Trump’s Center Cannot Hold
His natural state of chaos feeds on itself even as his personal peril grows.
TFW it’s all getting away from you.
Photographer: MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images
Wanted: chief of staff for very legal and very cool Individual. Must enjoy ever-escalating chaos, ritual humiliation and growing odds the boss will be fired.
President Donald Trump is heading into 2019, which could be the most fraught and chaotic year of an already fraught and chaotic presidency, without somebody to run his White House. Current chief or staff John Kelly is leaving, and Trump’s reported top pick for the job turned it down this weekend. This is all par for the Trump course, writes Tim O’Brien; the chaos in his White House, which Kelly only sporadically quelled, is a natural outgrowth of Trump himself. He values family over outsiders and accepts nobody’s counsel but his own. And he turns everybody who helps him into a punching bag eventually. No wonder he can’t find anybody to replace Kelly. Expect the chaos, and the risks it creates, to intensify as more staffers leave in the New Year.