John Kelly Is Still Fuming Over Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump
Former White House chief of staff John Kelly is finally free from the task of babysitting Donald Trump and the barrel of monkeys known as his administration. And though he holds no ill will toward the president himself, as he recently affirmed at Anthony Scaramucci’s annual SALT conference in Las Vegas, that doesn’t mean he’s forgiven the rest of the Trump crew. “They were an influence that has to be dealt with,” he told Bloomberg Television’s David Rubenstein on Tuesday, quickly adding: “By no means do I mean Mrs. [Melania] Trump—the First Lady’s a wonderful person.”
Less wonderful in Kelly’s book? Presidential favorite Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, who not only serve as official advisers to the president, but also hold enormous sway over his decisions. Anyone tuned into the West Wing soap opera is familiar with the enmity that sprung up between Kelly and Javanka. Though the first daughter and her husband were initially enthusiastic at the idea of Kelly as chief of staff, counting on him to professionalize an operation that had run amok under the leadership of Reince Priebus, things went south after Kelly downgraded Kushner’s security clearance, and Trump reportedly asked Kelly to figure out how to get his kids back to New York, far away from the bloodthirsty media. (“Ivanka’s still his little girl,” one source told The Washington Post of Trump’s desire to protect his senior adviser.)
That, of course, didn’t pan out. And as the months stretched on, the situation devolved into full-on warfare, inflamed by various reports that “Javanka” wanted Kelly gone. As my colleague Gabriel Sherman reported in September, the two believed Kelly was behind a brutal op-ed in The New York Times that claimed there was a Trump resistance in the White House. “He’s destroying your presidency,” Ivanka allegedly told her father of Kelly, who reportedly complained to co-workers about Ivanka “freelancing” on “pet projects” rather than abiding by her dad‘s priorities. (In public the two parties praised each other as lavishly as possible, with Kelly saying in a statement that he had “full confidence” in Kushner’s ability to handle foreign policy.)
Depending on whom you asked, Kelly’s White House departure was either a willing decision, or engineered by Kushner. Either way, after four months of downtime, Kelly still doesn’t seem ready to let go of his grudge, saying he was struck by the “intense personal ambition” of some unnamed staffers. He declined to elaborate, but was much less tight-lipped about one of the most controversial episodes of Trump’s presidency under his watch: the president’s declaration that there were “very fine people on both sides” of a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. “[He was trying to say] that there were good people in the crowd,” explained Kelly. “Whether that was articulated properly, I don’t know.
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