Chaos in the White House

[usmbguest5318]

For the benefit of the "peanut gallery," let's get this out of the way, nothing I'm saying has anything to do with liberal or conservative. It has to do with one's, my if not your, recognizing a mess when I see it. Even conservative observers, at least the ones who are both intelligent and have some measure of integrity, can recognize a mess when they see it, and in turn say so. And it's not just the WH that's dysfunctional.

As one conservative writer, Neah Lekan, put it:

Politics has always been about image, but now the election of the ultimate image of American corporate and personal luxury, Donald J. Trump, has helped to turn the political arena sharply away from policy.

Our political discourse has been colored by a new kind of distortion of reality, one that, whether you are liberal or conservative, is detrimental to continued policy discussions. The Trump Administration has played into these new politics of distortion as has the media. It is this distortion of facts in favor of sound-bytes, of substantive policy in favor of rhetorical posturing, that has lead to perhaps the greatest ill effect of this administration. My family has been a conservative one for generations, and yet we traditional conservatives of the Republican Party have found ourselves hard-pressed to agree with or justify some of the administration’s policies.​

Turned "sharply away from policy!" If that didn't yield a mare's nest during the campaign, it unequivocally does now when the time to govern is past nigh.


Trump today tweeted that there's no chaos in the WH. Really? To believe that, one needs more willing suspension of disbelief than I can muster. Did you write that tweet while at a seance with a swami channeling Taylor Coleridge, Donald? Maybe you're channeling him yourself? To wit...

• Scaramucci -- As if "The Mooch's" vulgar diatribes last week weren't enough...:
  I had a few friends and acquaintances over for brunch yesterday where gauche guffaws broke out about "The Mooch's" apparent affinity for a gay porn performer. I'd forgotten about it until just now hearing that Mooch is gone for the WH staff. Lo and behold, Mooch does/did indeed follow the performer. Maybe he has a "thing" just for Blake Mitchell? What is one to say of that? Mooch is young-ish, reasonably handsome and very wealthy; he can probably get away with being choosey about porn performers in whom he expresses interest. ??? (It's not clear to me that "The Mooch" follows any other porn performers. One website ascribes his doing so to his fascination with Superman, whom the performer is reputed to resemble.)
  
  Perhaps it's just as well, at least for Republicans. Were "The Mooch" to stay, surely chaos would have ensued given his "charismatic" personality and his singular attention to Mitchell. I think it'd be more fitting to say there'll be less chaos with "The Mooch" gone....Maybe that's what Trump meant by his remark???
  
  That notwithstanding, it's clear Trump's team still have not learned how to vette people. Do they even bother doing so?
  
  
• Kelly says that in protest against the Comey firing, he was on the verge of resigning from his DHS Secretary role
• Russia is now showing Trump about as much loyalty as he shows his staff.
• Trump's one-sided battle to remove his Atty. General, a guy who stuck his neck out for Trump well ahead of any other Republicans doing so.
• Trump issues empty platitude regarding the DPRK. It will be handled Trump claims. Yeah, and "mistakes were made." At the rate Trump's going, it'll be handed by the North Koreans, and much as it already has been thus far, quite to their satisfaction. Any wagers on how long before their next ICBM launch? Will the next one be a test, or will it actually explode somewhere over the U.S?

Then there's healthcare/health insurance that Trump wants to let "implode," most likely because it's "so complicated" he can't wrap his peabrain around solving it as well as the fractiousness (chaos) within the GOP about how to improve upon what we have now. Oh, and let's not forget the completely incoherent foreign and related trade policy Trump favors.

 

[tinydancer]

Kelly will restore order. Trump has needed a proper Chief of Staff from the get go. NOW he's got one.

 

[Old Rocks]

No matter how good the chief of staff, the President is the one that sets the tone of the administration. If the treasonous fat senile old orange clown continues as he has, General Kelly can do nothing to reign in his foolishness, and his term will end with his resignation, or firing by the clown. General Kelly is a good man, the President is not.

 

[usmbguest5318]

Kelly will restore order. Trump has needed a proper Chief of Staff from the get go. NOW he's got one.

He does. Kelly's one of the few senior WH staffers who's fit to be there.

Trump installed a bunch of people who are political strategists and mouthpieces. He doesn't need any of those people's skills until sometime much closer to the next election date, perhaps June 2020 or so.

Among the oddest things is that Trump is such a terrible manager. Seriously. No competent manager would ever have allowed the organizational disorder that Trump thus far has. I can only surmise that Trump doesn't actually manage the operations of Trump Organization. He likely did when he kept having all those bankruptcies -- one has to be big ol' mess of a managerial buffoon to go bankrupt with multiple casinos; the cash flows alone are enough to keep even halfway competently run casinos afloat indefinitely, even if only on a "hand to mouth" basis -- but he almost certainly didn't in the decade preceding his bid for POTUS.

