Trump left without plan B after first choice Nick Ayers turns down chief of staff job

'Why would anybody want to be Donald Trump’s chief of staff unless you want to steal the office supplies before they shut the place down?'

President Donald Trump has often bragged about having his pick of only the best people to serve in his administration.

Being publicly rejected by his first choice for chief of staff – and embarking on a very public search for someone else – has made Mr Trump’s claim harder to back up.

A shortlist of last-ditch possibilities has emerged, including family-vetted officials like Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Robert Lighthizer, the US trade representative, but only one possibility – Representative Mark Meadows, the hard-right Republican congressman from North Carolina who is so far not quite inside the Trump children’s circle of trust – has voiced interest.

After Nick Ayers, the Georgia political operative who was the president’s top pick, declined the job – something of a plot twist in a presidency notorious for its episodic cliff-hangers – Mr Trump is without a Plan B. Several of his aides expressed frustration that months of intense campaigning to replace John F Kelly – an effort led by Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, the president’s elder daughter and son-in-law – resulted in yet another chaotic staffing scramble in a White House splintered by factions and rife with turnover.

“Why would anybody want to be Donald Trump’s chief of staff unless you want to steal the office supplies before they shut the place down?” said Chris Whipple, who wrote a book on White House chiefs of staff called The Gatekeepers, expressing the views of many outside the White House about Mr Kelly’s job. “If you’re coming into that job, you’ve got to lawyer up.”

Mr Trump faces a week marked by negotiations with Congress over a possible government shutdown and difficult negotiations over the funding for his long-promised border wall. But on Monday, according to several people close to the administration, the president was more focused on his success in dispatching Mr Kelly than on his anger at Mr Ayers.

Ivanka Trump and Mr Kushner’s efforts on behalf of Mr Ayers were widely seen as a coup attempt, started on behalf of a president who was unhappy with Mr Kelly but could not bring himself to fire him. Mr Ayers’ rejection of the offer stunned the couple, who had long resisted Mr Kelly’s attempt to bend them to a traditional White House hierarchy.

But for Trump family members, the debacle amounts to a survivable setback. And the couple are now back to assessing a last-ditch list of possible candidates.

Others who know Donald Trump hinted that the president dislikes being embarrassed, and the abruptness of Mr Ayers’ rejection might not have worn off. After all, aides to Mr Trump and Vice President Mike Pence had been preparing as recently as Sunday morning for Mr Ayers to take the job, and for another aide, Jarrod Agen, to temporarily assume Mr Ayers’ current duties as Mr Pence’s chief of staff.

To make room for Mr Ayers, Mr Trump, who famously avoids one-on-one interpersonal conflict, had been trying for a while to pull the trigger on firing Mr Kelly. Famous for the “You’re fired!” catchphrase and also for hating confrontation, Mr Trump had looked for others to do the work for him last week – even attempting to arrange for Mr Ayers to fire Mr Kelly – according to three people familiar with the events.

Finally, Mr Trump persuaded Mr Pence and Mr Ayers to join him in hashing things out with Mr Kelly in the presidential residence on Friday night. But instead of sticking to the plan to let Mr Kelly leave with dignity, which Mr Ayers and others in the White House had urged the president to do, Mr Trump decided to announce it himself on Saturday.

Finding a replacement for Mr Kelly is in many ways just the latest staffing snare in a White House that has struggled to fill even low-ranking jobs. Staff turnover for senior aides, according to the Brookings Institution, sits at 62 per cent.

“After two full years, Obama was at 24 per cent turnover of his senior staffers,” Kathryn Dunn Tenpas of Brookings said in an interview. “George W Bush was at 33 per cent. In a way, instability breeds instability.”

But the chief of staff job is often described by those who have had it as the worst in Washington, even when times are good.

Leon E Panetta, who had the job under President Bill Clinton, said the Clintons squired him to Camp David to work on him to leave his job as the director of the Office of Management and Budget. Mr Panetta recalled Mr Clinton’s clincher:

“'You know, Leon,'” Mr Panetta said Bill Clinton told him, “'you could be the greatest OMB director in the history of the country, but if the White House is falling apart, no one will remember you.'”

Mr Mnuchin is in a similar position. He has earned the confidence of the president and his children from his time on the 2016 presidential campaign, and his name has been floated repeatedly as Mr Kelly’s successor. But a person familiar with Mr Mnuchin’s thinking said he was more interested in keeping the job he has now.

Mr Meadows, the hard-edge chairman of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, is also in the running for the job. He does not enjoy the same confidence of the Trump children that Mr Mnuchin does. But he is the only person to express public interest in replacing Mr Kelly.

After keeping silent much of the day, Mr Meadows told reporters on Monday evening that he was not “campaigning” for the job but would be “interested” if an offer were made.

Asked by a reporter about the infighting and “constant shivving” among White House staff, Mr Meadows unexpectedly broke into laughter.

“Sorry about that, you just caught me funny,” he said. “Listen, I don’t worry about palace intrigue as long as I am not part of it.”

Mr Lighthizer, another replacement option, has a good relationship with Mr Kushner, West Wing officials said, but he has little experience in the type of administrative duties the job would require.

Other options range from the possible – including Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget – to the unlikely, including Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor and head of the Trump transition team, who angered Mr Kushner for sending his father to jail while he was a federal prosecutor.

Donald Trump, who was said to be distrustful of Mr Kelly’s personnel judgment, will not be consulting Mr Kelly on his successor, people close to him said. Still, Mr Kelly returned to the White House in his role on Monday, and attended a meeting with the president.

The New York Times