Who Would Work for President Trump?

T here’s a really basic power law in the universe: The more staff you have, the more powerful you are. New York Times columnists have assistants, which makes them more powerful than your humble scribe here who just has spell-check. The president of the United States is the most powerful man in the world because over 2 million people are employed by the executive branch, and he is also the commander of the Armed Forces, which is another 1.3 million people.

Which raises a question: Was Donald Trump ever really the president of the United States? To take command of 2 million people, a new president basically has to hire 5,000 people in a period of a few months. This is doubly true for a Republican who has to deal with a civil service that more naturally inclines to the other side. The State Department is practically out of reach even for popular Republican presidents who are on top of their admin.

Trump could barely keep enough people on staff to have a functioning cabinet and White House. His orders and wishes — withdrawing from Syria, banning transgenderism in the military — were regularly reversed, ignored, or disobeyed by “the White House” weeks after he issued them.

Trump turns against his staff the way a soap-opera character turns against antagonists: loudly and with an eye for ratings. Trump called his former national-security adviser John Bolton a “moron” whom he “used to intimidate” foreign leaders. For his part, Bolton’s memoir of his time in the Trump White House, The Room Where It Happened, portrays Trump as completely unfit for office and as a fool who didn’t know that Finland wasn’t part of Russia.

Tellingly, Bolton argues that the supposed adults in the administration acted treacherously. He charges that figures such as H. R. McMaster, Rex Tillerson, and Secretary of Defense James Mattis “didn’t do nearly enough to establish order, and what they did do was so transparently self-serving and publicly dismissive of many of Trump’s very clear goals (whether worthy or unworthy)” that they earned Trump’s distrust and he saw “conspiracies” around him all the time.

Trump went from speaking paternally about “my generals” to denouncing them: “These were very untalented people and once I realized it, I did not rely on them, I relied on the real generals and admirals within the system.”

Just the titles of Trump-era memoirs shout out “bad boss” — whether it’s from relatively small-fry players (such as Cliff Sims’s Team of Vipers) or from a heavy-hitter (such as former AG Bill Barr’s unforgettable title, One Damn Thing After Another). Even Mike Pence’s straightforward book title, if pronounced wryly, offers a spicy comment: So Help Me God.

A number of groups, such as American Moment and the America First Policy Institute, are trying to solve the problem of staffing a second Trump administration. They are doing what Republicans should always be doing, which is hunting for the second and third layer of political appointees that could faithfully serve and execute for a Republican president.

But it is the top jobs that are going to be hardest to fill. Trump’s first administration burned and churned through most of the Trumpiest staffers and advisers available in the GOP. It is quite clear that anyone who gets on the wrong side of Trump, which was almost everyone by the end, will be subjected to a public lashing from the boss — one that potentially comes with ongoing personal-security concerns.

Trump seems also to have lost the political partnerships he had with his son-in-law Jared Kushner and daughter Ivanka. That may be a positive feature for some conservatives, who loathed their moderating influence. But overall, it increases the chance of Trump’s second administration beginning the way his first one ended: with the president isolated in the White House, taking meetings with marginal figures who come bearing bad advice.

Trump got famous for firing people. But it’s the hiring skill that makes for a successful presidency.