Reince Priebus

Former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus confirms to Vanity Fair the media’s portrayal of a White House in disarray and riven by conflict: “Take everything you’ve heard and multiply it by 50.”

Here’s how he describes the aftermath of President Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey:

While Priebus and Bannon watched the fiasco explode as the pundits excoriated the Trump White House on every cable news show, Kushner did a slow burn. He was livid, furious that the communications team could not defend Comey’s firing. Bannon blew his stack. “There’s not a fucking thing you can do to sell this!,” he shouted at Kushner. “Nobody can sell this! P. T. Barnum couldn’t sell this! People aren’t stupid! This is a terrible, stupid decision that’s going to have massive implications. It may have shortened Trump’s presidency—and it’s because of you, Jared Kushner!”

The screaming matches and white-knuckle showdowns continued. Eight days later, Priebus got an unexpected visit from the White House counsel—a story he has not told publicly before. “Don McGahn came in my office pretty hot, red, out of breath, and said, ‘We’ve got a problem.’ I responded, ‘What?’ And he said, ‘Well, we just got a special counsel, and [Attorney General Jeff] Sessions just resigned.’ I said, ‘What!? What the hell are you talking about?’ ”

The piece is an adaptation from the forthcoming paperback edition of The Gatekeepers by Chris Whipple.

Former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus was interviewed by special counsel Robert Mueller’s team on Friday, Politico reports.

“Priebus is seen as a key player in understanding the president’s actions because he was present for many meetings, including discussions on firing Comey and White House meetings with Russian officials. He also was privy to White House internal documents.”

Politico: “It was an ignominious close to an operatic six months during which Priebus was sidelined from the outset, first by chief strategist Steve Bannon, then by Trump’s children and finally by Anthony Scaramucci, whose arrival last week as communications director heralded the imminent end of Priebus’ tenure.”

“But finally it was the absence of progress on Trump’s legislative agenda—health care, taxes, infrastructure—that prompted the president, in consultation with his family, to finally tell people around him it was time ‘to try a different approach,’ said one senior administration official.”

Said this person: “It’s hard to overstate how much the family had to do with this.”

The Wall Street Journal editorial page lets loose on President Trump:

Presidents get the White House operations they want, and Mr. Trump has a chaotic mess because he seems to like it. He likes pitting faction against faction, as if his advisers are competing casino operators from his Atlantic City days. But a presidential Administration is a larger undertaking than a family business, and the infighting and competing leaks have created a dysfunctional White House.

The reason Mr. Priebus wasn’t as effective as he could have been is because Mr. Trump wouldn’t listen to him and wouldn’t let him establish a normal decision-making process. Mr. Trump has a soft spot for military men so perhaps he’ll listen more to Mr. Kelly. He’d better, because on present course his Presidency is careening toward a historic reputation where names like Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon reside.

This is quite the anecdote from the Washington Post:

Trump’s demeaning of Priebus came through in other ways, too. At one point, during a meeting in the Oval Office, a fly began buzzing overhead, distracting the president. As the fly continued to circle, Trump summoned his chief of staff and tasked him with killing the insect, according to someone familiar with the incident.

Daily Beast: “White House officials and outside allies say the president is revelling in Scaramucci’s campaign against Priebus—undertaken through cable news appearances and a billow of tweets, some of which were subsequently deleted—and is thrilled to see a top staffer placing a publicly bombastic emphasis on White House leaks to the press, which consistently infuriate the president.”

Said one White House adviser: “The president specifically gave him the green light to go after Reince.”

BuzzFeed: “Privately, Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, has told people that Priebus is ‘gone’ and that he is trying to figure out his next steps… Her message is that White House staffers who had come from the Republican National Committee, which Preibus ran before being named chief of staff, are out and the administration is ‘going back to Trump loyalists.'”

Washington Post: “Typically, the job of firing staffers — even those in the press shop — would be left to the chief of staff, but Priebus has found himself increasingly isolated in recent days, with few areas of the White House reporting directly to him.”

The New York Times reports that Priebus “is still on the bubble and said to be looking for a graceful exit of his own.”

Jonathan Swan: “President Trump knew that appointing Anthony Scaramucci as communications director would humiliate Reince, who fought hard against it. Scaramucci was smuggled into the meeting with the President on Thursday so Reince wouldn’t know about it. Trump had already taken pains to hide the discussions from his Chief of Staff, knowing Reince would try to foil the move. Trump also knew that inserting a line in the press release saying Scaramucci would report directly to the President — doing an end-run around Reince — was perhaps an unendurable public humiliation.”

“Reince has very few true allies inside the building. At this point, they don’t stretch much further than his personal assistant and the RNC holdovers on the press team. At the senior level, the only WH official who will go to the mat for Reince’s survival is Steve Bannon. They’ve become allies of convenience in a feud against Jared and Ivanka.”