PRESIDENT Donald Trump is considering an administration-wide shake-up after disappointing midterm election results.
Trump has lost patience with Homeland security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and White House chief of staff John Kelly, in part over frustration that his administration is not doing more to address what he has called a crisis at the US-Mexico border, according to sources.
But the scope of the contemplated changes is far broader, as Trump gears up for a wave of Democratic oversight requests and to devote more effort to his own re-election campaign since the Democrats now took control the House of Representatives.
Sources allege Trump is also discussing replacing Kelly with vice-president Mike Pence’s chief of staff, Nick Ayers.
Commerce secretary Wilbur Ross and interior secretary Ryan Zinke are also thought to be under threat of replacement as part of the White House shake-up.
And in an extraordinary move on Tuesday, first lady Melania Trump’s office called publicly for the firing of Trump’s deputy national security adviser, Mira Ricardel.
Meanwhile, France’s government has fired back at a flurry of critical tweets by Trump, suggesting the US president lacked “common decency” by launching his broadside on a day when France was mourning victims of the November 2015 terror attacks.
Government spokesman Benjamin Griveaux said: “We were commemorating the assassination of 130 of our compatriots three years ago in Paris and Saint-Denis, and so I will reply in English: ‘Common decency’ would have been appropriate.”
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