On Monday afternoon, John Kelly, the new White House chief of staff, made his first major staffing decision, forcing out the White House
communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, after less than two weeks on
the job. The move was unexpected. President Trump had issued no public statements criticizing Scaramucci for a series of obscenity-laced
statements he made to me last Wednesday night, which accused the former
White House chief of staff Reince Priebus of leaking to reporters and,
without offering any evidence, committing a felony.

The sacking of Scaramucci signals that Kelly, a retired marine general,
may actually be empowered to be a true chief of staff. There was no
bigger test for Kelly than the fate of Scaramucci, who, in his Wednesday
phone call, demanded that I reveal my sources for a trivial tweet about
who the President had dinner with that night, threatened to fire his
entire staff if I didn’t, alleged that he had called the F.B.I. to
investigate his White House rivals, attacked Reince Priebus as a
“paranoid schizophrenic,” and described Steve Bannon as engaging in
auto-fellatio.

After the interview was published, several people asked me if I believed
Scaramucci would be fired. My understanding at the time was that
Scaramucci was already on thin ice with the President after a series of
high-profile appearances. But with Trump you never know—he could fire
him, or he could promote him. When Trump fired Reince Priebus instead of
Scaramucci on Friday, we seemed to have the answer. Scaramucci had
publicly attacked the chief of staff, whom he blamed, in crude terms,
for “cock-blocking” him from a position at the White House for six
months. And it was Priebus who was forced out.

But Kelly, apparently, as his first move as chief of staff, told Trump
that he wanted Scaramucci out of the White House. “Anthony Scaramucci
will be leaving his role as White House Communications Director,” the
official White House statement announcing his departure said. “Mr.
Scaramucci felt it was best to give Chief of Staff John Kelly a clean
slate and the ability to build his own team. We wish him all the best.”

A hint of Kelly’s potential influence on Trump emerged two weeks ago, in
Aspen, Colorado, when Kelly made a startling revelation. According to
several sources who attended a private briefing that included some of
the nation’s most senior current and former national-security officials,
Kelly sought to ease their minds about one of the most controversial and
famous Trump proposals: the border wall with Mexico. Many of the current
and former officials were deeply skeptical of Trump, and surprised that
Kelly, a respected Marine Corps general, would even take a job working
for him.

Kelly explained that he had spent a great deal of time talking through
the issue with Trump, and he believed he had convinced the President
that he didn’t actually need to build a physical wall along the entire
nineteen-hundred-mile-long border between the United States and Mexico.
Instead, the use of sophisticated monitoring technology, air
surveillance, and fencing could secure the border with what Trump could
start calling a “barrier.”

To the officials in the room, it was a fascinating admission. Kelly
seemed to be suggesting that he was one of the few people who might be
able to tame Trump and get him to back off some of his most cartoonish
policy ideas, even the ones that were core campaign promises. Kelly did
not seem delusional. After impressing the group with the anecdote, Kelly
added a caveat that was paraphrased for me as something to the effect
of, “But you never know: one tweet, and that could all change.”

The question hanging over Kelly’s move to chief of staff is whether he
can convince Trump that he needs the kind of control over the White
House that a traditional chief of staff enjoys in order to be effective.
The vast majority of modern Presidents, both Republican and Democrat,
have required all employees in the Executive Office of the President to
report to the President through the chief of staff.

No chief of staff would want to step into the role with a communications
director who seemed to be super-empowered by the President and was
talking to reporters as if he, not the chief of staff, ran the White
House. When Trump hired him, Scaramucci announced that he would report
directly to the President, not to Priebus. That was a deal that Kelly
would have been foolish to tolerate.

The idea that all of Trump’s problems are communications failures that
can be easily fixed, or the result of the West Wing’s warring factions,
is absurd. The problems of this White House run far deeper, and start
with Trump himself. But surely he could have communications
professionals who don’t make things even worse.

On Wednesday night, Scaramucci told me, “What I’m going to do is I’m
going to eliminate everyone on the comms team and we’ll start over.” He
did not know how prescient he was.