Wall Street Journal editorial board says Trump, not Priebus, is the problem in the White House

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last updated 31 July 2017

The Wall Street Journal editorial board has added to its recent spate of brutally honest commentary on the Trump administration, this time weighing in on President Trump's sudden sacking of White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus on Friday:

President Trump announced late Friday on Twitter — how else? — that he is replacing White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus with Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly. The decision was probably inevitable given how the president publicly humiliated Mr. Priebus in recent days, but this shuffling of the staff furniture won't matter unless Mr. Trump accepts that the White House problem isn't Mr. Priebus. It's him. [The Wall Street Journal]

"Presidents get the White House operations they want," the column continues, "and Mr. Trump has a chaotic mess because he seems to like it." That doesn't bode well for Priebus' replacement, outgoing Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, who is due to step into his new position Monday. "Perhaps Mr. Kelly, a retired Marine general, can impose some order on the staff," the Journal board suggests — before realistically noting this was also the intended outcome of hiring White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci, who has instead escalated the chaos.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.