Reince Priebus, Trump’s Chief of Staff, no longer has that position. He is being replaced by General (and Secretary of Homeland Security) John Kelly.
Trump announced the move in a series of tweets:
How things have changed. Here’s Trump’s tribute to Reince election night:
The removal comes just a day after one of the most bizarre interviews ever given by a White House Communications Director. Anthony Scaramucci unloaded on Reince to Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker regarding a leak of a dinner Trump had with Scaramucci and Fox News journalists:
In Scaramucci’s view, the fact that word of the dinner had reached a reporter was evidence that his rivals in the West Wing, particularly Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, were plotting against him….Meanwhile, several damaging stories about Scaramucci have appeared in the press, and he blamed Priebus for most of them. Now, he wanted to know whom I had been talking to about his dinner with the President. Scaramucci, who initiated the call, did not ask for the conversation to be off the record or on background.“Is it an assistant to the President?” he asked. I again told him I couldn’t say. “O.K., I’m going to fire every one of them, and then you haven’t protected anybody, so the entire place will be fired over the next two weeks.”I asked him why it was so important for the dinner to be kept a secret. Surely, I said, it would become public at some point. “I’ve asked people not to leak things for a period of time and give me a honeymoon period,” he said. “They won’t do it.” He was getting more and more worked up, and he eventually convinced himself that Priebus was my source.“They’ll all be fired by me,” he said. “I fired one guy the other day. I have three to four people I’ll fire tomorrow. I’ll get to the person who leaked that to you. Reince Priebus—if you want to leak something—he’ll be asked to resign very shortly.” The issue, he said, was that he believed Priebus had been worried about the dinner because he hadn’t been invited. “Reince is a fucking paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac,” Scaramucci said. He channelled Priebus as he spoke: “ ‘Oh, Bill Shine is coming in. Let me leak the fucking thing and see if I can cock-block these people the way I cock-blocked Scaramucci for six months.’ ” (Priebus did not respond to a request for comment.)
Scaramucci has come under intense criticism for the profane tirade, though it endeared him to some Trump supporters. He tweeted:
How else is the Mooch’s week going? The NY Post reports his wife just filed for divorce. His response:
How did the dismissal of Reince go down? Apparently unceremoniously according to the “pool” report:
Though “sources” close to Reince say he resigned yesterday:
Reactions have been “interesting”:
I don’t think it’s coincidence that Reince is out just as Republicans in the Senate failed to pass any form of Obamacare repeal.
This could be the start of Trump going after and around congressional Republicans, particularly in the Senate.
[This post was updated multiple times.]
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