Here's a nice little piece from Vanity Fair that reflects the perspective of the moderate camp inside the West Wing — Jared, Ivanka, and Gary Cohn — and contains some brutal anonymous quotes hitting Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway in particular.
While the alt.right Bannonites can't be too happy, what's clear is that the West Wing's leak war is still very much alive, despite the President telling his senior staff to knock it off and work together. This situation is unsustainable and Bannon's job security isn't looking great.
THE INSIDE STORY OF THE KUSHNER-BANNON CIVIL WAR
West Wing sources come clean about the backstabbing, the bullying, the distrust, and the buzzing flies.
The West Wing of the White House is a cramped collection of tiny offices, some of them windowless, linked by narrow hallways. New inhabitants are sometimes surprised at just how small the physical quarters are. The current configuration results from a Depression-era renovation designed to increase the workspace of the president’s staff without expanding the physical footprint of the building. Parts of the West Wing can feel grungy and old, and look as if they have been repainted far too often. Many of the offices contain mousetraps to fight the inevitable infestation. Because the windows don’t open, for security reasons, large flies buzz near the ceilings. The relentless pressures and close quarters mean that someone in the West Wing always seems to be sick.
You’ll hear White House veterans say that working in the West Wing is like being on a submarine, sealed off from the rest of the world. “You are right on top of each other and you see each other all the time,” recalled one West Wing veteran. “The day-to-day volume of stuff that comes your way in the White House is overwhelming, especially to a new group.” What sustains you, this person went on, are the stated principles of the president and the dedication of the people working with him to pursue that vision. Ken Duberstein, a White House chief of staff to Ronald Reagan, told me, “There’s only one agenda in any White House, and it’s the president’s.”
But now, in full view of the country and the world, we are watching what happens when a president is elected on the basis of an incoherent and crowd-sourced agenda, one that pandered to white nationalists and stoked economic anxiety. When that same president is someone who has never managed a large bureaucracy and brings almost no close associates who have. And when some of the aides he haphazardly acquired a few months before taking office care more about their own ambitions than his own—whatever they are.
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/04/ ... -civil-war
The most withering of the anonymous quotes are aimed at Conway. "Don't spend too much time on Kellyanne," the senior administration official [said], referring to the Cheerleader Gone Wrong character in this reality-TV tableau. "She's a harmless, sweet person, but she is less and less in the middle of it."