Trump Tries to Regroup as the West Wing Battles Itself

 PresidentTrump enters a new phase of his presidency on Monday with a new chief of staff but an old set of challenges as he seeks to get back on course after enduring one of the worst weeks that any modern occupant of the Oval Office has experienced in his inaugural year in power.

With his poll numbers at historic lows, his legislative agenda stalled and his advisers busy plotting against one another, Mr. Trump hoped to regain momentum by pushingout his top aide, Reince Priebus, and installing a retired four-star Marine general, JohnF. Kelly, to take command. But it is far from certain that the move will be enough to tame a dysfunctional White House.

The shake-up followed a week that saw the bombastic, with-me-or-against-me president defied as never before by Washington and its institutions, including Republicans in Congress, his own attorney general, the uniformed military leadership, police officers and even the Boy Scouts. No longer daunted by a president with a Twitter account that he uses like a Gatling gun, members of his own party made clear that they were increasingly willing to stand against him on issues like health care and Russia.

The setbacks came against the backdrop of a West Wing at war with itself, egged on by a president who thrives on conflict and chaos. Mr. Kelly, who had been serving as secretary of Homeland Security, brings a career of decisive leadership to his new assignment as White House chief of staff. But he confronts multiple power centers among presidential aides, all with independent lines to the man in the Oval Office, who resists the discipline and structure favored by generals.

“Everybody knows what needs to be done to fix it, and I think everybody is coming to accept that they’re not going to happen,” said Sara Fagen, a White House political director under President George W. Bush. “And the reason they’re not going to happen is the person at the top of the food chain is not going to change. This is the new normal. This goes down as one of the worst weeks he’s had politically and P.R.-wise, but I don’t think anything will change.”

The historic moments, head-spinning developments and inside-the-White House intrigue.

The palace intrigue spilled into public with a vulgarity-laced rant by Anthony Scaramucci, the new White House communications director, who called Mr. Priebus a “paranoid schizophrenic” and vowed to take him down. While aides fought with one another, Mr. Trump’s signature promise to repeal and replace President Barack Obama’s health care program went down in flames.

“Anyone in a position of responsibility in G.O.P. politics is quickly losing patience with President Trump,” said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist and former adviser to Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. “The dysfunction is beyond strange — it’s dangerous.

“If Trump’s poll numbers were above 50 percent,” Mr. Conant continued, “health care reform would have passed. Instead, he’s spent more time responding to cable TV chatter than rallying support for his agenda.”

Presidential historians found it hard to recall precedents for the combination of internal warfare and external legislative troubles. Jeffrey A. Engel, the director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University, said the best examples were John Tyler and Andrew Johnson in the 19th century. Both men were serving as vice president when their bosses died in office, each during a time of great turmoil in his political party.

“In either case, we are forced to go well back over a century in the past to find an administration in such an open state of infighting coupled with legislative disarray,” he said.

Presidents can recover from a difficult first six months, as BillClintondid, Mr. Engel said. “But certainly, like both Tyler and Andrew Johnson, we see today a president at war with his own party, and that to my mind never turns out well,” he said.

The repeated defiance of Mr. Trump this past week indicated diminishing forbearance. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, publicly derided by Mr. Trump as “VERYweak,” refused to resign under pressure. Senate Republicans forced the president to back off his threats by warning that they would blockany effort to replace Mr. Sessions, either during their recess or through the confirmation process.

The House and Senate Intelligence Committees, both led by Republicans, summoned Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, to Capitol Hill to explainhis contacts with Russia during and after last year’s campaign. With near-unanimous, veto-proof bipartisan majorities, Congress passedlegislation curtailing Mr. Trump’s power to lift sanctions against Russia, a measure the president had to swallow and agree to sign.

After Mr. Trump abruptly wrote on Twitter that he was barring transgender people from the military, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff declared that the policy would not change unless the president gave a proper order. The Boy Scouts of America condemned Mr. Trump’s speech to its national jamboree as overly political and apologized to scouts, while some police organizations repudiated his call to be rougher on suspects.

And a Republican senator, John McCain, repaid Mr. Trump’s 2015 insult to his war service by torpedoing the president’s health care agenda with a dramatic middle-of-the-night thumbs down vote on the Senate floor.

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 “Think about this week. Not once, not twice — any of these things would have been a nail in the coffin,” said Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago, a White House chief of staff under Mr. Obama and a Democratic member of the House before that. “They told the president to pound dirt. That’s an unbelievable statement on where his presidency is only six months in. And nobody fears the political repercussions.”

Indeed, Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, received a call from Mr. Trump’s interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, reportedly warning of repercussions for the state after her initial vote against proceeding with the health care debate. Undeterred, she voted against the president again on a bill to repeal parts of Mr. Obama’s program.

Aides insisted the president would keep fighting.

“People are counting him out after health care,” Kellyanne Conway, a White House counselor, said on Fox News. “I would never bet against Donald Trump. He’s not going to allow one misvote by the Senate to stop him to provide relief for all of these Americans who are suffering. He’s not going to allow personnel changes to get in the way of tax reform or pushing back against these MS-13 gangs.”

Ms. Fagen said that tapping a general for the White House staff chief might be successful, but that it depended on whether he would be empowered in a way that Mr. Priebus had not been. Neither Mr. Trump nor Mr. Kelly disclosed what commitments if any were made to Mr. Kelly.

Mr. Priebus never had full command. Two senior advisers in the White House are immune from the discipline of a chief of staff: Mr. Kushner and Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter. When Mr. Scaramucci, the brash new communications director, was hired over Mr. Priebus’s objections, he boasted that he reported directly to the president, not to the chief of staff.

Even Mr. Priebus agreed it was time for a change. “I think actually going a different direction, hitting a reset button is actually a good thing, and the president did that,” he told Fox News on Friday. “So I think he’s happy, I got to tell you, although it’s always a little mixed when things like this happen.”

Mr. Kelly served as the senior military adviser to two defense secretaries, Robert M. Gates and Leon E. Panetta, and learned how to manage a sprawling operation with complicated politics. That gives hope to some.

“It’s not clear that John Kelly can succeed where Reince Priebus failed, because it appears that the president wants to act as his own chief of staff,” said Brian McKeon, who worked in Mr. Obama’s White House and Defense Department. “But given his background and experience, it seems likely that General Kelly will insist on a chain of command that runs through him, with no other staff reporting directly to the president.”

Ms. Conway said Mr. Kelly was a “generational peer” with the president but dismissed questions about chain of command.

“That’s just a pecking order question,” she said. “I think it’s beside the point, and here’s why: We all serve the president and this country. And in doing so, the president and his new chief of staff will decide what the right organizational structure and protocols are.”

Anyone who has studied the White House, however, knows that organization can be key to success. Chris Whipple, the author of “The Gatekeepers,” about White House chiefs of staff, said that Mr. Trump’s White House was broken and that the president needed to enable Mr. Kelly to fix it.

 “Trump now has a chance at governing, but it may be only a slim chance,” Mr. Whipple said. “The fundamental problem is that Donald Trump is an outsider president who has shown he has no idea how to govern — who, more than any of his predecessors, desperately needs to empower a chief of staff as first among equals to execute his agenda and tell him hard truths.