At Fox News, Bill Shine ascended from Sean Hannity’s producer to Roger Ailes’s right hand because he was the ultimate Ailes loyalist and enforcer. Now he’s poised to play the same role for Donald Trump. Trump’s decision to tap Shine as deputy chief of staff signals that the West Wing is entering a new era, one in which the last redoubts of internal rebellion are stamped out. “Shine is very tough,” a former Shine colleague told me. “You could pull a gun on him and he’d be like, ‘Son, put the gun away.’”

According to sources close to the White House, Trump wants Shine to plug the leak-prone communications shop and bring discipline to the White House’s daily messaging. “He’s a mechanics guy,” the source close to Shine said. “He can determine when the best day to announce something is to drive the news cycle; or when the White House is doing events how to get the best camera shots.”

At the urging of Hannity, Trump has been wooing Shine for months. Shine played hard to get, telling people his family wasn’t on board. One source who spoke with Shine said Shine’s wife Darla worried that the White House job would open the family to scrutiny. (She maintains a vocal pro-Trump twitter feed. A recent tweet: “My painter Sergio was just here. He is from El Salvador. I asked him what he thought about the border issue. He said ‘Trump is right, in my country they tell all the gang members and criminals to go to America.’”)

In hiring Shine, Trump may have solved one crisis but created another. Shine comes to the job with significant baggage. In May 2017, he was forced out of Fox in part because of his role enabling sexual harassment (Shine denied knowledge of Ailes’s behavior). By far the most controversial part of Trump’s decision to hire Shine is Shine played a central role in facilitating Ailes’s sexual and psychologically abusive relationship with former Fox executive Laurie Luhn. As I previously reported, Ailes blackmailed Luhn by videotaping her in lingerie and coerced her into performing sex acts on him for nearly 20 years. Luhn told me that Shine summoned her from Washington to meet with Ailes in New York. Shine monitored Luhn’s e-mails to make sure she wan’t talking about Ailes, Luhn told me. Shine also arranged for Luhn to see a psychiatrist after she suffered an emotional breakdown.

Shine comes to the job with virtually no experience personally dealing with the press. In his role at Fox, he rarely granted interviews, having imbibed Ailes’s worldview that reporters were the enemy. While I was researching my Ailes biography in 2012, Ailes directed Shine to rally Fox personalities to tweet negative things about me. (In a tweet, Hannity called me a “PHONEY [SIC] JOURNALIST.”) Two sources told me Shine was also aware of Ailes’s use of private investigators to harass and intimidate journalists. “This guy is up to eyeballs in shit,” a Republican close to the White House said. In a normal West Wing, Shine’s baggage would be disqualifying.

The shake-up in the press office is likely to presage more staff churn. On Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported Trump’s long-suffering chief of staff may finally be leaving. The Journal reported the leading candidates to replace him are Office of Management and Budget chief Mick Mulvaney and Mike Pence’s chief of staff Nick Ayers. According to a source, Hannity has been pushing for Shine, eventually, to be chief of staff (it’s perhaps why Shine got the deputy chief title, rather than simply communications director).

Another dark-horse candidate is Hope Hicks. Two sources say Hicks’s name is being discussed inside the White House. According to a source close to Hicks, she has told people she is open to the job if Trump asked, but is not pursuing it. When I reached out, she declined to comment.