December 14, 2018

Trump Announces Mick Mulvaney as New Acting Chief of Staff

The OMB head replaces John Kelly, who has been rumored to have a tumultuous relationship with the president for months.

/AP Photo

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President Donald Trump announced via Twitter on Friday that Mick Mulvaney will replace John Kelly as acting chief of staff.

Mulvaney, a former Republican congressman from South Carolina, has been serving as the director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Trump administration. Recently, he had taken on a position as interim head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, “diluting a number of tools aimed at robust supervision of the financial industry.”

The White House announced earlier this week that Kelly would be departing the White House, which came as no surprise—rumors of tension between Trump and Kelly have been swirling for months. Still, in the tweet, Trump called Kelly a “great patriot.”

Since the chief of staff vacancy was announced, Trump has struggled to fill the position—Nick Ayers, Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff and Trump’s rumored top choice, declined the job.

In a tweet, Mulvaney called the appointment “a tremendous honor.”

It’s unclear how long this appointment will last and who will be named permanently to the position.

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You expect the big picture, and it's our job at Mother Jones to give it to you. And right now, so many of the troubles we face are the making not of a virus, but of the quest for profit, political or economic (and not just from the man in the White House who could have offered leadership and comfort but instead gave us bleach).

In "News Is Just Like Waste Management," we unpack what the coronavirus crisis has meant for journalism, including Mother Jones’, and how we can rise to the challenge. If you're able to, this is a critical moment to support our nonprofit journalism with a donation: We've scoured our budget and made the cuts we can without impairing our mission, and we hope to raise $400,000 from our community of online readers to help keep our big reporting projects going because this extraordinary pandemic-plus-election year is no time to pull back.

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