Nearly a year into his presidency, Donald Trump's high-level staff members have given up on trying to calm their boss' Twitter habit. Despite numerous attempts, administration officials seem to have concluded that there's nothing they can do to stop the president from damaging himself and fellow Republicans by spouting off whatever happens to come into his head — usually directly from television.
This is both a very good thing and a very bad thing for the staffers. Some White House employees are seeing Trump adding fuel to a fire that could very well bring him down, Politico noted.
The tweets all combined to reignite fears among people close to Trump that the president is not taking the special counsel’s investigation seriously enough and is getting bad advice from his legal team.
Trump supporters, former campaign aides and former administration officials are beginning to privately raise red flags that the White House can’t keep up with the president’s own tweets and doesn’t have a coherent messaging strategy on the Russia investigation, according to interviews with a half-dozen people close to the president.
The people close to the president stressed that they are not worried that special counsel Robert Mueller will ensnare the president or find evidence of collusion. But they nonetheless fear that the near-daily revelations about the investigation will overtake Trump’s presidency.
But amid the worries, a sense of zen is creeping in. Politico reported that White House officials were saying that Trump's Twitter habit was best ignored, saying it was a "lost cause." That may be the biggest takeaway from the age of John Kelly, Trump's second chief of staff.
"Someone, I read the other day, said we all just react to the tweets," Kelly said last month, after a presidential news conference in Vietnam. "We don’t. I don’t. I don’t allow the staff to. We know what we’re doing.”
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