Yes, Trump has picked arguably the first disciplinarian, hard-truth-telling chief adviser of his entire two years in the national political spotlight. And yes, Kelly appears to have immediately asserted some order by getting rid of Scaramucci, who engaged in an expletive-ridden tirade against his new White House colleagues last week.

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But let's keep this in context.

Just seven days before Trump hired this retired Marine general to reportedly come in and right the ship with military precision and discipline, he hired the antithesis of all that: Scaramucci. Scaramucci was well-known as a brash, unapologetic Trump defender with an unpredictable streak. The “Trump's mini-me” label stuck for a reason. So if Trump wanted to pivot to presidentiality Friday, he apparently wanted to pivot to anarchy the Friday before.

And perhaps even more illustrative, Trump appeared to applaud Scaramucci's scorched-earth tactics and vulgarity just a day before hiring Kelly. When Scaramucci called in to CNN on Thursday morning to suggest that then-White House chief of staff Reince Priebus was a leaker, he did so immediately after speaking with Trump, who he said had authorized the reality-TV-esque last-minute call-in.

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“I just spent about 15 minutes on the phone talking with the president of the United States who has given me his full support and his full blessing,” Scaramucci assured.

And even after the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza published that interview full of invective and no-holds-barred criticisms of Priebus and top White House aide Stephen K. Bannon later Thursday, Trump seemed to be eating all of it up. As the New York Times reports:

Mr. Trump was initially pleased by Mr. Scaramucci’s harsh remarks, directed at Mr. Priebus and Stephen K. Bannon, the chief White House strategist. But over the weekend, after speaking with his family and Mr. Kelly, the president began to see the brash actions of his subordinate as a political liability and potential embarrassment, according to two people familiar with his thinking.

So almost exactly 24 hours after Lizza's story broke, the White House announced that Trump had replaced Priebus with Kelly. Are we really to believe that the president — whom nobody could persuade to do much of anything on the campaign trail or in his first six months in office — has suddenly seen the light? After two years of prioritizing letting Trump be Trump, did Trump undergo a full political transformation in just a day's time? That seems unlikely, not to mention unsustainable.

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Or is it more likely that Trump recognized that things were going badly — what with the staff drama and the health-care bill failing all at once — and decided that he needed a change? It's little secret that Trump loves generals, and he had tried to get Kelly to take the job many times before. Kelly resisted and appears to have gained concessions, including control over his whole staff. The firing of Scaramucci is surely a sign that the White House is trying something new, for now.