Internal White House staff gossip about Kelly, Cohn, and Nikki Haley’s alleged rise

president’s part. The daily discussion among senior staffers, those still there and those now gone—all of whom had written off Tillerson’s future in the Trump administration—was how long General Kelly would last as chief of staff. There was something of a virtual office pool, and the joke was that Reince Priebus was likely to be Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff. Kelly’s distaste for the president was open knowledge—in his every word and gesture he condescended to Trump—the president’s distaste for Kelly even more so. It was sport for the president to defy Kelly, who had become the one thing in his life he had never been able to abide: a disapproving and censorious father figure. OOK Ok There really were no illusions at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Kelly’s long-suffering antipathy toward the president was rivaled only by his scorn for the president’s family —“Kushner,” he pronounced, was “insubordinate.” Cohn’s derisive contempt for Kushner as well as the president was even greater. In return, the president heaped more abuse on Cohn—the former president of Goldman Sachs was now a “complete idiot, dumber than dumb.” In fact, the president had also stopped defending his own family, wondering when they would “take the hint and go home.” But, of course, this was still politics: those who could overcome shame or disbelief— and, despite all Trumpian coarseness and absurdity, suck up to him and humor him— might achieve unique political advantage. As it happened, few could. By October, however, many on the president’s staff took particular notice of one of the few remaining Trump opportunists: Nikki Haley, the UN ambassador. Haley—“as ambitious as Lucifer,” in the characterization of one member of the senior staff—had concluded that Trump’s tenure would last, at best, a single term, and that she, with requisite submission, could be his heir apparent. Haley had courted and befriended Ivanka, and Ivanka had brought her into the family circle, where she had become a particular focus of Trump’s attention, and he of hers. Haley, as had become increasingly evident to the wider foreign policy and national security team, was the family’s pick for secretary of state after Rex Tillerson’s inevitable resignation. (Likewise, in this shuffle, Dina Powell would replace Haley at the UN.) The president had been spending a notable amount of private time with Haley on Air Force One and was seen to be grooming her for a national political future. Haley, who was much more of a traditional Republican, one with a pronounced moderate streak—a type increasingly known as a Jarvanka Republican—was, evident to many, being mentored in Trumpian ways. The danger here, offered one senior Trumper, “is that she is so much smarter than him.” What now existed, even before the end of the president’s first year, was an effective power vacuum. The president, in his failure to move beyond daily chaos, had hardly HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020115