More rejection

President Trump has often bragged about having his pick of only the best people to serve in his administration.

Being publicly rejected by his first choice for chief of staff — and embarking on a very public search for someone else — has made Mr. Trump’s claim harder to back up.

  NYT

I'd argue we passed that benchmark way back when he had to lawyer up and couldn't get anyone from a good firm to represent him.

A shortlist of last-ditch possibilities has emerged, including family-vetted officials like Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, and Robert Lighthizer, the United States trade representative, but only one possibility — Representative Mark Meadows, the hard-right Republican congressman from North Carolina who is so far not quite inside the Trump children’s circle of trust — has voiced interest.

He must be crooked.

Several of his aides expressed frustration that months of intense campaigning to replace John F. Kelly — an effort led by Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, the president’s elder daughter and son-in-law — resulted in yet another chaotic staffing scramble in a White House splintered by factions and rife with turnover.

[...]

“Why would anybody want to be Donald Trump’s chief of staff unless you want to steal the office supplies before they shut the place down?” said Chris Whipple, who wrote a book on White House chiefs of staff called “The Gatekeepers,” expressing the views of many outside the White House about Mr. Kelly’s job. “If you’re coming into that job, you’ve got to lawyer up.”

So choose somebody who's already lawyered up. And already implicated in the investigation. Hey, what about Jared Kushner? He's not doing anything useful.

Ms. Trump and Mr. Kushner’s efforts on behalf of Mr. Ayers were widely seen as a coup attempt, started on behalf of a president who was unhappy with Mr. Kelly but could not bring himself to fire him. Mr. Ayers’s rejection of the offer stunned the couple, who had long resisted Mr. Kelly’s attempt to bend them to a traditional White House hierarchy.

[...]

[T]he couple are now back to assessing a last-ditch list of possible candidates.

Sure, it could be like Cheney when Bush tasked him with finding a vice president to run and Cheney found - guess who - himself.

Others who know Mr. Trump hinted that the president dislikes being embarrassed, and that the abruptness of Mr. Ayers’s rejection might not have worn off. After all, aides to Mr. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence had been preparing as recently as Sunday morning for Mr. Ayers to take the job, and for another aide, Jarrod Agen, to temporarily assume Mr. Ayers’s current duties as Mr. Pence’s chief of staff.

I'd be skeptical of Pence's agreeableness to that arrangement.

To make room for Mr. Ayers, Mr. Trump, who famously avoids one-on-one interpersonal conflict [...] and also [hates] confrontation [...] had looked for others to do the work for him last week — even attempting to arrange for Mr. Ayers to fire Mr. Kelly — according to three people familiar with the events.

What a chickenshit.

Finally, Mr. Trump persuaded Mr. Pence and Mr. Ayers to join him in hashing things out with Mr. Kelly in the presidential residence on Friday night. But instead of sticking to the plan to let Mr. Kelly leave with dignity, which Mr. Ayers and others in the White House had urged the president to do, Mr. Trump decided to announce it himself on Saturday.

A chickenshit dick.

Staff turnover for senior aides, according to the Brookings Institution, sits at 62 percent.

“After two full years, Obama was at 24 percent turnover of his senior staffers,” Kathryn Dunn Tenpas of Brookings said in an interview. “George W. Bush was at 33 percent. In a way, instability breeds instability.”

[...]

Mr. Mnuchin [...] has earned the confidence of the president and his children from his time on the 2016 presidential campaign, and his name has been floated repeatedly as Mr. Kelly’s successor. But a person familiar with Mr. Mnuchin’s thinking said that he was more interested in keeping the job he has now.

So he's not as dumb as he looks.

Asked by a reporter about the infighting and “constant shivving” among White House staff, Mr. Meadows unexpectedly broke into laughter.

“Sorry about that, you just caught me funny,” he said. “Listen, I don’t worry about palace intrigue as long as I am not part of it.”

So HE's dumber than he looks. Does he think the Chief of Staff position wouldn't be invovled in palace intrigue???

Mr. Trump, who enjoys embarrassing reporters and planting his own information about staff machinations, has mentioned several other names. They included Matthew G. Whitaker, the current acting attorney general who nearly every West Wing staff member has said could not be a realistic option, but who Mr. Trump likes personally.

[...]

Mr. Trump, who was said to be distrustful of Mr. Kelly’s personnel judgment, will not be consulting Mr. Kelly on his successor, people close to him said.

[...]

Mr. Kelly, meanwhile, is said to be furious with Ms. Trump and Mr. Kushner. One senior administration official said that Mr. Kelly was known to have kept written notes about Mr. Kushner and Ms. Trump and the things that they had done or requested, which he conspicuously left on his desk in view of his staff.

Oh my.

But, speaking of Mark Meadows...here's a February 2 post:

We've seen Mark Meadows before.  He pushed for having Sessions removed as a way to get to Mueller, and wants a merit-based immigration policy.  

He could be the guy.

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 12/12:  Awwww.  Too bad.