Blame Trump, Not Priebus, for White House Chaos, Brit Hume Says
Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume said President Donald Trump should be blamed more than former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus for the infighting and chaos in the White House.
"Reince Priebus is not the one to blame for such behavior," Hume said on "Fox News Sunday" when host Chris Wallace mentioned that "people seem to be getting fed up" with the state of the White House.
Wallace quoted a message the news channel received on Facebook: "How can this White House possibly recover respect after this past week's Sessions/Scaramucci/Boy Scouts/Priebus and other histrionics? Why the drama and the antics?"
Get Our Latest News for FREE
Hume responded by saying that this all comes down to "the president and his behavior and his way of doing things and the casual way that he ran his business in New York where — where he really kept a very loose schedule and people came and went and he picked up the phone and called different people at different times depending on what he was focused on at the moment."
Trump has replaced Priebus with the retired Marine Corps general John Kelly as new chief of staff.
White Houses can't operate that way, Hume added. "This staff structure that exists in the White House traditionally, which was developed over many years and many administrations, is there — is that way for a reason. And the question really is not whether John Kelly has the ability to be an effective chief of staff. I think he manifestly does. The question is whether Donald Trump will permit that. Whether he will allow that. Whether when somebody wanders into the Oval Office the first words out of his mouth will be, does Kelly know you're here? And I think that's in doubt."
Karl Rove, a Republican strategist, agreed. He said that Trump should "reduce the drama, reduce both the sniping within and reduce the leaks, and bring some discipline to the relationships."
Former Republican Governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee suggested that Kelly should do gatekeeping at the Oval Office.
"That's what needs to happen, but that's going to be up to the president," said Huckabee, whose daughter Sarah Sanders is Trump's spokeswoman. "The president has a very different style, he's very open, the door is open, he invites people to just come on in to a meeting."
On "Face the Nation," CBS News chief White House correspondent Major Garrett also blamed President Trump.
"One of the problems for this White House is the president himself, in the sense that he does not adhere to any traditional or even historically rational organizational system for his own White House," he said. "He likes the idea that five or six different people walk into the West Wing every day believing they are, for a moment, the effective chief of staff. He likes that rivalry, that embedded, intense competition."
Garrett added, "But what it does is, it prevents any sort of flow of ideas, policies, debate and projection out to the rest of the administration what the White House intends to do, and how it wants it to be explained to the country."
However, Trump's former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski defended the president.
Lewandowski said on "Meet the Press" that Kelly should not try to "change" the president.
"The thing that Gen. Kelly should do is not try to change Donald Trump," he said. "You have to let Trump be Trump. That is what has made him successful over the last 30 years. That is what the American people voted for. And anybody who thinks they're going to change Donald Trump doesn't know Donald Trump."
The president should fire another staffer, he went on to say. "It's my recommendation of the president of the United States to fire (Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) Richard Cordray. If he wants to go run for governor of Ohio ... go do it."
Lewandowski is helping raise money for Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Jim Renacci, a position for which Cordray, a Democrat, is also considering.
