From pinnacle to punchline: How Trump diminished the job of his chief of staff

The surprise news that Nick Ayers declined Trump's job offer underscores how a once all-powerful West Wing post has become 'mission impossible.'

By ELIANA JOHNSON and ALEX ISENSTADT 12/09/2018 10:20 PM EST

For decades, the job of White House chief of staff was among Washington’s most desirable jobs — a pinnacle of access and power. Like so many other things in the White House, that has been changed by President Donald Trump.

On Sunday evening, the vice president’s chief of staff, Nick Ayers, who had been the leading candidate to succeed outgoing White House chief of staff John Kelly, took himself out of the running.

Ayers, who is only 36, is a savvy political operative wired with GOP donors and party leaders, and friends say he hopes to run for office himself one day. In any ordinary White House, the job he is declining — for what he calls family reasons — would be an ambitious insider’s dream. To take two recent examples: Rahm Emanuel, who served as chief of staff to President Barack Obama, went on to serve as mayor of Chicago, and Leon Panetta, who spent two and a half years in the job under President Bill Clinton, served as CIA chief and Secretary of Defense.

It’s a different story under Trump. A job that was once a ticket to Washington royalty has recently become a laughing stock. Trump’s first two top aides, Kelly and Reince Priebus before him, have left as diminished and arguably humiliated figures, unable to control the wild chaos of this president’s White House. Priebus was marginalized and mocked before he was abandoned on an airport tarmac. Kelly was subjected to analyses of his facial expressions during awkward moments, repeatedly threatened to quit, and wasn’t even allowed to announce his own resignation despite a reported agreement with Trump that he could do so.

“You really do have to wonder why anybody would want to be Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff given that so far it’s been mission impossible,” said Chris Whipple, the author "The Gatekeepers," a history of White House chiefs of staff.

more
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/12/09/trump-chief-of-staff-john-kelly-nick-ayers-1054203