New York Times: “Unlike his predecessors… Mr. Mulvaney is not interested in challenging what has revealed itself to be the one constant in the Trump White House: the special status reserved for Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, the president’s family members and senior advisers, in the West Wing.”

“Mr. Mulvaney’s more hands-off approach to the family members has allowed Mr. Kushner to position himself among lawmakers on Capitol Hill as the person who can deliver to Mr. Trump what he wants. The dynamic… is similar to the opening days of the administration, when the staff to the new president was just beginning to meet with Washington officials and Mr. Kushner often told people that ‘everything runs through me.’”

“This time, however, Mr. Mulvaney is doing nothing to curb his influence. In fact, he is treating Mr. Kushner and Ms. Trump as assets, rather than rivals. And they are seeing a new ally. On Sunday night they hosted Mr. Mulvaney and his wife at their Kalorama mansion for a social dinner.”

“President Trump chastised his new chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, over his handling of shutdown talks, creating an awkward scene in front of congressional leaders of both parties,” Axios reports.

“Mulvaney inserted himself into the conversation and tried to negotiate a compromise sum of money… Mulvaney said ‘that if Dems weren’t OK with $5.7 [billion] and the president wasn’t OK with $1.3 [the Democratic offer] … he was trying to say we should find a middle ground,’ one of the sources said, paraphrasing Mulvaney’s remarks.”

Said the source: “Trump cut him off … ‘You just fucked it all up, Mick.’ It was kind of weird.”

“Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, as recently as late last year explored the possibility of becoming president of the University of South Carolina,” the New York Times reports.

“Mr. Mulvaney, a congressman from South Carolina for six years before joining the Trump administration, initiated a discussion with a senior official at the university late last year about the position, which is going to become open this summer.”

“As a sign of the mood inside, officials at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue tell us that Trump is complaining about his incoming chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, in conversations inside the West Wing and with Capitol Hill,” Axios reports.

Trump asked one trusted adviser: “Did you know he called me a terrible human being?”

“We’re told that Trump was furious when the slight surfaced in a two-year-old video right after he promoted Mulvaney.”

“Outgoing White House chief of staff John Kelly tried and failed to bring a military discipline to the West Wing. Mick Mulvaney doesn’t plan to try. Mulvaney will approach the job far differently than Kelly… Most notably, he intends to give Trump more leeway to act as he chooses — a recognition that trying to control Trump is a futile approach,” Politico reports.

“Mulvaney will adopt a much larger role in politics and messaging, and plans to take a more laissez faire approach to some quirks of the Trump White House that irked Kelly — like non-essential staffers attending meetings, or the president frequently reaching out to longtime friends, Republican lawmakers and advisers for advice or dinners in the White House residence.”

Olivia Nuzzi: “Mulvaney does have one advantage: He has demonstrated his loyalty to the president since the beginning.”

Said one person close to the White House: “It’s cultish. It’s Stockholm syndrome. There’s this thing that’s set in of a bunker mentality. There’s less infighting because of the bunker mentality.”

“Nevertheless, as the incoming Democratic Congress prepares to challenge Trump, and various law enforcement investigations draw ever closer to him, it seems unlikely that Mulvaney will be able to do much to change the place.”

“President Trump announced on Friday that he had selected Mick Mulvaney, his budget director, to serve as his acting chief of staff, temporarily halting a week of speculation about who would take over one of the most important positions in the federal government,” the New York Times reports.

“Mr. Mulvaney, a hard-line conservative and former congressman from South Carolina, is a fiscal hawk who has produced budgets that cut federal spending only to see congressional Republicans and Democrats ignore them.”

Politico: “A favorite of Trump’s since last winter’s federal shutdown and the earlier unsuccessful effort to repeal Obamacare, Mulvaney has emerged as one of the two leading candidates to succeed John Kelly as Trump’s chief of staff.”

“Long rumored to be on his way out, Kelly has no clear plans to resign — but Mulvaney has been discreetly lobbying for the job, asking Republicans outside the White House to put in a good word on his behalf with the president.”

White House budget director Mick Mulvaney “privately fumed on Thursday that his own staff had been leaking confidential information ‘to make me look bad,’ hours after a federal appeals court questioned whether he could legally run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau while simultaneously heading the budget office,” the New York Times reports.

“The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit expressed support for the president’s legal right to appoint an interim director of the consumer agency. But two of the three jurists — Patricia A. Millett and Judith W. Rogers, both Democratic appointees — raised doubts about Mr. Mulvaney’s dual roles, citing the legal provision that created the bureau, which called for it to be completely independent from other agencies.”

Politico: “Every quarter, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau formally requests its operating funds from the Federal Reserve. Last quarter, former director Richard Cordray asked for $217.1 million. Cordray, an appointee of President Barack Obama, needed just $86.6 million the quarter before that. And yesterday, President Donald Trump’s acting CFPB director, Mick Mulvaney, sent his first request to the Fed.”

“He requested zero.”