Have you ever wondered how you throw away a garbage can? I once tried wheeling an old broken garbage can to my curb with a sign on it that said, “take this.” They took the sign.
That has to be about how Donald Trump is feeling as he attempts to fire John Kelly, his chief of staff. Kelly, after all, is the one who does the firing usually, so according to a White House staffer who briefed New York Magazine journalist Olivia Nuzzi on the internal strife in the West Wing, Trump is left with nobody to call to ax the “grown-up in the room.”
It should come as no surprise that Trump would want to get rid of Kelly — he has to feel like the Marine General sometimes cramps his style. What’s surprising is how badly he wants everyone to think he and Kelly are best pals, despite knowing that Kelly has privately called him an idiot multiple times and described him as “unhinged” in discussions about him.
When Donald Trump pulled Nuzzi aside for a one-on-one interview that she ended up describing as “very weird,” it was because he had heard she was going to report on the conflict between him and his chief of staff. He was eager to show her that Kelly was close at hand, as well as Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo, by calling them into the room to “prove” that they were just having lunch together:
We’re all having lunch. This was not a set-up.”
That, of course, sounds exactly like what you might say if it was, in fact, a set-up.
Even giving the President the benefit of the doubt in that particular situation, Nuzzi was left with conflicting reports from the insider. Speaking on condition of anonymity, the administration staffer told her,
I think the president just doesn’t know who to call to fire him. Normally if the president wanted to fire somebody, he would call Kelly to do it. But there’s nobody else to call. When the President says, I need you to leave, Kelly just ignores him.”
It’s hard to imagine the level of discomfort that Nuzzi felt in the Oval Office. Aside from being a spectacular journalist, she is also a beautiful 25-year-old woman who found herself nearly alone (the only other people present being Trump apologists-slash-enablers Sarah Sanders and Bill Shine, each of whom has extensive experience covering up misconduct) in a room with a guy who’s been credibly accused by 19 women of inappropriate sexual behavior and who just nominated and fought to confirm a similarly notorious cretin to the Supreme Court.
Not that Olivia Nuzzi can’t stand up for herself, of course. Still, when he handed her a 58-point bulleted list of his “accomplishments” as a cap to their conversation, it must have also been a cap to possibly the most bizarre experience of her journalistic career.
Uh… Yeah, that’s weird.
Featured image via screen
