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John Kelly will depart as White House chief of staff near the end of this year, President Trump told reporters today. Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, Nick Ayers, is his likely replacement.

“John Kelly will be leaving — I don’t know if I can say ‘retiring.’ But, he’s a great guy,” Trump said on the South Lawn of the White House. “John Kelly will be leaving toward the end of the year, at the end of the year.”

Kelly’s exit comes after several months of relative personnel stability in an infamously tumultuous White House.

But with the midterm elections now over and Democrats having won control of the House of Representatives, Trump concluded that now was the time for a shakeup he’s long wanted.

For many months now, the relationship between Kelly and Trump had reportedly been deteriorating, and his departure has long been rumored to be imminent.

Kelly managed to hang on to the job for quite some time after that. But things didn’t get better — and CNN’s Kaitlan Collins reported this week that Kelly and Trump were no longer even speaking to each other.

Beyond that, Trump was said to want a chief of staff with more political expertise, to help him handle the inevitable investigations and legislative battles with next year’s Democrat-controlled House, and to prepare for the 2020 election.

Ayers’s rapid ascent, lucrative business ventures and golden boy reputation are again under the microscope as speculation over a White House staff shake-up is rekindled.

Those criticisms escalated late last year after Ayers filed a financial disclosure statement, required for top federal government officials, that showed him with a net worth of $12.2 million to $54.8 million — a huge fortune for a self-made career political operative in his 30s.

His wealth, accumulated partly through a complicated web of political and consulting companies in which he held ownership stakes, evoked to some the swamp that Trump has pledged to drain, though Ayers also holds significant investments in other sectors, including farmland in his native Georgia worth $2.5 million to $11 million.

By contrast, Kelly and his predecessor as chief of staff, Reince Priebus, came to the job with little in the way of wealth and far fewer financial ties to Washington’s political industrial complex.

Both men also had far more experience as administrators, but neither had much luck taming the chaos created by Trump and his factions of feuding aides.

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