Who Exactly Is Going to Serve in a Second-Term Trump Administration?

W ho’s up for four more years of Donald Trump? Probably 65 million voters or more, of course. And they’ll get to have their full say on it shortly. But more to the point, who is up to serve in the next four years of a Donald Trump administration?

Almost all the debate about whether we ought to have four more years of Donald Trump has focused on the president’s policies or his character. But, as the clock runs out on the election, I find that my biggest concern about a second term centers on his inability to hire and keep a competent staff.

To be fair, I was just as concerned about this four years ago. I wrote then:

Without the full support of his party, Trump’s attempts to even assemble a full Cabinet and make the thousands of political appointments that are a necessary part of taking possession of the executive branch would be dogged almost immediately by reports of rank amateurism, corruption, and malice. As the reports mounted, fewer and fewer Republicans of substance would find themselves willing to join what already looks like a failing administration.

Given Trump’s somewhat vengeful personality, I argued at the time that people working in the administration could expect to part on bad terms. And they have. To say the least, this style of management has depleted Trump’s ability to “hire the best people.”

Take Jeff Sessions, for instance. The former senator from Alabama was one of Trump’s earliest supporters in the Republican party. He was a man with a reputation as a stalwart and serious conservative, a man who didn’t just lend his vote to the GOP base, but his heart and mind too. He was also the most serious immigration restrictionist in the Republican Senate, and he would eventually bequeath to Trump his top adviser on the issue, Stephen Miller. Sessions, of course, became attorney general. Yet he was fired one day after the midterm elections because Trump decided to make him the fall-guy for the investigation that would eventually lead to Trump’s impeachment. Earlier this year, Trump endorsed Sessions’ Senate primary opponent in Alabama, Tommy Tuberville, who poses as a populist, but is committed to the pre-Trump orthodoxy of the party. Tuberville won the primary, and Sessions thus ended his political career having served Trump faithfully, but despised and avoided by his former supporters.

Trump’s entire first term has been bedeviled by his inability to hire staff that agree with his vision. This mismatch was particularly acute on foreign policy. He lost his first national security adviser, General Mike Flynn, to an investigation. He lost his second, General H.R. McMaster, after they disagreed over whether to send more troops to Afghanistan. Then he lost his third, John Bolton, over disagreements on several fronts, but most notably Iran. Bolton wrote a book after leaving the administration that made Trump look foolish and outmatched by America’s adversaries. Dan Coats left as director of National Intelligence last summer. Trump lost Defense Secretary General James Mattis over Trump’s decision to remove troops from Syria — a removal that ended up never happening. Syria also likely cost him his first secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, who gave his first major speech in 2017 outlining several ambitious war aims for the conflict and yet failed to commit much in the way of resources for achieving them.

Trump has had the highest staff turnover of any modern president. He goes for long stretches with unconfirmed Cabinet members, such as acting Homeland Security secretary Chad Wolf.  The State Department, which is uniquely resistant to the changes of most administrations, has become frightfully depleted, particularly at the deputy- and under-secretary level. There is a danger in this. It means potentially going into international events, conferences, summits, or negotiations without the best research on hand, or without the benefit of having heard the sometimes-conflicting visions of informed staffers who disagree with each other productively. The function of the presidency itself is degraded.

Trump was always going to have trouble staffing up because he ran against the recent past of the Republican party. Many potential staffers and appointees ruled themselves out preemptively by opposing him so forcefully in 2016. But Trump’s style of management has also alienated people. You can take a job in the Trump administration, as Anthony Scaramucci once did, and lose it ten days later. Imagine signing that lease in Washington, D.C., and finding out that you’re paying for eleven months and 21 days more than you needed.

Trump is widely rumored to be interested in having the bombastic Fox News TV personality Jeanine Pirro take a significant role in the Justice Department — perhaps even to head it as attorney general. This would be a less than propitious development, to my mind.

The one job we know would be filled come January is chief Twitter personality. But Trump’s lack of focus on major initiatives for his second term and his habit of making enemies of his staff could lead to serious dysfunction. And this dysfunction could turn a crisis — particularly a foreign-policy crisis — into a genuine national setback.