 

[usmbguest5318]

No matter how good the chief of staff, the President is the one that sets the tone of the administration. If the treasonous fat senile old orange clown continues as he has, General Kelly can do nothing to reign in his foolishness, and his term will end with his resignation, or firing by the clown. General Kelly is a good man, the President is not.

Tone at the top is "everything." It's not literally so, but it's heavily influencing and can be defining to say the least, so much so that when it conflicts with the approaches an organization must use to achieve it's goals, tone at the top can be the thing that makes or breaks success.

 

[JimBowie1958]

Lol, "Trumps staff in chaos"?

That overworked pack of bullshit has been trickling down from the political Establishment since the time he declared he was running.

There Is No Trump Campaign

What is concerning for Trump backers and Republicans (the Venn diagram of overlap between those groups seems to be in perpetual flux) is that it appears to be distracting from the rest of the crucial work of building a presidential campaign. For most intents and purposes, there appears to be no Trump campaign.

CNN has a blockbuster report Thursday digging into this. For example, Trump has no state-level campaign director in Ohio or Colorado, two top-shelf swing states. Across the map, Republican officials say they’re just waiting to hear on what to do from either Trump or the Republican National Committee, but so far they’re hearing very little.​

Trump campaign in disarray

Donald Trump’s campaign is increasingly falling into disarray as the Manhattan billionaire braces for a loss in Wisconsin that could set him on course for an uncertain convention floor fight for the Republican presidential nomination.

Since March, the campaign has been laying off field staff en masse around the country and has dismantled much of what existed of its organizations in general-election battlegrounds, including Florida and Ohio.​

Donald Trump does not have a campaign

Donald Trump is a candidate without a campaign – and it’s becoming a serious problem.​

Republicans working to elect Trump describe a bare-bones effort debilitated by infighting, a lack of staff to carry out basic functions, minimal coordination with allies and a message that’s prisoner to Trump’s momentary whims.

“Bottom line, you can hire all the top people in the world, but to what end? Trump does what he wants,” a source close to the campaign said. ...

Veteran operatives are shocked by the campaign’s failure to fill key roles. There is no communications team to deal with the hundreds of media outlets covering the race, no rapid response director to quickly rebut attacks and launch new ones, and a limited cast of surrogates who lack a cohesive message.

“They don’t or can’t cover it all, and there are things that happen that need to be addressed immediately and don’t get addressed at all, and that hurts the candidate,” a source within the campaign groused last month.​

But somehow, Trump STILL MANAGED TO WIN THE ELECTION!

Face it, the problem is not that Trumps people are in chaos. There is a certain level of chaos in every organization.

The problem is that establishment politicians and their pet journalists do not understand how Trump gets things done and they never will, lol.

 

[EvilCat Breath]

There is no chaos. There never was any chaos. There was a considerable bit of sabotage but no chaos. Democrats invented it like everything else.

Trump made one mistake. After the tantrum democrats threw over accepting the results of the election, Trump thought they really would accept the results of the election and that was a lie.

 

[Pete7469]

The only chaos I've noticed were bed wetters rioting in the streets after hitlery lost.

Regressives prefer to be ruled by sociopaths, a "great leader" surrounded by sycophants rather than competent people is preferable to them.

 

[JimBowie1958]

This is the Truth about the Deep State and US Oligarchs, according to George Carlin, and I pretty much agree with him,

 

[ninja007]

the actual issue is cons make changes, admit mistakes, libs dont.

 

[Flopper]

Kelly will restore order. Trump has needed a proper Chief of Staff from the get go. NOW he's got one.

Typically, the Chief of Staff is not usually responsible for maintaining order. The leadership qualities of the president should make that unnecessary.

 

[tinydancer]

Kelly will restore order. Trump has needed a proper Chief of Staff from the get go. NOW he's got one.

Typically, the Chief of Staff is not usually responsible for maintaining order. The leadership qualities of the president should make that unnecessary.

What a pant load! White House Chief of Staff controls it ALL. Kelly will be a most amazing gatekeeper.

Chris Whipple, author of The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency, loosely describes the role of a White House chief of staff through his interview with former President Barack Obama: "During the last days of his presidency, Barack Obama observed: 'One of the things I've learned is that the big breakthroughs are typically the result of a lot of grunt work—just a whole lot of blocking and tackling.' Grunt work is what chiefs of staff do."

