Friday on Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer reacted to the announcement Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly would be replacing Reince Priebus as chief of staff.
Krauthammer called Priebus “a good man,” but said the structure Priebus had in place at the White House was not working and effectively making it an administration in “chaos.”
“You know, Priebus is a good man,” Krauthammer said. “The president is right, but he was over his head. He was not a confidante of the president. He didn’t have the authority you needed. People went around him. Now what the White House needed and I think the reason you haven’t had even Democratic criticism of the appointment is that we’re getting what we needed, which is somebody who will be the gatekeeper, somebody who will restore some kind of order, somebody who will be the authority.”
Krauthammer argued the way to tell if the pick of Kelly would be a success was to see if White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci answered to Kelly, or if he had a “direct line” to Trump.
“[T]he test case is going to be Scaramucci,” he added. “If Scaramucci has a direct line, then we are going to have parallel governments. If Scaramucci has to go through Kelly, then we are going to have something that resembles a reasonable chain of command.”
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