Mark Meadows has earned his title of worst chief of staff in history

[DonViejo]

Opinion by Chris Whipple
Jan. 15, 2021 at 4:29 p.m. EST

Chris Whipple is the author of “The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency.”

In a secure tent on the Ellipse last week, as President Trump prepared to incite an angry mob ahead of its assault on the U.S. Capitol, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, smiling from ear to ear, mugged for a video with Donald Trump Jr., as Laura Branigan’s 1982 hit “Gloria” blared in the background.

For Trump’s glad-handing chief of staff, it was just another day of dutifully holding the president’s coat while the boss took a hammer to democracy. This will be the defining image of Meadows, for which he has earned the title of worst chief of staff in history.

Even in the short time we’ve had White House chiefs of staff, there’s considerable competition for that honor. Sherman Adams, Dwight D. Eisenhower’s gatekeeper, resigned in disgrace over a payola scandal. H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, who had the job under Richard M. Nixon, did prison time for Watergate crimes. Even those who did the job reasonably well typically emerged battered and scarred. As Donald Rumsfeld, Gerald Ford’s gatekeeper, put it: “The White House chief is the one person besides his wife who can … look the president in the eye and say, ‘This is not right. You simply can’t go down this road.’”

But Meadows, Trump’s fourth chief of staff, has been a yes-man straight from central casting, the see-no-evil West Wing minder Trump wanted but could never find. Ignored and humiliated by his boss, Trump’s first chief, Reince Priebus, the former RNC chairman, went along with illegal immigration orders and Trump’s attempted shakedown of FBI Director James B. Comey. Priebus’s successor, John F. Kelly, a retired Marine four-star general, tried but could not contain Trump’s venomous, self-destructive impulses. When, after a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville the president declared there were “very fine people on both sides,” Kelly just stood and stared, in apparent disgust, at his shoes.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/01/18/mark-meadows-worst-chief-staff-ever-trump

[CurtEastPoint]

1. He'll go back to NC and wreak more havoc on them.

[marble falls]

2. Great article!

[pfitz59]

3. He was a terrible Congressman

Not very bright and a Fascist to boot...