It's hard to keep a good man down

Chief of Staff John Kelly over the past five months has imposed discipline and rigorous protocols on a freewheeling White House. But President Donald Trump has found the loopholes.

The president on occasion has called White House aides to the private residence in the evening, where he makes assignments and asks them not tell Mr. Kelly about the plans, according to several people familiar with the matter.

[...]

The president, who values counsel from an informal group of confidants outside the White House, also sometimes bypasses the normal scheduling for phone calls that give other White House staff, including Mr. Kelly, some control and influence over who the president talks to and when.

  WSJ

Gee, we're surprised.

[S]ome of his friends have taken to calling Melania Trump and asking her to pass messages to her husband, according to two people familiar with the matter.

[...]

A spokeswoman for Mrs. Trump said: “This is more fake news and these are more anonymous sources peddling things that just aren’t true."

[...]

Mr. Kelly has clamped down on a number of practices that aides say made the White House’s internal operations chaotic in the first several months of the Trump presidency. He has told staff there will be no more patching through calls from Trump friends outside the White House who wanted to weigh in on the news; instead they would need appointments. And he stopped aides from wandering into the Oval Office to try to get time with the president.

[...]

“John has been successful at putting in place a stronger chain of command in the White House, requiring people to go through him to get to the Oval Office,” said Leon Panetta, a White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton who worked with Mr. Kelly, a four-star Marine general, in the Department of Defense. “The problem has always been whether or not the president is going to accept better discipline in the way he operates. He’s been less successful at that.”

In the understatement of the year. ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.