Mick Mulvaney’s Uncertain Fate
A few weeks back, a Trump-administration official told me that the White House’s acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, would soon be “acting” no more. Mulvaney had won the job for good, and Donald Trump was about to make him permanent chief, this person said. One week ago, another person close to the president came to me with a different tip: Trump had seen enough, and Mulvaney’s firing was imminent.
Neither whisper has proved true. Mulvaney is still in place, though Trump refuses to lift a modifier on a job title—acting—that all but screams, This person’s grip on the job is shaky.
But here’s a bigger question: Outside of Mulvaney’s friends and family, does anyone need to care about the chief of staff’s fate? Since assuming the presidency, Trump has cycled through senior aides at a faster clip than any president since Ronald Reagan, converting the office into a solo operation driven by impulse and chatter on cable news. . A cynic might ask,
