Shortly after Kelly was named chief of staff, he entered a meeting to find the man who would one day succeed him, Mick Mulvaney, was there despite not being on the approved list of attendees. “Kelly flipped out on Mick and said, ‘You wanna be the fucking chief of staff? Here, I’ll just leave because you wanna be the chief of staff’ ” the second former official said. Mulvaney and the president were both confused by Kelly’s reaction, according to this person, who recalled the president saying, “But he’s Mick. What do you mean he’s not on the list? What are you talking about?”

“Kelly was always trying to instill some sense of order and wanted things to be very regimented,” the second former White House official told New York. In meetings with the president, Kelly would conduct: “Okay, you talk now. You talk now. You talk now — and that’s not how Donald Trump works, obviously, so there was always a tension in meetings, because Kelly was trying to lead the meetings but Trump leads any meeting or conversation he’s in.”

These changes had a practical purpose: Kelly had cut down on the number of meetings in general and made the meetings that were held a more exclusive affair, reasoning that with fewer people as witnesses, there would be fewer leakers and the identity of those who did leak would be more obvious.

“The nature of leaking has changed,” a third former White House official said. “Some of it can be attributed to this bunker mentality, where there’s not a lot of people left and they’re getting a hailstorm of bullets on them every single day and people are generally less likely to leak when they’re getting shit on every day.”