The ascendance of retired Marine Gen. John Kelly to the role of White House chief of staff was heralded as a much-needed source of discipline in an administration marked by high staff turnover and a presidential Twitter account unfettered by such tediums as business hours, syntax, and grave legal implications. But a new Wall Street Journal report describes President Trump and the first lady circumventing Kelly's orderly ways.

The president has more than once called White House staff "to the private residence in the evening," the Journal reports, presumably after Kelly has gone home for the night. Trump then apparently gives them assignments and asks them to keep Kelly in the dark about the whole thing. On at least one occasion, the story's unnamed sources said, a staffer refused Trump's request to go behind Kelly's back.

First lady Melania Trump is also reportedly bypassing Kelly's management, as Trump family friends who wish to bend the president's ear without going through normal White House scheduling channels — over which Kelly exercises significant control — will contact Melania to pass a message along to her husband. In a statement to the Journal, the first lady's office said this is "fake news." Bonnie Kristian

More than 100 people have been killed in India, Nepal, and Bangladesh, with heavy rains causing widespread flooding and triggering landslides.

Millions of people have been displaced from their homes, including 4.3 million in the Indian states of Assam and Bihar. It is the beginning of monsoon season, and the rain started on Thursday, leaving roads and railroad tracks underwater. It's estimated that some parts of Nepal saw nearly 16 inches of rain in the last few days, and in Bangladesh, officials are keeping an eye on the swollen rivers that flow into the country from India.

During the 2017 monsoon season, at least 800 people were killed in India, Nepal, and Bangladesh, with countless crops and homes destroyed. Catherine Garcia

Attorney George Conway, husband of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway and one of the most prominent conservative critics of President Trump, said he always viewed Trump as "boorish, dim-witted, inarticulate, incoherent, narcissistic, and insensitive," but also thought he was an "equal-opportunity bully — in his uniquely crass and crude manner, he'll attack anyone he thinks is critical of him."

In an op-ed published Monday night in The Washington Post, Conway writes that because of Trump's tweets on Sunday, telling four Democratic lawmakers, all women of color, to "go back" where they came from, there is no doubt that "naiveté, resentment, and outright racism, roiled in a toxic mix, have given us a racist president. Trump could have used vile slurs, including the vilest of them all, and the intent and effect would have been no less clear."

Conway's mother came to the U.S. from the Philippines, and while he remembers in the 1970s a woman approached her in a parking lot and said "Go back to your country," this never really bothered him, because "to my mind, most Americans weren't like that. The woman in the parking lot was just a boor, an ignoramus, an aberration." Now, he can see there are more people in the world who share this woman's point of view, and it horrifies him that Trump appears to be one of them.

"Trump is not some random, embittered person in a parking lot — he's the president of the United States," Conway said. "By virtue of his office, he speaks for the country. What's at stake now is more important than judges or tax cuts or regulations or any policy issue of the day. What's at stake are the nation's ideals, its very soul." Read the entire op-ed at The Washington Post. Catherine Garcia

Seth Meyers wasn't too shocked by President Trump's "appallingly racist attack" against four Democratic women of color in Congress, saying on Monday's Late Night it's been clear Trump is "a racist and that racism is at the core of his political ideology. It's not a side dish — it's the main course."

As Meyers reminds the audience, Trump was a vocal advocate of the birtherism conspiracy, accused Mexico of sending rapists across the southern border, and said the judge in charge of one of his many cases could not be fair because of his Mexican heritage. Over the weekend, he added to his greatest hits by tweeting at the congresswomen to "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came." There is "no acceptable word for this other than racist," Meyers said. "Period."

Three of the women were born in the U.S., and all are American citizens, "so if you're asking them to fix the totally broken, crime-infested governments of their home countries, they're trying," Meyers said. It doesn't even matter whether they were born here or not, he continued, because "they're Americans. This is their country, and they're treating it with a lot more respect than the racist gargoyle who sits around tweeting from the back nine of his chintzy golf course." Watch the video below. Catherine Garcia

The Trump administration on Monday said taxpayer-funded family planning clinics can no longer refer women for abortions.

The Health and Human Services Department also told clinics that they must maintain separate finances from facilities that provide abortions, The Associated Press reports. Every year, about four million low-income women are able to receive family planning and preventative health services through the Title X program, which provides $260 million worth of grants to independent clinics. Under federal law, taxpayer funds cannot be used to pay for abortions.

Many of these clinics are operated by Planned Parenthood, and President Leana Wen said the organization is hoping to get the regulations overturned in federal court. Several professional groups, including the American Medical Association, are against the new policy, saying it could affect how a woman receives basic medical care. Catherine Garcia

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Monday night said the House of Representatives will not raise the debt ceiling unless it is combined with a budget agreement.

Earlier in the day, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told reporters that if a budget deal is not reached soon, Congress will have to raise the debt ceiling before its August recess, otherwise there won't be enough money to pay the government's bills. This idea, Pelosi said, is not "acceptable to our caucus."

Lawmakers have until the end of September to hammer out a budget deal, as that's when funding for several agencies is scheduled to run out. The Treasury Department can only issue debt up to the limit set by Congress. Since President Trump's inauguration, total government debt has increased by about $3 trillion, to more than $22 trillion. Catherine Garcia

It took more than a century, but Andrew Johnson has met his match when it comes to racist presidents, presidential historian Jon Meacham said Monday.

Meacham appeared on MSNBC's Hardball to discuss President Trump telling four lawmakers — all Democratic women of color — that they needed to "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came." Going on a "journey toward a more perfect union is the story of the country," Meacham said. "What the president's done here is yet again — I think he did it after Charlottesville and I think he did it, frankly, when he was pushing the birther lie about President Obama — he has joined Andrew Johnson as the most racist president in American history."

Meacham explained that in a state message, Johnson "said African Americans were incapable of self-government and relapsed into barbarism if they weren't closely supervised." Historian Eric Foner, he added, "said this was the single most racist statement by a president in a public paper." Since the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, when the Supreme Court ruled racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, politicians have set it up so poor black Americans and poor white Americans are "pointing at each other instead of pointing up," Meacham said. "That's the story of the racial politics of the country in the modern era. By using culture instead of economics, which the Republican Party in the modern era has done very well."

The country can't escape its past, and it's "pointless to try to expiate ourselves from what Trump has been saying," he said, adding, "The way America moves forward from this is 51 percent of the time we're with Lincoln instead of Andrew Johnson." Catherine Garcia