New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt — whose upcoming paperback edition of his book, Donald Trump V. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President, is set to hit the shelves soon — sat down for a rather telling interview with MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” where he shed some significant and frankly unsettling new light on on Donald Trump’s former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly. More specifically, the staggering realization Kelly was hit with when he first came into the Trump Administration and came to discover just who Donald Trump really was.
Kelly, a retired U.S. Marine Corps general, joined Trump’s Cabinet about halfway through 45’s first year in office. According to Schmidt, Kelly was almost instantly hammered with several shocking and unsettling realizations about the then-president.
Speaking with the MSNBC host, Schmidt explained:
So when Kelly came in as chief of staff, he thought that the problem around Trump was that he was not staffed properly and they needed to create a process around him, and that’s what the chaos of the first six months of the administration was about. But when Kelly comes in as chief of staff, what he realizes is that the problem is not just the fact that there’s not a process and that he’s not being staffed as well as he could, but that Trump himself was the problem, that Trump was far dumber and immoral and ignorant and lazy than he ever thought he was.”
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The New York Times reporter and author went on to add, “Within a few days, he becomes terrified because here he is, the top staffer to the president of the United States, and he’s realizing that the president of the United States is far more limited and potentially dangerous than he ever thought, and at that point, there was no one else to call. He was — it was just him and Trump, and he basically spends the next 18 months trying to manage Trump as much as he could.”
In the end, Trump was the problem.
You can watch the MSNBC segment here:
Featured image via Flickr/Michael Vadon, under Creative Commons license 2.0
