Catching up on the palace intrigue

Following the sting of the midterms—which Trump still insists were a victory—staff housecleaning was supposed to provide some satisfaction. After the defenestration of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, next on the hit list was Trump’s long-suffering chief of staff, John Kelly, possibly accompanied by Homeland Security chief Kirstjen Nielsen.Kelly has managed to hang on in part because there was never an obvious replacement. But last week, it appeared Trump had finally settled on Nick Ayers, Mike Pence’s 36-year-old chief of staff. On election night, Ayers attended a White House party and was seen mingling with the president and Melania Trump. A source said the president asked Ayers not to join Pence on his Asia trip last week so he could be in Washington for an announcement. But in recent days, Trump’s plan appears to have hit a snag. Ayers’s appointment has gone from a sure thing to “who knows?” after White House staffers mobilized against him. “They’ve gone to POTUS. There is a campaign against Nick. And it’s vicious,” a former West Wing official said.

Ayers is an unctuously boyish Southerner, known for his strategic acumen—not incidentally in regards to his own career. Ayers’s candidacy has been championed most intensely by Ivanka and Jared Kushner, four sources familiar with internal discussions said. In Ayers, they see a generational peer who possesses a sophisticated understanding of Republican politics at a moment when the White House is turning its focus to the 2020 election. “They think he’s savvy,” a person close to the couple said. “Jared and Ivanka have been telling people Nick will get the role,” a prominent Republican said. One source close to the White House said the president’s sons Don Jr. and Eric also support Nick’s appointment. “Even Kelly’s biggest fans know the guy knows nothing about politics. We’re going to be at loggerheads in Congress and we have to get Trump re-elected. Nick understands politics,” another former West Wing official said.

Ayers is known in Washington as a sharp-elbowed operative who would come to the job with a long list of bitter enemies. “He’s nakedly ambitious,” a former White House colleague said. In advance of the 2012 Republican Primary, Ayers, then 28, sent an e-mail to friends about his decision to join Tim Pawlenty’s campaign that made it appear that Ayers was the one running for president. In 2017, Politico reported that Ayers was eyeing a run for governor in his home state of Georgia. He was 34. Earlier this year, I reported that Ayers was seen by some inside the White House as quietly positioning Pence for a presidential run in the event Trump wasn’t on the ballot in 2020. “Everybody knows Nick is not loyal to the president,” an administration official told me at the time.

The campaign to block Ayers is being led, not surprisingly, by Kelly loyalists, including Deputy Chief of Staff Zachary Fuentes and White House counselor Johnny DeStefano.DeStefano is said to have an intense dislike of Ayers. According to a second West Wing official, DeStefano spoke to Melania Trump’s chief of staff, Lindsay Reynolds, as part of an effort to turn the First Lady against Ayers’s promotion. But the First Lady has mostly sat this one out. “She is wary of Nick,” the source said. Elsewhere, even staffers who normally stay out of West Wing battles have been drawn in. A source said Dan Scavino, Trump’s social-media director, spoke out against Ayers to the president. “I’ve never heard of Dan weighing in on any staff debates,” the source said. (The White House did not respond to a request for comment.)

The problem for Trump has always been: if not Kelly, then who? “Look, I put the odds of Nick being chief down in the teens,” the source continued. “The challenge is, who else can they get?”