WASHINGTON, DC — Nick Ayes, a native of Mableton, GA, removed himself from consideration to become the next White House chief of staff by President Donald Trump. On Friday, the president announced he was picking a new U.S. attorney general and a new ambassador to the U.N., and at the same time two senior aides departed the White House to beef up his 2020 campaign. Kelly’s replacement in the coming weeks is expected to have a ripple effect throughout the administration.
Ayers, who is a seasoned campaign veteran despite his relative youth — he’s just 36 — reportedly had the backing of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, the president’s daughter and son-in-law and senior advisers, for the new role, according to White House officials. But Ayers removed himself from the running Sunday night, saying he will be leaving his current position by the end of the year and forming a pro-Trump SuperPAC.
Ayers is a graduate of Kennesaw State University, and was a member of Sonny Perdue’s historic upset of Democratic Georgia governor Roy Barnes in 2002, a defeat that swept Republicans into state power for the first time since Reconstruction. Two years later, at age 22, he chaired Perdue’s reelection campaign. Perdue is now Secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the Trump administration.
Ayers has also served as executive director of the Republican Governor’s Association, and served in numerous other political consulting and leadership positions before becoming Pence’s chief of staff. The vice president replied to news of Ayers’ pending departure:
Trump has hardly been shy about his dissatisfaction with the team he has chosen, and has been weighing all sorts of changes over the past several months. He delayed some of the biggest until after the November elections at the urging of aides who worried that adding to his already-record turnover just before the voting would harm his party’s electoral chances.
Now, nearly a month after those midterms, in which his party surrendered control of the House to Democrats but expanded its slim majority in the Senate, Trump is starting to make moves.
He announced Friday that he’ll nominate William Barr, who served as attorney general under President George H.W. Bush, to the same role in his administration. If confirmed, Barr will fill the slot vacated by Jeff Sessions, who was unceremoniously jettisoned by Trump last month over lingering resentment for recusing himself from overseeing special counsel Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation.
Sessions was exiled less than 24 hours after polls closed. But Trump’s broader efforts to reshape his inner circle have been on hold, leading to a sense of near-paralysis in the building, with people unsure of what to do.
Trump also announced that State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert is his pick to replace Nikki Haley as the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and he said he’d have another announcement Saturday about the military’s top brass.
All this came the same day that Trump’s re-election campaign announced that two veterans of the president’s 2016 campaign, White House political director Bill Stepien and Justin Clark, the director of the office of public liaison, were leaving the administration to work on Trump’s re-election campaign.
“Now is the best opportunity to be laser-focused on further building out the political infrastructure that will support victory for President Trump and the GOP in 2020,” campaign manager Brad Parscale said in a statement.
Trump and Kelly’s relationship has been strained for months — with Kelly on the verge of resignation and Trump nearly firing him several times. But each time the two have decided to make amends, even as Kelly’s influence has waned.
Kelly, a retired Marine Corps four-star general, was tapped by Trump in August 2017 to try to normalize a White House that had been riven by infighting. And he had early successes, including ending an open-door Oval Office policy that had been compared to New York’s Grand Central Station and instituting a more rigorous policy process to try to prevent staffers from going directly to Trump.
But those efforts also miffed the president and some of his most influential outside allies, who had grown accustomed to unimpeded access. And his handling of domestic violence accusations against the former White House staff secretary also caused consternation, especially among lower-level White House staffers, who believed Kelly had lied to them about when he found out about the allegations.
AP writers Zeke Miller, Jill Colvin and Catherine Lucey contributed to this report.
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WASHINGTON, DC – DECEMBER 5: Chief of Staff to the Vice President Nick Ayers stands outside a meeting with Senate Republicans on Capitol Hill, December 5, 2017 in Washington, DC. After the Senate passed their tax reform legislation last week, the next step will be a conference committee with members of the House to iron out the differences between the two bills. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
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