The appointment of John F. Kelly as White House chief of staff was roundly applauded, even as it was met with some skepticism. Whereas Kelly's predecessor, Reince Priebus, came to be viewed as a punch line, Kelly—a gruff retired Marine Corps general—instantly commanded respect, even among the Trump family. He quickly set about bringing a sense of military discipline to an unruly West Wing, firing Anthony Scaramucci, cracking down on the whisper campaign against National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, and restricting the flow of information and visitors into the Oval Office.

There were two things he never attempted to control, however, and couldn’t if he had wanted to: Donald Trump himself and the president’s Twitter feed. Trump’s equivocal and then openly inflammatory response to last weekend's events in Charlottesville underscored the reality that as long as Trump remains in the Oval Office, there will be no order imposed on the White House, despite the hopes of Republicans on Capitol Hill that Kelly might finally oversee the mythical Trump Pivot. “The Kelly era was a bright, shining interlude between failed attempts to right the Trump presidency, and it has now come to a close after a short but glorious run,” a Republican operative and informal White House adviser told The Washington Post. “Like all people who work for the president, he has since experienced the limits of the president’s promises to cooperate in order to ensure the success of the enterprise.”

As Trump defended on Tuesday the torch-bearing mob of Ku Klux Klan members, neo-Nazis, and white nationalists who descended on Charlottesville to protest the removal of a Confederate statute—arguing that there were “very fine people” on both sides—Kelly stood in the background with his arms-crossed and staring at the ground, occasionally glimpsing over at the reporters lobbing questions at his boss. According to the Post, Kelly left the impromptu Trump Tower press conference “frustrated and dismayed.” Trump, however, was reportedly in “good spirits,” according to a White House adviser who spoke with him, steeled by his battle with the press and eager to press his argument that Confederate monuments should be protected. On Thursday, he continued:

The president’s untrammeled, early-morning Twitter spree—and the 24-hour media cycle it will surely provoke—highlight the limits of Kelly’s power. The Post reports that Kelly and his top aide Kirstjen Nielsen, a transplant from Homeland Security, have curtailed unplanned visits and calls from Trump associates, routing all calls to the president through a switchboard and embodying the traditional “gatekeeper” role. But the president himself remains a wild card. “It’s clear Kelly is having a stabilizing and organizing influence on the White House,” Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House and an informal Trump adviser, told the Post. “He will gradually have an impact on Trump, but it won’t be immediate. There are parts of Trump that are almost impossible to manage.” Already, Kelly’s reign has aggravated Trump, who has used his personal cell phone to circumvent Kelly’s switchboard. One associate close to the president described him as a “caged animal.” And Trump, as Politico’s Nancy Cook and Josh Dawsey report, does not like being caged: