Looks like John Kelly and Sarah Huckabee Sanders are both bailing out of Donald Trump’s sinking White House
With all the chaos going on in Donald Trump’s failing administration and in the nation in general, it went barely noticed last night when Trump hired disgraced former Fox News boss executive Bill Shine as his new White House Communications Director. Trump usually leaves this position vacant, and only tends to bring someone in when he’s trying to rid himself of existing staffers. Sure enough, both John Kelly and Sarah Huckabee Sanders appear to be on their way out the door.
Two weeks ago CBS News first reported that Huckabee Sanders was preparing to resign. She denied it, but then she began sharply pulling back from her job duties and her visibility. Now that we know that Trump has been shopping around for a new Communications Director, it makes sense why the report surfaced that she’s planning to leave. But now it looks like she won’t be the only one.
Several major news outlets are reporting this evening that White House Chief of Staff John Kelly is also preparing to resign, and that Trump has gotten as far as shortlisting replacement candidates. This has direct echoes of when Trump hired Anthony Scaramucci as Communications Director, and within days, Press Secretary Sean Spicer and Chief of Staff Reince Priebus announced their resignations.
We’ll see what comes of this. The timeframe for Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ departure has never been fully clear, and of course we’ve heard about John Kelly’s supposed resignation before. It’s noteworthy that the CBS report says Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah is also planning to resign – suggesting that this could be more of an “abandon ship” moment than we’ve been led to believe. In any case, Trump is now casting off the few people who were functioning on his White House senior staff, and it’ll leave him with virtually no one left. Nor do we expect the controversial Bill Shine to last long.
