The layout of President Trump’s properties in Palm Beach scattered his staff around Palm Beach. In a time of crisis, Trump and his senior staff were spread across three different locations, with the president himself on an island—both literally and figuratively.
Jack Francis was President Trump’s fourth chief of staff. It was not an easy job. Reince Priebus had lasted only six months, John Kelly a little over a year, and then Dan Scavino for another year after Kelly’s departure. Francis had more in common with Kelly than Priebus or Scavino. Like Kelly, Francis was a retired Marine four-star general. And like Kelly, he made it his mission to manage a chaotic White House. As Francis saw it, any chief of staff would behave in exactly the same way. Indeed, one of Francis’s first priorities after taking over as chief of staff from Scavino was putting an end to the power struggles that had plagued the Trump administration and imposing some control over who the president saw and how he received information.
In this task, Francis worked closely with Keith Kellogg, a retired Army three-star general who became Trump’s fourth national security adviser following Michael Flynn, H. R. McMaster, and John Bolton. Kellogg, who had previously served in the same role for the vice president, had no idea how long he would be around, but he was determined to help Francis keep things together for as long as he could. That was a tall order, as the myriad scandals and investigations swirling around the president and key members of his staff created a constant sense of crisis within the White House.
Mostly Francis and Kellogg focused on keeping the president’s legal woes from overwhelming everything else. They also worked to keep various international crises, like the threat posed by North Korea’s growing nuclear and missile programs, from spiraling out of control. But Francis and Kellogg also knew they needed to tread carefully. After all, it had been North Korea that did in their predecessors. In fact, it had been the issue of negotiations with North Korea that had led Trump to show their predecessors the door.
During the brief thaw in relations in 2018, Donald Trump had relied heavily on Mike Pompeo to do the legwork in advance of his summit with Kim Jong Un. Pompeo’s role began while he was still the director of the CIA and continued after he replaced Rex Tillerson as the secretary of state. Pompeo had a reputation at CIA for giving Trump a steady stream of rosy intelligence assessments about the impact of sanctions on North Korea. “Pompeo kept feeding Trump assessments that US military threats will force Kim to bow to US demands for nuclear disarmament,” one former White House official said. Some officials felt that Pompeo’s characterizations went far beyond what the CIA analysts actually believed and were in fact an effort to flatter Trump. It was Pompeo who traveled to Pyongyang to meet with Kim Jong Un. And it was Pompeo who took the blame when it became clear that Kim Jong Un had no intention of abandoning his nuclear weapons.
But, according to aides, the president also blamed Bolton. Trump never enjoyed sharing the spotlight with the combative Bolton, who often seemed to give the impression that he was calling the shots. The president came to think that Bolton had undermined him.
Trump blamed his entire national security team for the failed effort to negotiate with Kim’s regime. This deep dissatisfaction underlays one of the strangest moments in American political history: the president of the United States firing practically his entire national security team with a single tweet:
Donald J. Trump @tehDonaldJTrump
I wanted a Summit! But Little Rocketman won’t de-nuke!
No more Mr. nice guys! Thank you to Mike Pompeo, John Bolton and John Kelly for your service! Tomorrow we announce a GREAT new national security team! Going to the mattress! I need a war time consillary![1]
#MAGA
After the “Twitter Massacre,” as it came to be known, only Secretary of Defense James Mattis remained on the president’s national security team, which otherwise had to be entirely rebuilt. In short order, Trump chose Francis and Kellogg to pick up the pieces.
As chief of staff, Francis attempted to impose a semblance of order around the life of a man who, prior to being elected president, was used to having large blocks of unstructured time. The president would rise around 5:30 AM and start the day by watching news on television. The White House typically scheduled a block of “executive time” from 8:00 AM to 11:00 AM. Official schedules listed that time as occurring in the Oval Office, but in fact staff at the time indicated that, while he was staying at the White House, Trump often “spends that time in his [executive] residence, watching TV, making phone calls and tweeting.” Trump would not appear in the Oval Office until his first scheduled meeting of the day, which was typically his intelligence briefing at 11:00 AM.
Early on, Francis revived one of John Kelly’s pet projects—an effort to encourage the president to spend more time in the Oval Office rather than the executive residence, located between the East and West Wings of the White House. Francis attempted to schedule regular meetings with family and close advisers of the president to establish a routine. On a typical day, Trump would have meetings with Kellogg, his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner, his legal team, and Kellyanne Conway, who was then serving as the president’s counselor. Trump typically took an hour-long lunch at 12:30, followed by another block of either “executive time” or “policy time.” The president’s day typically ended around 4:15, at which point he was most likely to return to his residence. Dinner was usually served at 5:30.
Staff members had long been concerned about Trump’s time outside of the Oval Office, even when he was staying at the White House. “Once he goes upstairs [to the residence], there’s no managing him,” one administration insider said. It was also clear that staff were concerned about flows of information, including social media and television. And yet, the president was the president. “But if he wants to watch [television], it’s not like we can say, ‘Oh, the TV doesn’t work,’” a staffer remarked. Recognizing this problem, Francis sought to improve the overall quality of information available to the president, but he accepted that there would always be some things he could not control.
The president’s insistence on spending time at Mar-a-Lago made Francis’s job much harder, increasing the amount of unstructured time available to the president while physically isolating him from staff who might otherwise keep him engaged and focused. But Trump viewed his time at Mar-a-Lago as an escape from the pressures of the White House—and from Francis. The president rarely scheduled formal meetings during this time, opting instead to play golf.
While he was staying at Mar-a-Lago, it was also unusual for President Trump to receive a routine intelligence briefing, which would have required him to go down into the SCIF in the basement fallout shelter. Some aides suggested that this was because the president was uncomfortable walking down stairs, although others disputed that claim as “absurd” and indicated that Trump would go down to the SCIF when necessary.
In addition to isolating the president from his key staff, Trump’s time in Palm Beach placed him in close and often unpredictable contact with club members. In one case, a golf club member invited a New York Times reporter as a guest and then introduced the reporter to Trump—who then agreed to give a thirty-minute, on-the-record interview without a single aide present.
1
According to a follow-up statement released by the White House, “consillary” is “an accepted anglicization of the Italian term