Chief of Staff

The position of White House chief of staff only dates back to Eisenhower.  The current occupant is Mark Meadows.

 Tim Alberta at Politico:

It was unsettling enough on Saturday morning to hear President Donald Trump’s personal physician, Sean Conley, evading questions from the media during a news conference outside Walter Reed Medical Center. Tasked with giving an update on Trump’s bout with Covid-19, Conley wouldn’t say definitively whether the president had ever been given supplemental oxygen; what his temperature was; whether any lung damage had been detected. Making matters worse, the timeline he provided of Trump’s illness was wrong; he was forced to correct it after the briefing. Still, the big takeaway was that Trump was doing “very well,” that doctors were “extremely happy” with his condition, that the move to Walter Reed was nothing more than a “precautionary measure.”

Incredibly, just minutes after that briefing, the traveling press pool blasted out a statement provided by “a source familiar with the president’s health.” The anonymous quote hinted at something far bleaker than what the 10-member team of medical professionals had just offered: “The president’s vitals over the last 24 hours were very concerning and the next 48 hours will be critical in terms of his care. We’re still not on a clear path to a full recovery.”

It became immediately obvious that Meadows was the source; he was the only White House official at Walter Reed, the only person who could have so promptly briefed the pool on the president’s condition. (Sure enough, footage quickly surfaced showing Meadows pulling the reporters to the side, asking to speak “off the record with some of y’all” for a minute.)

What wasn’t clear—and still isn’t clear—is why Meadows said what he said. (I tried to get him to explain but he did not respond to messages seeking comment.)

Here again, there are competing theories among people who know him. One is that Meadows was concerned that Americans weren’t getting the full picture on the president’s health and wanted to offer a more realistic assessment. Another is that Meadows, a lover of political drama, wanted to seed a narrative of the president on the ropes and fighting for his life, setting up the storyline of a triumphant comeback. In reality, the likeliest explanation is that Meadows, having watched the doctors shed little light on Trump’s situation, tried to be helpful by providing some needed context to reporters, but overstepped with his melodramatic wording.

Whatever the case, Meadows erred not only by stepping on the doctors’ statement with his own, but by doing so anonymously, piling enormous confusion on top of an already chaotic moment. That the reporters in the pool agreed to the chief’s ground rules at such a critical time, on such a sensitive subject matter, is bad enough; what’s unfathomable is the top staffer at a White House that regularly disparages anonymous sourcing as “Fake News“ requesting the cover of background to deliver news the entire world was waiting on.