Can Marine General John Kelly Bring Discipline to the White House?
08-01-2017
President Trump's new chief of staff is a retired 4-star Marine general, and he's looking to bring some order and discipline to a White House the media has branded as "chaotic."
General John Kelly's first order of business was convince the president to dismiss White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci, who had attacked fellow White House members in a profanity laced interview with a reporter.
Scaramucci lasted only 10 days.
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters, "Look, the president certainly felt that Anthony's comments were inappropriate for a person in that position and he didn't want to burden General Kelly."
A reporter asked, "Did General Kelly ask him to leave or did the president ask him to leave, did he volunteer his resignation or how did that come about?"
Sanders replied, "I'm not going to get into the process tick-tock. Look, as we have said several times before, what matters most to us is not who is employed in the White House, but who's employed in the rest of the country."
Scaramucci became the seventh major administration official to leave in President Trump's first six months.
General Kelly previously ran the Department of Homeland Security.
President Trump said of Kelly, "We all know him, we respect him, admire what he's done."
Kelly will need a smooth-running White House to handle the multitude of foreign policy problems left by the Obama administration.
Those problems include:
1. New North Korean missiles that now have the range to hit much of the continental US;
2. A new mini-Cold War with Russia after Congress slapped sanctions on the Putin regime and Russia expelled 755 US dipomats;
3. And the growing crisis in Venezuela, which has been hit by political unrest and violence in recent months - and where the White House says socialist President Nicolas Maduro is building a dictatorship after creating a new assembly to rewrite the Constitution to give him more power.
Regarding new financial sanctions placed on Venezuelan President Maduro by the US, National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster said, "...Maduro himself he joins a very exclusive club including (Zimbabwean dictator, Robert) Mugabe, (Syrian strongman) Bashar al Assad and (North Korean dictator) Kim Jong Un in terms of the brutal repression of his people, and in this case the abrogation of the Constitution with the constituent assembly."
Trump's team will need as much order and discipline as possible in the days ahead, with so many foreign policy challenges, while gearing up to take on tax reform and the budget battle here at home.
