Late last month, the interests of President Donald Trump aligned neatly with the interests of the Washington press corps. A chaotic White House was in search of order, and restless journalists were in search of a new political narrative. Enter John F. Kelly, a retired general and former secretary of Homeland Security, whom Trump tapped as his new chief of staff. Almost immediately, media reports celebrated Kelly as the man who could finally “bring order to a chaotic and unruly White House,” as Bloomberg put it. It’s a story best told in two New York Times headlines, less than a week apart: “John Kelly, New Chief of Staff, Is Seen as Beacon of Discipline” and “John Kelly Quickly Moves to Impose Military Discipline on White House.”

Referred to simply as “General,” Kelly reportedly brought military rigor to Trump’s team in a matter of days. One of his first moves was to fire Anthony Scaramucci, Trump’s boastful, indiscreet, and foul-mouthed communications director. Kelly has also imposed a strict chain of command so that everyone in the White House, aside from the president, has to answer to him. “After one week, other signs of Mr. Kelly’s taking the reins include the end of the unchecked flow of paperwork that crosses the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, and a new, more formal process for meeting with the president,” The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. “The new rules extend to Mr. Trump’s family. Son-in-law Jared Kushner and daughter Ivanka Trump, who serve as official advisers in the White House and have their own staffs, now report to Mr. Kelly instead of directly to the president, as does chief strategist Steve Bannon.”

Prominent Trump ally Newt Gingrich claimed a “sense of relief” came over the White House last week, a feeling shared even by many of Trump’s political opponents, who fear that an anarchic administration could hurt the country. But the hope bestowed upon Kelly is misplaced. While Kelly might run a tighter ship than his predecessor, Reince Priebus, he still faces the same insolvable problem: how to impose order when the chief agent of chaos is the president himself.

The tumult in the White House isn’t a product of Trump’s inexperience with politics; it’s long been his preferred way of running things. As a real estate boss, Trump cultivated teams of rivals to compete for his approval, not unlike his reality TV show The Apprentice. This approach also defined Trump’s entire campaign for president, and now his presidency. Such factionalism hasn’t stopped under Kelly—and perhaps even has intensified, as Bannon’s allies wage a whisper campaign against national security advisor H.R. McMaster, who is derided by the Breitbart crowd as a “globalist.”

International relations scholar David Rothkopf on Friday compared the strife in the Trump White House to the palace intrigues of a monarchy, a situation impossible to reconcile with the bureaucratic order Kelly aspires to. “The Trump White House differs from those of the past because sometimes, with daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner as the president’s true primus inter pares advisers, it often more resembles a royal court than the pinnacle of a democracy,” Rothkopf argued in the Financial Times. “It is hard to impose a hierarchic military perspective on those who float above the system by virtue of birth. In addition, Mr Trump spends much of his time out of the White House in Trump resorts on the golf course where his behaviour is harder to control.”