Leaky, Leaky

Wasn't General Kelly supposed to stop these leaks?

Blue chip stocks slid last week after an erroneous report said that [Trump adviser Gary] Cohn’s resignation was imminent because of his disgust with Mr. Trump’s failure to more forcefully denounce the racist Charlottesville, Va., demonstrators. Friends and former colleagues of Mr. Cohn’s said the economic adviser criticized Mr. Trump in such strong terms that at least one wondered how he could possibly remain in his position.

  NYT

Somehow I missed that.

[Steve Bannon, who resigned (or was fired) Friday] felt that Mr. Trump had treated him as a peer during the presidential campaign, but, he often complained to friends, “when I got to the White House, all of a sudden I was just a staffer.”

[...]

While several administration officials interviewed said they see Mr. Kelly as perhaps the last hope for fixing the fractured administration, they concede that only Mr. Trump can right his listing presidency.

That's a good one. The people Kelly was supposed to stop leaking are leaking that they're looking to Kelly to straighten things up.

Mr. Bannon fed Mr. Trump’s paranoid streak and shared the president’s penchant for believing in conspiracies. He viewed not just intelligence agencies but most of government as stocked with a devious bureaucratic underbelly, the “deep state.” Mr. Trump, who has never worked in government, eagerly adopted that view.

[...]

Mr. Bannon was notorious for maintaining his own, shadowy presence within the White House. He would frequently skip meetings where policy was discussed, injecting his views into the process in other ways, according to two administration officials. He did not use a computer, preferring to have paper printed and handed to his assistant to stay outside the formal decision-making process.

[...]

Perhaps nowhere was the mutual disgust thicker than between Mr. Bannon and Mr. Trump’s daughter and son-in-law.

[...]

Mr. Bannon openly complained to White House colleagues that he resented how Ms. Trump would try to undo some of the major policy initiatives that he and Mr. Trump agreed were important to the president’s economic nationalist agenda, like withdrawing from the Paris climate accords. In this sense, he was relieved when Mr. Kelly took over and put in place a structure that kept other aides from freelancing.

“Those days are over when Ivanka can run in and lay her head on the desk and cry,” he told multiple people.

[...]

Mr. Bannon made little secret of the fact that he believed “Javanka,” as he referred to the couple behind their backs, had naïve political instincts and were going to alienate Mr. Trump’s core coalition of white working-class voters.

[...]

He also advised that ideological softening would buy the president no good will from Democrats or independent voters, whom Mr. Kushner and Ms. Trump believe Mr. Trump still has a chance of reaching.

“They hate the very mention of his name,” Mr. Bannon told them. “There is no constituency for this.”

His advice for the president: “You’ve got the base. And you grow the base by getting” things done.

Instead, he's solidified the base by talking trash.

By the time Charlottesville erupted, Mr. Kushner and Ms. Trump had a powerful ally in Mr. Kelly, who shared their belief that Mr. Trump’s first statement blaming “many sides” for the deadly violence needed to be amended.

Mr. Bannon vigorously objected. He told Mr. Kelly that if Mr. Trump delivered a second, more contrite statement it would do him no good, with either the public or the Washington press corps, which he denigrated as a “Pretorian guard” protecting the Democrats’ consensus that Mr. Trump is a race-baiting demagogue. Mr. Trump could grovel, beg for forgiveness, even get down on his knees; it would never work, Mr. Bannon maintained.

“They’re going to say two things: It’s too late and it’s not enough,” Mr. Bannon told Mr. Kelly.

And since he was right about that, it makes it seem less likely that Trump would allow Kelly to can Bannon, and yet he did.

The arrival of Mr. Kelly to play precisely the gatekeeping role that would stymie aides like Mr. Bannon marked the beginning of the end.

The president believed that Mr. Bannon had been leaking unauthorized stories about infighting inside administration for months before he ultimately took action.

Mr. Trump was irritated by a book, “Devil’s Bargain,” that portrayed Mr. Bannon as a brilliant political Svengali but put Mr. Trump in a supporting role.

And THAT is mostly likely why Trump let Bannon go.