President Trump and his family had increasingly become fed up with Reince Priebus as chief of staff for weeks before Trump announced his ouster on Friday by tweeting Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly would take his place.
Trump’s wife Melania, daughter Ivanka Trump, and son-in-law Jared Kusher all thought Priebus had been doing a poor job. Kusher and Ivanka Trump both work for the president as top advisers.
Trump himself had been going around saying that Priebus was “weak,” an unnamed senior White House official told the Washington Post.
“It reached a fever pitch of the president complaining about Reince to all of us,” the official said. “If we heard it once, we heard it 20 times in the last week — this erosion of confidence. The word was ‘weak’ — ‘weak,’ ‘weak,’ ‘weak.’ ‘Can’t get it done.'”
It has been rumored for months that Priebus would be ousted from the White House, and speculation heated up with Trump’s decision to tap Anthony Scaramucci as his communications director. Scaramucci reportedly has had a behind-the-scenes feud with Priebus, who had worked to block Scaramucci from obtaining a White House job. This week Scaramucci said Priebus would be asked to resign after pointing to him when talking about stopping leaks.
After he announced Kelly as his new chief of staff, Trump publicly praised Priebus on Twitter.
“I would like to thank Reince Priebus for his service and dedication to his country,” Trump said. “We accomplished a lot together and I am proud of him!”
Priebus, in a Friday evening interview on CNN, said he and Trump had an agreement that “anytime either one of us thinks that we need to make a change or move in a different direction, let’s just talk about it and get it done.”
The Post report also said that Trump has been repeatedly asking Kelly, a retired Marine general, to be his chief of staff since mid-May. Kelly initially declined, saying that he still had national security and immigration enforcement work to do as DHS head.
