Scott Horsley at NPR reports:
White House chief of staff John Kelly will leave "toward the end of the year," President Trump said on Saturday. It is the latest administration shakeup as Trump makes adjustments following the recent midterm elections.
Kelly took over as chief of staff six months into Trump's presidency, and he initially helped bring military discipline to a sometimes chaotic White House. But Kelly ran afoul of the president, who doesn't like feeling "managed," and gradually relaxed his grip on the West Wing. As frustrations mounted over the rising level of illegal immigration, Kelly reportedly suffered a bruising public battle with national security adviser John Bolton.
"The last thing you can afford to do as chief of staff to the president is become the headline rather than the person working in the background," said Leon Panetta, who served as former President Bill Clinton's chief of staff and worked with Kelly at the Pentagon.
That Kelly would somehow make Trump straighten up and fly right was always a vain hope. His tenure has been marked with tension and several battles with Trump that, according to numerous reports, had finally reached the point where the two men were barely speaking to each other.
Trump did not name a replacement, but there are still lots of possibilities at “Fox and Friends.”
As usual, for every occasion there’s a relevant historical tweet from Himself.