President Trump declined to defend embattled acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, an indication he is considering a change.
Asked during an Oval Office interview with the Washington Examiner if he is happy with the job Mulvaney is doing for him, Trump demurred.
“Happy?” he said, mulling the question. “I don’t want to comment on it.”
Instead, Trump offered a general defense of his senior team and said some West Wing “bedlam” was the inevitable result of an administration that had been besieged by federal investigations and congressional subpoenas from Day One.
“I could see that,” Trump said when asked about Republican senators expressing unhappiness with Mulvaney.
Mulvaney became a lightning rod for dissatisfaction last month after a White House press briefing during which he appeared to acknowledge a long-denied quid pro quo with Ukraine that formed the basis for impeachment, formalized this week by House Democrats in a party-line vote. Mulvaney later issued a retraction, but it was not enough to quell anxiety among Trump’s allies on Capitol Hill, with Republican senators and GOP operatives unhappy with Mulvaney’s performance urging Trump to professionalize his impeachment response.
[Read more: Power struggle: Mulvaney allies accuse Cipollone of failing Trump on impeachment]
Trump’s senior team has been marked by a high turnover of officials, including three chiefs of staff and four national security advisers in his first three years. But the president insisted reports of chaos were exaggerated.
“The first thing you do is get hit by subpoenas: 2700 subpoenas, 500 people,” he said. “I think if there was some bedlam, we have a right to it, and yet I think we were really cool under the circumstances. We had bad people after us … Everyone … angry Democrats, numerous of them worked for Hillary Clinton, they knew a fake dossier was written with horrible things written in it.”
In recent weeks, whispers have grown that Mulvaney, who succeeded John Kelly in the role of chief of staff at the start of the year, was about to be replaced. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin or Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, are among those reportedly in the running.
Mulvaney sparked a new rash of headlines as he retracted his quid pro quo admission by saying that Trump “still sees himself to be in the hospitality business.” Mulvaney said that as he tried to defend Trump’s decision, since reversed, to hold next year’s G-7 summit at one of the president’s resort properties.
Meanwhile, Mulvaney was not present in the situation room the day Trump’s national security team and senior officials monitored the raid to kill Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi.
Privately, Trump has admitted to friends that he himself is a difficult man to manage and that the intense pressure of legal action is a heavy burden for senior staffers.
“I think we ran an incredible operation considering,” Trump told the Washington Examiner. “How would you like to be president, and you want to do a great job and almost the first thing you do, you are getting subpoenaed and you are fighting off Robert Mueller with his 39 Democrats,” he said, in reference to the special counsel who investigated whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russian attempts to disrupt the 2016 election.
When Kelly took over from Reince Priebus as chief of staff, he was expected to implement a military-style chain of command, reducing the number of people who could stroll into the Oval Office at will and controlling the flow of newspaper cuttings to the president.
But after a year in office, reports circulated of friction, and he was eventually replaced by Mulvaney, who, insiders say, offers a more relaxed style.
Trump claimed reports of turbulence were frequently exaggerated by opponents in the media but that some disruption was inevitable when senior staff members had to cope with nonstop attacks.
“So when you say a little bit of activity here, I think we have a right to have a little activity,” he said. “We had scumbags after us.”
