While former Obama chief of staff Bill Daley says he doesn’t find it surprising that “chaos” seems to consume President Donald Trump’s White House, he does think it is telling.
“White Houses reflect the person at the top and the chaos, or perceived chaos or lack of competence, in my opinion, reflects more about Donald Trump than anything else,” Daley told David Axelrod on “The Axe Files,” a podcast from the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and CNN.
Daley, who served as President Barack Obama’s top staffer for a little over a year, slammed Trump as an ineffectual leader and claimed Trump had run his businesses as an autocrat.
“I have never seen anything like this in a business setting, much less a White House,” Daley said.
“It’s very reflective of somebody who ran a small business — basically which is what it was — and ran it as a dictator,” he continued, adding that although Trump was financially successful, “making a lot of money doesn’t necessarily mean you’re smart.”
Daley instead suggests that Trump won the White House by appealing to the worst instincts in society.
“Maybe he reflects more of us today … this nastiness and the crassness that you see in politics maybe were more reflective of our society,” Daley told Axelrod. “Donald Trump understood that maybe better than many, and his sort of outrageousness reflects reality TV or the politics of today, and he got that before anybody else maybe wanted to act on that.”
Daley said he believes that some of this divisiveness and vitriol can be addressed during the 2020 election — one in which he doesn’t think Trump will run.
“The next president, I think, will have to be very different and will have to bring a sort of calmness,” Daley said. “No country can stay at this level of sort of craziness for for very long. And I think the next president, whoever he or she will be, will have a very different tone.”
To hear the whole conversation with Daley, click on http://podcast.cnn.com. To get “The Axe Files” podcast every week, subscribe at http://itunes.com/theaxefiles.