John Kelly didn’t have high expectations about Donald Trump when he joined the White House as chief of staff, but he was still shocked by what he found after joining the administration.
The retired U.S. Marine Corps general joined the White House halfway through Trump’s first year, and New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” about what Kelly learned about the former president and his abilities.
“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,” Schmidt said. “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’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,” Schmidt added. “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.”