The following article by James Hohmann with Breanne Deppish was posted on the Washington Post website April 24, 2017:
THE BIG IDEA: In any normal administration, the failure of Andy Puzder to become secretary of labor would be a major data point in accounts of the president’s first 100 days.
It would be difficult, for example, to tell the story of Barack Obama’s first 100 days without mentioning Tom Daschle. Or Bill Clinton’s without mentioning Zoe Baird. Or George H.W. Bush’s without mentioning John Tower.
But nothing about Donald Trump is normal, and the fast food CEO is already a forgotten footnote in the frenzied opening chapter of his administration.
— The first three tumultuous months of Trump’s term have seen a perhaps unprecedented number of personnel casualties. A big part of the problem is that his transition team did a lousy job of vetting. Red flags that might have been discovered by a simple Google search didn’t emerge in some cases until after nominees were named publicly. The president also gravitated toward billionaires as he stocked the government, and the richer someone is the more conflicts they are likely to have. Complying with the requirements of the Office of Government Ethics proved too onerous for some. The premium that this president places on loyalty over experience and qualifications cost others their postings. Backstabbing and palace intrigue – which created a brutal, joyless work environment in the West Wing – drove others away after only weeks in their dream jobs.
— Trump’s pick for deputy commerce secretary, Todd Ricketts, withdrew last Wednesday. The son of TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts, a major GOP donor, could not easily unload his share in some of the family’s holdings, such as the Chicago Cubs.
The president’s nominee for Navy secretary, venture capitalist Philip Bilden, also cited his inability to meet the OGE ethics agreement when he pulled out in February.
Trump’s first choice for Army secretary, billionaire high-frequency-trader Vincent Viola, apparently dropped out for similar reasons. When his company was planning to go public in 2014, though, it disclosed that regulators were looking into its trading practices. It also came out that he was involved in an altercation last summer, in which he allegedly punched a concessions worker at a racehorse auction. (He was never charged.)
— Puzder’s withdraw never got much attention because it happened just two days after Trump fired Michael Flynn as his national security adviser over his contacts with the Russian ambassador. These conversations are part of a grey cloud that continues to hang over the White House.
The longtime CEO of the company that owns Carl’s Jr. was bowing to the reality that he wouldn’t have the votes to get confirmed by the Senate. His past employment of an undocumented housekeeper and his support for more liberalized immigration policies ultimately did more to doom his hopes in the GOP-controlled chamber than his ex-wife’s past allegations, made during an appearance on Oprah Winfrey’s show but later recanted, that he had abused and threatened her.
It’s still not clear how much of Puzder’s past, if any, Trump knew about before he named him to run the Labor department. The vetting process became especially messy after Trump fired Chris Christie as head of the transition team just days after the election. The president was reportedly prodded by son-in-law Jared Kushner, whose father Christie had sent to jail as U.S. attorney in New Jersey. Christie’s ouster was part of a broader purge that put family members and conservative hardliners linked to Mike Pence and Jeff Sessions in charge of the effort.
— Because the president has no fixed ideology, the people who occupy decision-making jobs in the government matter more than usual. That’s why the turmoil has been especially significant.
— The deputy White House chief of staff didn’t even survive until the end of March. Katie Walsh, who had been Reince Priebus’s deputy at the Republican National Committee, abruptly left her West Wing post the week after the collapse of the president’s health care plan in the House. The administration claimed she was leaving to assist a pro-Trump outside group, even though several loyalists were already helping the effort.
— Boris Epshteyn, who as a special assistant to the president was in charge of managing all TV appearances by White House officials, also didn’t make it until the end of the first quarter. Russian born, he got plugged into Trump World because he was a college buddy of Eric Trump at Georgetown. But Boris lost juice after antagonizing key people at the very networks with which he was supposed to be building bridges. “Earlier this year, Epshteyn threatened to pull all West Wing officials from appearing on Fox News after a tense appearance on anchor Bill Hemmer’s show,” Politico reported shortly before his departure. “Epshteyn also earned a reputation as someone who is combative and sometimes difficult to work with, even when he arrives at studios as a guest of a network. He has offended people in green rooms with comments they have interpreted as racially insensitive and demeaning.” He got a soft landing at Sinclair Broadcast Group, which the administration sees as a friendly media platform.
— Gerrit Lansing gave up his job as the White House’s chief digital adviser after a month because he was unwilling to cut financial ties to a company he held an ownership stake in, Politico reported last week: “The Republican Party’s top digital strategist in 2016 got a nearly $1 million payout from a firm he co-founded that collected online contributions to the party and (Trump) — despite earlier claims that the strategist had severed his ties to the company. … The controversy put White House press secretary Sean Spicer in an awkward spot. As the RNC’s chief strategist, Spicer denied to Politico in mid-2016 that Lansing had any financial stake in Revv. ‘He has zero connection to Revv,’ Spicer said then. ‘He had to sever the ties.’ In fact, Lansing never did. He received a $909,000 payout from the company last year. ‘The statement that was issued last year was based on information provided by Gerrit,’ Spicer (said last week).”
— Others who were poised to get plum jobs in the White House never even got the chance to report for work:
Anthony Scaramucci was named as the head of the Office of Public Liaison and Intergovernmental Affairs, but three weeks later it was taken away from him. The problem reportedly was the sale of his firm, SkyBridge Capital, to a division of HNA Group, a politically connected Chinese conglomerate.
Jason Miller was supposed to be White House communications director until he suddenly announced on Christmas Eve that he wanted to focus on his family instead. Suggestive tweets from the account of A.J. Delgado, an adviser to Trump’s campaign and a member of the transition team, added intrigue and raised questions that were never answered. Miller instead took a job at Teneo Strategy, the firm founded by former Bill Clinton loyalists which Republicans used to frequently attack.
Monica Crowley was going to oversee communications in a senior job on Trump’s National Security Council, but she was felled by a plagiarism scandal the week before Trump took office. In March, she registered with the Justice Department as a foreign agent for Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk.
— The NSC was a hotbed of dysfunction until recently when Flynn’s replacement, H.R. McMaster, finally asserted himself fully. Deputy national security adviser K.T. McFarland, who had been brought on by Flynn, is expected to leave her post soon to become U.S. ambassador to Singapore. McFarland initially resisted but later accepted the reassignment, an administration official told Abby Phillip on April 9. McMaster also removed White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon from the principals committee as part of a shake-up.
Trump’s own pick to be the NSC’s senior director for Western Hemisphere Affairs, Craig Deare, was dismissed in mid-February after word got back to the White House that he’d trashed the president (and Bannon) during an off-the-record event hosted by the Woodrow Wilson Center. Deare had complained to a group of academics that senior national security aides did not have access to the president.
Deare, of course, is not the only Trump appointee to get fired for being insufficiently loyal: A senior adviser to Ben Carson was escorted out of the Housing and Urban Development department headquarters by security after someone completing his background check found a critical op-ed he wrote about Trump last fall for The Hill. Shermichael Singleton, one of Trump’s relatively few African American political appointees, had been planning a cross-country tour for Carson.
— Today is Day 95. Will anyone else be gone before the week is over?
View the post here.