On Friday night, members of Donald Trump’s West Wing gathered for drinks at the Trump International Hotel following a holiday dinner at the White House. As they mingled in the lobby, Bill Shine, Stephen Miller, Kellyanne Conway, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and others grappled with the latest West Wing upheaval: Trump had changed the plan and fired Chief of Staff John Kelly earlier that afternoon. “It got back to Trump that Kelly was bad-mouthing him and Trump had decided he’d had enough. His attitude was, ‘fuck him,’” an attendee told me.

Kelly’s defenestration surprised few people—Trump had wanted to fire him for months—but the lingering problem had been finding a replacement whom Trump felt comfortable with (and who wanted the job). “The president really wanted someone he knows. He didn’t want to gamble,” a former West Wing official said. After weeks of lobbying by Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, Trump had been convinced that Mike Pence’s 36-year-old chief of staff, Nick Ayers, was the best candidate. On Friday afternoon, Trump met with Ayers, Pence, and Kelly and finalized the transition, a source briefed on the meeting said. A press release announcing Ayers’s hiring was reportedly drafted and ready to go for when Trump planned to announce Kelly’s departure on Monday.

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But Trump’s frustration with Kelly boiled over after Kelly pressed him to name his deputy Zachary Fuentes interim chief of staff. “Trump didn’t like how Kelly was trying to dictate the terms of his departure,” a Republican briefed on the discussions told me. Trump blew up the carefully orchestrated announcement and told reporters on Saturday as he walked to Marine One that Kelly would be leaving by the end of the year. “John wanted to announce his own departure. This was a humiliation,” a former West Wing official said.

Trump’s impulsive announcement quickly became an even bigger problem when it turned out that Kelly’s replacement was not sewn up; Ayers surprised Trump later that day by insisting that he only wanted the job short term. “Trump was pissed, he was caught off guard,” a former West Wing official briefed on the talks said. Sources said Ayers, who has triplets, told Trump he wanted to return to Georgia with his wife in the spring and work on a super PAC supporting Trump’s 2020 re-election. But a former White House official said Ayers wanted to avoid intense scrutiny on his financial dealings (last year, Ayers reported a net worth of $12.2 million to $54.8 million from his political-consulting ventures). “He started getting calls from reporters with requests for information about how he made his money and he thought, ‘Do I really want to do this?’” said a source familiar with his thinking.

Losing Ayers put Trump back in the position of searching for a chief of staff at a time when the White House will be under siege from Robert Mueller and House Democrats. Over the weekend, Blackstone Chairman and C.E.O. Stephen Schwarzman called Trump and recommended Blackstone senior managing director Wayne Berman for the role, a source said. (A spokesperson for Blackstone denied this.) But sources said Trump doesn’t have any obvious choices. Allies of Steve Bannon are pushing House Freedom Caucus Chair Mark Meadows and Citizens United president Dave Bossie. Other names that have surfaced include Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and Office of Management and Budget Head Mick Mulvaney. A senior White House official told me, in a sign of the depth of the current difficulties, that even former chief of staff Reince Priebus has been brought up as a possible replacement for Kelly.

A White House spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

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