has to manage the POTUS to prevent him from being easily influenced by news stories that “rile him up”. Kelly has to keep certain people away from Trump and limit his access to news stories. Kelly has to clean house and remove all of the unqualified circus clown cronies that Trump hired as rewards for supporting him. Staff has to scramble to do clean up after Trump’s many Twitter rants and other faux paus. Do we not see the bigger problem here? This POTUS needs to be removed from office. He is not capable of handling this job because of mental instability.
Instead they hire babysitters and try to hide the fact that the emperor has no clothes instead of dealing with this very serious problem head on. Instead of removing the problem they are trying to better manage the insane asylum.
The POTUS is not really functioning as the POTUS. Who is really running the WH and our country? A group of people and close family members in constant conflict with one another each trying to wrest control from the other with no clear leader. In the meantime they are trying to manipulate an unstable old man who seems to go with whomever the last one is he spoke to or the last Fox News commentary he saw. God help us.
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