New York Magazine: Trump's scandals are making his administration impossible to staff

[Botany]

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/05/scandals-are-making-the-white-house-impossible-to-staff.html

Trump did not know that he would have to hire a new staff for all the west wing jobs.


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The Trump administration is falling apart before it even came together. The White House has been infamously slow to fill vacant positions throughout the executive branch, due to the president’s signature combination of ignorance, incompetence, and insecurity.

Trump reportedly went into his post-election meeting with Obama “unaware that the entire presidential staff working in the West Wing had to be replaced.” Among the would-be staffers that his transition team did bother to recruit, several failed to survive into the presidency’s fourth month. And the administration’s attempts to alleviate its staffing crisis have been undermined by the president’s aversion to hiring anyone who ever publicly suggested that making an emotionally volatile reality star our commander-in-chief would be a mistake.

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Who will want to do communications for a president who makes a daily habit of generating a five-alarm public-relations crisis; contradicting the White House’s official strategy for containing that crisis; and then berating his communications team for their incompetence? Who will want to provide national-security advice to a president who can’t be bothered to read a briefing that’s longer than a page; refuses to prepare for high-level diplomatic meetings with foreign powers; shares highly classified information with foreign adversaries on a whim; and then makes you declare his behavior “wholly appropriate?” Who will want to join a team that appears to spend most of its free time either telling employees how miserable they are or how miserably incompetent their co-workers have been?

And with last week’s appointment of a special prosector, working for the Trump White House is no longer merely nightmarish — it’s also, potentially, expensive.

[Vinca]

1. Anyone currently there who has an ounce of common sense will run for their lives.

The best case scenario for some of these people is they leave Trump off their resumes and hope no one checks.

[Botany]

2. They are already jumping ship ...... The #2 person at the dept. of treasury just quit

Nor will it be easy to prevent “filled” positions from emptying up: On Friday, Deputy Treasury Secretary nominee Jim Donovan suddenly realized that taking a White House gig would require him to spend less time with his family.

Donovan is no small fish. One of the many Goldman Sachs veterans to seek a position in the bank’s new public-sector division, Donovan helped hire all of the Treasury Department’s political appointees, and was expected to be a central player in crafting the administration’s tax-reform policy.

[mercuryblues]

3. I read an article

posted on here the other day that made a good point. By not filling those positions, trump has screwed himself. He bigly decreased the amount of people willing to stand up for him.

Without leadership in many dept. there is chaos. He fires people at will so employees are on edge about their jobs. Especially if Obama hired them. He blames them for his mismanagement and incompetence. When there is chaos and no job security people tend to start backstabbing the root cause.

By not filling those positions trump thinks he is containing the leaks. In reality he is feeding into them.

[jberryhill]

4. And, any prospective employee just saw how he treats people he's fired

Trump does not understand that people were willing to sign up for The Apprentice to be paid as entertainers and for television exposure.

He does not understand there is not a deep well of competent professionals who are motivated by "stardom" to put up with that kind of abuse.

[3catwoman3]

5. The first sentence of the second paragraph...

...could be a lot shorter.

Instead of "Trump reportedly went into his post-election meeting with Obama unaware that the entire presidential staff working in the West Wing had to be replaced”, it could just be "Trump went into his post-election meeting with Obama unaware."

[kairos12]

6. Anyone who signs up now needs a second mortgage to cover their lawyer expenses.

[dalton99a]

7. +1

[Jim Lane]

8. This is one reason I'm unenthusiastic about impeachment.

Oust Trump and, within a few months, President Pence will have hard-core right-wing zealots in all those posts. They will be busily making mischief. I prefer incompetence, disorganization, and chaos, as opposed to a carefully considered undermining of everything progressives have fought for.