Post-impeachment exit...

White House braces for Mulvaney’s post-impeachment exit

The acting White House chief of staff could never win President Donald Trump’s full support. Mulvaney has been sidelined so much in recent months that he’s now expected to depart soon.

By NANCY COOK

Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney is widely expected to leave his current position once the Senate wraps up its impeachment trial and the intense scrutiny of the West Wing settles down, according to five aides and confidants to President Donald Trump.

Trump allies and White House aides, who have been nudging the president in recent weeks to find a new leader for the team as it delves into a crucial reelection campaign, have been circulating lists of potential replacements for weeks.

Mulvaney no longer wields much control over White House staff. Lately, he has been left out of major personnel and policy decisions, and he is not driving the strategy on impeachment even though he occupies what is historically the most powerful job in the West Wing.

“He is there. I’ll leave it at that,” said a Republican close to the White House when asked about Mulvaney’s status. “He’s like a kid. His role at the dinner table is to be seen and not heard.”

The news Thursday that Republican Rep. Mark Meadows would not seek reelection and would instead work in some capacity for the president was interpreted throughout the White House and Trump world as Meadows morphing into Trump’s chief of staff in waiting — ready to assume the position in a second term if Trump wins reelection. Meadows has been spotted around the West Wing in recent weeks and has been one of Trump’s key advisers throughout the House impeachment process. He is also close to Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and one of his most trusted advisers, whom the outgoing congressman often speaks with multiple times per week.

A spokesman for Meadows declined to comment. The White House press office did not respond to a request for comment.

Mulvaney has been on the job for roughly a year — through a government shutdown, the release of the Mueller report and now impeachment — yet was never able to kick the “acting“ title for a role that does not require formal approval from anyone but the president.

Just like his predecessors, Reince Priebus and Gen. John Kelly, he eventually lost juice inside the building, according to interviews with nine current and former senior administration officials and Republicans close to the White House.

While Mulvaney never took a traditional approach to the job and viewed his role based on the “let Trump be Trump” approach, he still got tripped up in the position by a mercurial president and a White House staff that tends to operate like a group of independent contractors pursuing their own portfolios.

His relationship with the president has ebbed and flowed, depending on the day. One White House official said Mulvaney’s relationship with the president was currently on the upswing. “He is never the guy rushing to get into the Oval Office,” the official said. “He picks his battles. He does not need to be in the president’s face all of the time.”

Mulvaney allies give him credit for boosting White House staff morale, building a better relationship with Ivanka Trump and initially with Kushner, and involving himself in outreach to the House, where he served as a member from 2011 to 2017. Other allies praise him for making the policy process work better, leading to recent wins like the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade deal and the deal with China on tariffs.

He faltered during this tenure when he gave a news briefing on the location of the G-7 — an appearance that degenerated into a session all about the Ukraine scandal, providing fodder for Democrats to say the White House tried to engage in a quid pro quo with Ukrainian leaders over military aid. The ensuing controversy and the White House’s walkback of Mulvaney’s comments damaged his standing inside the White House, according to Republicans close to the administration and White House officials.

Mulvaney also urged Trump late last year to shut down the government as leverage to land additional funding for a border wall, a move that backfired politically on Republicans. Trump had to reopen the government 35 days later with no tangible wins and with the distinction of overseeing the longest government shutdown in history.

One former senior administration official argued it is unfair to pin all that on Mulvaney, because Trump ultimately calls the shots. Another former official said, in the long run, it showed Trump’s base the extent to which he is willing to fight for border funding.

Mulvaney is not looking at other jobs outside the White House, according to one of his allies, and has long said he loves his job and will leave only when the president tires of him.

In recent weeks, Mulvaney has been keeping himself busy working on smaller issues within the package of spending bills that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin negotiated with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

“While he does not have the authority of a traditional chief of staff, he has been able to influence certain policy and budget priorities that do not come into the line of sight for the president,” said one of the Republicans close to the White House.

He spent time calling up several conservative groups to urge them to drop their opposition to Judge Halil Suleyman Ozerden, the president’s pick for the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Mulvaney is an old friend of Ozerden and even served as a groomsman in his wedding, yet Ozerden is the rare Trump judicial pick whose nomination is stalled in the Senate, thanks to the opposition of several conservative groups and at least two Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The biggest blow to Mulvaney of late, however, was his exclusion from the decision-making process for Trump’s new deputy chief of staff for operations, a position that reports directly to Mulvaney.

The president ultimately picked a Secret Service official, Anthony Ornato, for the job after days of internal jockeying. Various aides suggested and pushed for current staffers to fill the post including Derek Lyons, Max Miller and Nick Luna. Mulvaney was not involved in the final decision, nor did the president settle on the choice the acting chief of staff advocated, according to two additional Republicans close to the White House. “He was out of the loop,” one said.

Inside the West Wing, Mulvaney does not earn the ire of staffers as Kelly did toward the end of the general’s tenure with his top-down, military approach to organization and management and his frequent clashes with Trump’s family.

Mulvaney instead is seen as a supremely confident and ambitious person who took a job few viewed as tenable and who now lives on the outskirts of the White House’s key centers of power.

“The president does not want a traditional chief of staff, plus there is Jared. There are already two chiefs: the president and his son-in-law. There is no room for a third,” said one Trump ally.