January 13, 2023
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4:25Now PlayingGeneral John Kelly was brought in as Trump's Chief of Staff to bring order to the chaos after the first six months of Trump's tenure. But what Kelly found out was that Trump was far dumber and lazier than he could have imagined, a sentiment that has previously been shared by multiple former staffers of the Trump White House. It turns out that Trump was the biggest problem of all, as Farron Cousins explains.
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*This transcript was auto-generated. Please excuse any typos.
Michael Schmidt, a reporter for the New York Times, has a not so new book coming out. The book actually came out two years ago, but it is now being released on paper back with, you know, some additions. And one of the things that Mr. Schmidt talked about in a recent interview on Ms. N B C was the fact that General John Kelly, who came during the, uh, first year of Trump's administration to serve as the new chief of staff, was shocked, absolutely shocked at how stupid and lazy Donald Trump was. Now, before I read the exact quote, please understand that John Kelly came in about halfway through Trump's first year in office. And Kelly, according to Schmidt knew, you know, just from looking on the outside in that things were chaotic in the Trump White House. I, I mean, everybody knew that things were chaotic in the Trump White House.
You got a guy who's never worked in politics a day in his life, suddenly elevated to the highest, most powerful office possibly on the planet. He doesn't know what the hell he's doing. So Kelly's like, oh hell, I know I'm getting into it, and I know the staff up there is just wholly incompetent, giving him bad advice. I can write the ship. Kelly thought, because he thought it was the staff, he thought it was the people Trump surrounded him with, and that's what shocked him the most. He saw the chaos and thought to himself, there's no way in hell it's coming from Trump. And here is what Schmidt has to say that Kelly said to him. 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. Within a few days, he becomes terrified because here he is the top staffer to the President of the United States, and he is 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. It was just him and Trump. And he basically spends the next 18 months trying to manage Trump as much as he could. So again, Kelly gets in there and he is like, all right, man, let's, let's figure this out. You got an incompetent staff, I get that. But you, you're, you're a good guy, right? Oh, you're just, oh, you're, you're, you're just gonna sit and watch tv. Okay. Um, yeah, I guess we got bigger problems than I thought at this point. That's pretty much what happened with John Kelly when he came in there. But what's really interesting to me is not the fact that Kelly's like, yeah, this guy is ignorant, he's dumb, he's immoral, he's lazy. We get that, and you know why we get that? Not just because we watched it ourselves, but because other staffers have said the same thing. Couple months ago, another report came out where staffers who
Had worked in the Trump White House, but obviously now they're free, spoke to reporters and said that they too, were shocked, shocked at how stupid Trump was when they worked with him in the White House. So it's a recurring theme, like the people who've worked for him understand, like, this guy is dumb. He doesn't know what he is doing, he doesn't know how the law works. He hasn't even set up the office properly. For there to be a process to do things and, and look from a business standpoint, you still should know how to set up an office to be able to at least get things done, have a chain of command, you know, like, Hey, a thing came in, it goes to this person. They give it to them, they give it to Trump. They didn't even have that. So that of course, is what caused a lot of turmoil in that Trump White House. And the biggest problem is that he never changed. He had four years of on the job training and was just as incompetent on the day he left as he was the day he stepped into that office for the first time.
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