New York Magazine: Trump's scandals are making his administration impossible to staff [View all]

[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.