He made his name by firing contestants on NBC’s The Apprentice. In real life, though, Donald Trump prefers to avoid sacking people in person. “I am pleased to inform you that I have just named General/Secretary John F Kelly as White House Chief of Staff,” the US president tweeted from Air Force One last July, without telling the incumbent chief of staff, Reince Priebus. The latter only discovered he’d lost his job after checking his phone on the tarmac at Andrews Air Force Base.
Six chaotic months into the Trump administration, Republican Party apparatchik Priebus was out. Kelly, a retired four-star Marine Corps general, was in. As one of the longest-serving commanders in the US military and the highest-ranking military officer to lose a child in combat – his son Robert was killed in Afghanistan in 2010 – Kelly was greeted with a mixture of acclaim and relief from the Washington press corps. He was “tasked with bringing order to an often chaotic White House” (CNN); he would “bring some semblance of traditional discipline to the West Wing” (Washington Post); he was a “beacon of discipline” and “unafraid to challenge” Trump (New York Times). Kelly, agreed the pundits, would be the “adult in the room”; a restraint on an out-of-control commander-in-chief.
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