Even as Donald Trump's white nationalist advisers craft botched white nationalism-inspired orders and his most controversial nominees get steamrolled through despite issues ranging from insider trading to past racist statements to hearing-room incompetence, Trump allies are pointing at the supposed true reason everything the Trump team has touched has turned into a tire fire. Why, it must be Reince Priebus' fault.
“It’s my view that Reince is the problem. I think on paper Reince looked good as the chief of staff — and Donald trusted him — but it’s pretty clear the guy is in way over his head. He’s not knowledgeable of how federal agencies work, how the communications operations work. He botched this whole immigration rollout. This should’ve been a win for Donald, not two or three weeks of negative publicity.”
Ah, now here we have an interesting development. That there would be far-right Trump buddy Christopher Ruddy, who met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago on Friday and held forth on the Priebus Problem today on CNN and to the Washington Post. And while we have no desire to or intention of defending, of all people, Reince Freaking Priebus, it's quite the inventive argument to suppose that the "whole immigration rollout", consisting of an incompetently written and overtly racist travel ban written by Trump's white nationalist team, would have been a great win for Trump had Reince only, ya know, not let them light all those tires on fire.
It appears Operation Ass-Covering is already well underway.
Is Reince unqualified? Perhaps, perhaps not. Trump has surrounded himself with advisers that distain government and are aggressively hostile towards government expertise. Not one of Trump's extremist advisors know “how federal agencies work.” Not even all of them together could combine to craft an "immigration" executive order that was not a bumbling exercise in campaign-promised racism of the sort that the courts are now more than eager to scrape off the bottom of America's shoes. It turns out extremist policies are not, go figure, natural "communications" wins.
“What I’m hearing from a lot of people on the inside is that Reince is not giving Donald the pushback that he needs,” Ruddy said. “He just doesn’t have the gravitas that Donald would respect at the end of the day.”
There is not one person in America who has enough gravitas for Donald Trump to respect them at the end of the day, at least not unless they are acting as unquestioning yes-man for whatever last left Trump's own mouth, but let's take a look at the larger point being sold. As Bannon, Flynn, Conway, Miller and Spicer continue to produce negative headlines on a daily basis for Team Trump, there are at least some on "the inside" who see the real problem as being the included Republican party functionary. Get rid of him, they suppose, and finally we'll start to see some real progress.
We can presume this is the start of the pushback campaign from the extremist side of the Trump White House, which has had free rein during these last few weeks but which is under increasing public attack as a result.
Three weeks. It's been three weeks, and the White House team is already at each other's throats. In a month they'll be hunting Sean Spicer for sport in the Rose Garden.