A new report published Thursday evening indicates that another major staff shakeup could occur at the White House soon, possibly as early as Friday.
The New York Times’ Michael Shear and Maggie Haberman report that John Kelly and H.R. McMaster are both “on thin ice.”
Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson were also mentioned in the article. The Times reports, “Mr. Trump could act as early as Friday to remove one or more of them, though the president is known to enjoy keeping people off kilter.”
Haberman appeared on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360” Thursday to discuss her reporting, telling Cooper, “What I’ve been told by several people in the White House is the president clearly has made up his mind about a number of cabinet officials that they will not be with him for much longer–the question is, how much longer?”
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“There are a couple of different buckets here,” she added. “There is the ‘people who have caused him embarrassing headlines’ bucket, which is Ben Carson, the HUD secretary, and the VA secretary David Shulkin, with reports that they have been, you know, using taxpayer money lavishly.”
“Then you have people like John Jelly, the chief of staff, who the president’s been at odds with for many weeks, but who has said no to the president a bunch of times, who had tried to keep him from firing the secretary of state Rex Tillerson, until finally he couldn’t hold the president off anymore.”
“And then there is H.R. McMaster, the national security advisor, who the president has been frustrated with for a very long time. I’m not sure that we will see that change tomorrow. I’m not sure that we will necessarily see any change tomorrow–and it could be as soon as tomorrow, but things are going to move in the coming days. One person very close to the president told me that there was a desire to sort of rip the band-aid off, by some, by some people in the White House, who think the president would be smart to get it all done with at once and have told him that.”