The following article by Jeff Shesol was posted on the New Yorker website December 15, 2017:
This degree of churn is “off the charts,” according to Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who has spent years tracking White House turnover rates. Next month, Tenpas will release her findings about Trump’s first year in office. The data—some of which she shared with me this week—is striking: even if every one of Trump’s senior aides stays put until January 20th, the anniversary of his Inauguration, his first-year turnover rate among senior staff—some sixty positions in total—will reach or exceed thirty-three per cent. Turnover, as Tenpas defines it, includes resignations, firings, and shifts of position within the White House. Trump’s first-year turnover rate will be three times higher than both Barack Obama’s (nine per cent) and Bill Clinton’s (eleven per cent) and double Ronald Reagan’s (seventeen per cent), which is as far back as Tenpas’s analysis goes. And this, almost certainly, is just the beginning. Every one of the past five Presidencies saw a massive jump in departures during its second year: typically, the rate more than doubles as staff burnout intensifies, legislative initiatives bog down in Congress, and midterm elections, almost inevitably, deal a setback to the President’s party.
Turnover isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Trump traded up when he hired John Kelly to replace the ineffectual Priebus as chief of staff and H. R. McMaster to succeed Flynn at the helm of the National Security Council. But the coming and going of key players has a cost. When senior staff members leave, institutional knowledge leaves with them. Valuable relationships—with members of Congress, state officials, or interest groups—can be weakened or lost. Junior staff members are often left without a sponsor, a portfolio, or clear direction. During his campaign, Trump often promised to run the White House like a business, but few C.E.O.s would accept, or survive, a level of staff attrition as high as this President’s.
Replacing senior aides is never easy; finding men and women with the right mix of qualifications and connections, and who have personal chemistry with the President, is a challenge for any White House. But for Trump’s it is likely to be even harder. If Republican leaders in Congress succeed in getting their tax bill over the finish line this month, it will be Trump’s first legislative achievement of note as President; much of the rest of his agenda has been stalled. His political standing on Capitol Hill took another hit this week when Doug Jones, a Democrat, defeated the Trump-endorsed Republican Roy Moore in the special Senate election in Alabama. And the special counsel’s investigation into links between Trump’s Presidential campaign and the Russian government continues to loom over everything that Trump and his team might try to accomplish. New recruits are “not jumping onto a bandwagon,” Tenpas told me. “They’re jumping onto something that’s chugging up a hill.”
The compounding trouble for Trump is that he needs his staff even more than any other modern President has. Trump entered office with no government experience, and, a year into his term, he seems just as ignorant and incurious as ever—just as hungry for all the made-up nonsense he can consume, despite the efforts of staff members like Kelly to regulate his diet of misinformation. For all their obvious failings, Trump’s senior advisers remain, in government parlance, “essential personnel.” Yet he will, almost certainly, continue to drive many of them to distraction—and, ultimately, drive them out. As Bradley H. Patterson, Jr.—who served under Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford—has written, “A White House is organized, and behaves, exactly as the president prescribes it.”
Jeff Shesol, a former speechwriter for President Clinton, is the author of “Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court” and is a partner at West Wing Writers.
View the post here.