If you have noticed the glut of recent reports on White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly's attempt to act as the president's gatekeeper, then you probably were not surprised to read this in The Washington Post on Thursday evening: Trump “has been especially sensitive to the way Kelly's rigid structure is portrayed in the media and strives to disabuse people of the notion that he is being managed.”

“Donald Trump resists being handled,” Roger Stone, a former Trump adviser, told The Post's Philip Rucker and Ashley Parker. “Nobody tells him who to see, who to listen to, what to read, what he can say.”

AD

AD

In fact, there is substantial evidence that Trump is rather impressionable and can be influenced by what he sees on television or by the last person with whom he speaks about a given issue. But it is clearly important to the president that he be seen as an independent thinker.

Remember this?

Only the thinnest of veils hid Trump's anger at a February Time magazine cover that described Stephen K. Bannon, then the White House chief strategist, as “the great manipulator.” Without saying explicitly what he was responding to, Trump tweeted that he calls his own shots and accused the “fake news” media of lying.

The New York Times reported in April that the cover continued to bother the president, two months later.

AD

Bannon, seemingly aware that the idea of a manipulator irks Trump, ran two headlines on Breitbart News last week that suggested the president was under the spell of national security adviser H.R. McMaster when delivering a speech that laid out a plan for continued U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan.

One claimed that Trump had spoken in “his McMaster's voice.” Clever, right? The other, blunter headline referred to “President H.R. McMaster,” a riff on a New York Times editorial headline from January that read, “President Bannon?”

One problem for Kelly is that adversaries, such as Bannon and Stone, know that Trump can grow to resent people who are perceived, in the media, as wielding power over the president. Though it might seem counterintuitive, a way to undermine Kelly is to promote the notion that he is in command.

For now, Trump is still praising Kelly publicly. Perhaps responding to The Post's report from the previous night, Trump tweeted on Friday morning that Kelly “is doing a great job.”

The tweet could be nothing more than posturing, but recall that Trump's souring on Bannon spilled into view in April when he spoke dismissively about his former campaign chief executive in an interview with the New York Post.

AD

AD

“I like Steve, but you have to remember he was not involved in my campaign until very late,” Trump said at the time. “I had already beaten all the senators and all the governors, and I didn't know Steve. I'm my own strategist, and it wasn't like I was going to change strategies because I was facing crooked Hillary.”