Donald Trump scrapes the bottom of the Chief of Staff barrel, finds Mick Mulvaney underneath it

| 6:59 pm EST December 14, 2018
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Donald Trump just finished bragging that he had a long list of people lined up who wanted to be his new White House Chief of Staff, including some recognizable names. It looks like they all turned him down, because Trump ended up scraping as far toward the bottom of the barrel as anyone can go – and even the person who took the job is declining to keep it.

If you thought Donald Trump was desperate when it surfaced that he was considering the unpopular Chris Christie for the job, things got even more humiliating when Christie made a point of publicly taking himself out of the running today. But that wasn’t because Trump had decided to give the job to someone else. We know this, because he ended up naming Mick Mulvaney as his new acting Chief of Staff. That’s right, acting.

Mick Mulvaney is the obscure White House budget director who’s best known for a weird press conference in which he attacked Meals on Wheels. Trump had to go that low to find someone. But it gets worse. Trump previously offered Mulvaney the job, and he turned it down. So now Trump has had to cajole Mulvaney into temporarily taking a job he doesn’t want.

This means Donald Trump will go into the new year with no White House Chief of Staff, as John Kelly heads for the hills and Mick Mulvaney temporarily does double duty, with no apparent prospects for being able to find anyone to permanently take the job. Then again, with the felony counts against Trump adding up, how far into the new year will he last anyway?