When Donald Trump summoned John Kelly to the White House on Friday to give him, at long last, his walking papers during a meeting with Nick Ayers and Mike Pence, it appeared that Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump had notched a major victory. For weeks, Kushner and Ivanka had been lobbying the president to replace Kelly with Ayers, a generational peer and ally who would increase their influence in the West Wing.

But Ayers’s surprise decision to walk away from Trump’s offer has blown open the chief-of-staff search and, according to sources familiar with the situation, damaged Kushner’s standing with the president. “This was a big repudiation of Jared,” a prominent Republican close to the White House said. According to a source, Trump instructed Kushner, who almost never speaks publicly, to appear on Sean Hannity’s show on Monday night to be the face of the chief-of-staff debacle. “Trump said, ‘You’re going to go on there and defend me and take blame for chief of staff as punishment,’” a source briefed on the conversation said. (Kushner’s hit was spun externally as a discussion of prison reform.)

With Ayers out, Trump appears to be taking a hard look at candidates with vastly different politics and style than Kushner and Ivanka. According to two sources, Trump is scheduled to interview Citizens United president Dave Bossie at the White House on Friday. (Bossie declined to comment.) Bossie, who served as deputy campaign manager of Trump’s 2016 campaign, is known as a political street fighter and is a close confidant of Corey Lewandowski and Steve Bannon. With House Democrats poised to launch investigations of Trump in January, Bossie’s experience in political trench warfare is viewed by Trump as a plus. “Trump is all over how Bossie knows investigations,” one Republican briefed on the search said.

Bossie is among several hard-liners Trump is considering for the job. At the Army-Navy Game on Saturday, Trump quizzed friends in the box about House Freedom Caucus chair Mark Meadows. One attendee brought up acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker, and Trump replied, “I love Matt!,” one person who overheard the conversation said. With Bossie, Meadows, and Whitaker getting serious attention, Kushner and Ivanka are racing to inject a new horse into the race. Politico reported they have recommended Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin for the job, but Mnuchin is said to be not interested. One source said they’ve suggested former deputy national-security adviser Dina Powell, but a source close to Powell said she wants to remain at Goldman Sachs. (The White House did not respond to a request for comment.)

The problem, as Kelly found, is that Trump is impossible to manage. “It doesn’t matter who the president has in there—he’ll do what he wants,” an outside adviser said.