When retired Marine Corps. general John Kelly joined the Trump administration as White House chief of staff, he didn’t have high expectations, but even so, he was in for a shock or two.

Perhaps the most glaring problem Kelly discovered when he came on halfway through Trump’s first year, wasn’t just that the administration was under-staffed, Raw Story reports. That’s what Kelly thought in the beginning until he found out that the largest part of the problem lay with Trump himself, according to New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt, during an interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.

“So when Kelly came in as chief of staff, he thought that the problem around Trump was that he was not staffed properly and they needed to create a process around him, and that’s when the chaos of the first six months of the administration was about,” Schmidt said. “But when Kelly comes in as hief of staff, what he realizes is that the problem is not just the fact that there’s not a process and that he’s not being staffed as well as he could, but that Trump himself was the problem, that Trump was far dumber and immoral and ignorant and lazy than he ever thought he was.’

Maybe I should have applied for the job; I could have told them that. By the time 2017 rolled around I’d been writing about Trump for at least two years and already understood the man probably needed a refresher course on how to tie his shoes every morning.

But this truly became a scary time for Kelly after he realized how deep Trump’s shortcomings actually were.

“Within a few days, he becomes terrified because here he is, the top staffer to the president of the United States, and he’s realizing that the president of the United States is far more limited and potentially dangerous than he ever thought, and at that point, there’s no one else to call,” Schmidt said. “He was — it was just him and Trump, and he basically spends the next 18 months trying to manage Trump as much as he could.”

Trump made the ludicrous suggestion that perhaps the U.S. could drop a nuclear bomb on North Korea and then blame it on another country, and that had to be a nightmare for Kelly, while at the same time, he was dealing with first lady Melania and Ivanka Trump who were at each other’s throats, something that Schmidt covered in his book, Donald Trump v. The United States. 

Kelly was fired by Trump in December 2018, but I’m sure this is one job he doesn’t miss.

I’ve included a clip of Schmidt’s interview below.