With the news that Donald Trump has been considering “shaking up” much of his top staff following the disastrous (for him) midterms, many members of the administration have been on edge, and at least one of them says that’s par for the course.
Detailed in a report from the Wall Street Journal, the President’s plan to fire not just Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen but also a deputy to National Security Adviser John Bolton — to start with — sparked comments from an unnamed official currently inside the administration who compared the President to a pyromaniac due to his penchant for keeping everyone in the West Wing on edge about whether they might have a job or not:
This is how the president works. He’s doused a bunch of people in gasoline and he’s waiting for someone to light a match.”
The ouster of Nielsen, the President hopes, may precipitate the departure of his Chief of Staff John Kelly, with whom he’s been at odds for some time, possibly because Trump is resentful of Kelly’s reputation as “the adult in the room” when it comes to decision-making inside the White House.
Trump, of course, prefers to be seen as choosing every action and acting alone in every decision, unless of course the outcome is bad, in which case he will amazingly have suddenly had nothing to do with any of it.
The Journal reports, in fact, that Trump has already chosen a successor for General Kelly, should his plan to coax him into quitting work as engineered — he would simply poach his Vice President’s current Chief of Staff, Nick Ayers.
All of that, of course, lines up with exactly what the unnamed official in the Journal‘s report claims: Trump wants Kelly gone, but hasn’t made any decisions, so he’s applying accelerant to the situation to see if anyone slips up.
We’re not sure what happened to a simple “You’re Fired,” but the President’s new method of ridding himself of non-loyalists is cowardly and makes the White House look like a banana republic.
Featured image via screen capture
