An often-quoted cliche goes something like this: Change is the only constant in this world.
If you’re a member of the Trump administration’s senior staff, you’re right in the midst of change. It’s constant. It comes in blinding bursts.
The New Yorker magazine offers a fascinating look at what Donald J. Trump once called a “fine-tuned machine.” That would be his administration and the senior staff members who comprise it.
According to The New Yorker: Turnover among the White House staff, already record-setting in Trump’s first year, has spiked recently, now that no one is really in charge. Late last month, Martha Joynt Kumar, a scholar who has tracked White House staff during the past six Presidencies, reported that the Trump White House has an astonishing turnover rate of sixty-one per cent so far among its top-level advisers. No other Administration she has tracked comes close: Trump’s two immediate predecessors were at fourteen per cent (Barack Obama) and five percent (George W. Bush) at this point in their Presidencies. Bill Clinton, the highest after Trump, was at forty-two per cent, and that number was mostly made up of advisers who were reassigned to other senior White House roles, not fired or pushed out, according to Kumar.
There’s more from The New Yorker: The Trump Cabinet has been similarly tumultuous: Pruitt’s departure, on Thursday, adds to a list that already included a fired Secretary of State, a fired Secretary of Health and Human Services, and a fired Veteran Affairs Secretary, as well as a vacancy that was created when Kelly moved from the Department of Homeland Security to replace Trump’s fired first chief of staff, Reince Priebus. All together, Trump’s Cabinet has the fastest turnover rate of any Administration in a hundred years. Tenures are so short that Kumar is now reporting on the turnover among the second and third waves of aides. And it could be that Trump has no problem with this situation, or even with the seemingly untenable situation of having a chief of staff who is regularly reported to be on his way out.
Read the entire New Yorker article here.
Trump’s delusion has become almost legendary now that he’s been in office for the past 18 months. He keeps boasting about how well everything is going. How much he has accomplished. How he can pick from the crowds of “the best people” who are lining up to work in the West Wing.
It ain’t happening, Mr. President. So quit lying about the “fine-tuned machine” that is misfiring seemingly every hour at the White House.