Should President Trump’s new chief of staff tell him what he should or shouldn’t tweet about? Will the man who spent a good deal of his youth in a military academy, benefit by having a chief of staff who brings a military-style discipline into his everyday life?
Right before eighth grade, Trump’s father sent him literally up the river to New York Military Academy in the Hudson Valley. Trump would spend the next five years there.
Retired Col. Ted Dobias remembers the tall, lanky kid who showed up at his dormitory.
“I put [him] down at the end of the hall. He didn’t know how to make a bed. He didn’t know how to shine his shoes. He had a problem, you know, with being a cadet. You know, being a cadet, you gotta take care of yourself,” Dobias said.
And Trump the cadet didn’t quite know how, at first. Dobias had a reputation for being one of the school’s toughest instructors. He was a hardened World War II veteran who made it clear to Trump — he didn’t care who his daddy was.
“When he got out of line, he got the same treatment like everybody else. His name was Donald Trump, like Johnny Jones. It was all the same,” Dobias said. “Nobody was different. We treated everyone alike.”
Back in Trump’s day, cadets would wake up near the crack of dawn, hurry into their uniforms and march in formation to breakfast. First-year cadets had to eat their meals squared-off — lifting their forks in a right angle path into their mouths. And after breakfast, they’d scurry back to clean their rooms for inspection. Dobias said it was a place where kids who didn’t like following the rules learned to like it.
“It’s a hell of a thing for a kid to go to a military school — especially when you have to say, ‘Yes sir,’ ‘No sir,’ have to learn how to salute, how to do about-face, how to march, how to carry a gun,” said Dobias.
But instead of recoiling from the discipline, Trump thrived under it. In her book The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate, Gwenda Blair notes how “Donald seemed to welcome being in a place with clear-cut parameters, a place where he could focus on figuring out how to come out on top and get what he wanted.”
Mike Kabealo, one of Trump’s roommates at NYMA, said in the confines of the school’s rigid rules, Trump wanted to be a standout.
“Cocksure, positive and anything-you-can-do-I-can-do-better kind of stuff — you know, he was very competitive,” Kabealo said.
And friends say Trump channeled that competitiveness into everything at military school. When he was in charge of the rifle rack, he cleaned the rifles obsessively. He was meticulous about his uniform. When it was his turn to do inspections in the barracks, he whipped other cadets into shape. – NPR
Given his success in the military academy, is it any surprise then, that President Trump would choose a former general to be his chief of staff?
White House Chief of Staff John Kelly aims to stop President Trump from making policy announcements on Twitter, according to a report Friday night.
While Kelly acknowledges he can’t stop Trump from tweeting, the new chief of staff would like to know what the president plans to tweet before he does so. He would prefer big policy decisions not be announced on Twitter.
The goal is “pushing the tweets in the right direction,” Politico reported, citing a White House official.
Trump made waves on July 26 when he announced on Twitter that he would ban transgender people from the military:
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/890193981585444864
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/890196164313833472
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/890197095151546369
The Defense Department has since said it won’t execute a policy based on Trump’s tweet until it would receives formal guidance, which the White House has not provided yet.
Politico reported that White House and Defense Department lawyers had warned Trump against the transgender military ban, fearing the legal backlash that would follow. The lawyers only learned about Trump’s decision when he tweeted it. – Washington Examiner