The responsibilities of the chief of staff are both managerial and advisory and can include the following:

• Select key White House staff and supervise them;
• Structure the White House staff system;
• Control the flow of people into the Oval Office;
• Manage the flow of information;
• Protect the interests of the president;
• Negotiate with Congress, other members of the executive branch, and extra-governmental political groups to implement the president's agenda; and
• Advise the president on various issues, including telling the president what he does not want to hear.

Richard Nixon's first chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, garnered a reputation in Washington for the iron hand he wielded in the position—famously referring to himself as "the president's son-of-a-bitch," he was a rigid gatekeeper who would frequently meet with administration officials in place of the president, then report himself to Nixon on the officials' talking points. Journalist Bob Woodward, in his books All the President's Men and The Secret Man, wrote that many of his sources, including the famous Deep Throat, displayed a genuine fear of Haldeman

White House Chief of Staff - Wikipedia

 

[busybee01]

What amazes me is how Trump supporters can deny the undeniable. The White House is in chaos. If it weren't Kelly would not have moved over to Chief of Staff. Kelly may be able to make the trains run on time but beyond that is a big question mark. Some of the leaks were designed to stop Trump from doing something stupid. It reminds of George Bush's failed re-election effort when James Baker was moved from Secretary of State to Bush's campaign chairman. He made the trains run on time but could not save Bush from himself. Kelly cannot protect Trump from himself.

 

[Flopper]

Kelly will restore order. Trump has needed a proper Chief of Staff from the get go. NOW he's got one.

Typically, the Chief of Staff is not usually responsible for maintaining order. The leadership qualities of the president should make that unnecessary.

What a pant load! White House Chief of Staff controls it ALL. Kelly will be a most amazing gatekeeper.

Chris Whipple, author of The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency, loosely describes the role of a White House chief of staff through his interview with former President Barack Obama: "During the last days of his presidency, Barack Obama observed: 'One of the things I've learned is that the big breakthroughs are typically the result of a lot of grunt work—just a whole lot of blocking and tackling.' Grunt work is what chiefs of staff do."

The responsibilities of the chief of staff are both managerial and advisory and can include the following:

• Select key White House staff and supervise them;
• Structure the White House staff system;
• Control the flow of people into the Oval Office;
• Manage the flow of information;
• Protect the interests of the president;
• Negotiate with Congress, other members of the executive branch, and extra-governmental political groups to implement the president's agenda; and
• Advise the president on various issues, including telling the president what he does not want to hear.

Richard Nixon's first chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, garnered a reputation in Washington for the iron hand he wielded in the position—famously referring to himself as "the president's son-of-a-bitch," he was a rigid gatekeeper who would frequently meet with administration officials in place of the president, then report himself to Nixon on the officials' talking points. Journalist Bob Woodward, in his books All the President's Men and The Secret Man, wrote that many of his sources, including the famous Deep Throat, displayed a genuine fear of Haldeman

White House Chief of Staff - Wikipedia

If you read a little further in Wikipedia you will see that the duties of the White House Chief of Staff vary greatly from one administration to another, and in fact, there is no legal requirement that the president even fill the position. The duties of Chief Staff depend a lot on what the president needs. Typically, the Chief of Staff is the most politically orientated member of the president's team. In order for him to act as a gatekeeper for the president he has to be not only very knowledge of the presidents views and policies but also, that of the White House staff and key members of congress. This is what's perplexing about Kelly's appointment. He is probably one of least politically oriented members of the president's staff so maybe he is going to be the White House Disciplinarian. I find it hard to believe that Trump is going to allow anyone to set his daily agenda and decide who he will see.

 

[Flopper]

What amazes me is how Trump supporters can deny the undeniable. The White House is in chaos. If it weren't Kelly would not have moved over to Chief of Staff. Kelly may be able to make the trains run on time but beyond that is a big question mark. Some of the leaks were designed to stop Trump from doing something stupid. It reminds of George Bush's failed re-election effort when James Baker was moved from Secretary of State to Bush's campaign chairman. He made the trains run on time but could not save Bush from himself. Kelly cannot protect Trump from himself.

It's becoming pretty clear that the problems in the White House is not the staff. These key staff members are hand picked by president. The people they hire are with the presidents approval. No matter how Trump may try to divert, the buck stops in Oval Office.

 

[peach174]

What amazes me is how Trump supporters can deny the undeniable. The White House is in chaos. If it weren't Kelly would not have moved over to Chief of Staff. Kelly may be able to make the trains run on time but beyond that is a big question mark. Some of the leaks were designed to stop Trump from doing something stupid. It reminds of George Bush's failed re-election effort when James Baker was moved from Secretary of State to Bush's campaign chairman. He made the trains run on time but could not save Bush from himself. Kelly cannot protect Trump from himself.

What amazes us ,is so many are still believing the lies and propaganda of News, no matter how many times it's been debunked and caught red handed in lies.