CHAPTER EIGHT

When Caregivers Give Up

Staffing the Toddler in Chief

Without strong guidance, a very active child’s energy can easily turn toward aggressive or destructive behavior. To avoid this, you need to establish clear and logical rules and enforce them consistently.

American Academy of Pediatrics, Caring for Your Baby and Young Child

Inside the White House, aides have grown calloused to the chaos. That the president managed to turn a simple question over a botched military operation into a week-long feud with a grieving military family, all while sullying his chief of staff’s public image, didn’t register as particularly eventful given the preceding nine months of drama.

Asawin Suebsaeng and Lachlan Markay, “Donald Trump Feels Zero Remorse over How the Week Went, Friends and Allies Say,” Daily Beast, October 20, 2017

Every parent knows that taking care of toddlers can be exhausting. They are more mobile than babies and therefore more capable of putting themselves into peril. Toddlers require constant supervision. All the traits discussed in this book—poor impulse control, fits of temper, short attention spans, oppositional behavior, a profound lack of knowledge about how the world works—make toddlers particularly difficult to monitor in public. It is not surprising that parents of toddlers are often frazzled and overtired, particularly when shepherding them through air travel. Same with caregivers. Unsurprisingly, the low pay of many parts of the childcare sector leads to high rates of staff turnover.1

Compared to childcare service providers, White House staffers earn a higher salary, command greater respect, exercise more power, and participate in making history. The same logic holds with even greater force for cabinet secretaries. Traditionally, those who serve in the high ranks of an administration can expect a more rewarding future career track replete with honors, awards, and lucrative speaking engagements.2 One would therefore expect there to be a bevy of Republicans eager to work for the 45th President. President Trump certainly assumed this during the campaign, pledging, “I’m going to surround myself only with the best and most serious people.”3

And yet the opposite has been the case. Compared to previous administrations, the Trump White House has been much slower to fill presidential appointments across the federal government. According to the Partnership for Public Service, in its first seven months the Trump administration’s process to fill presidential appointments was the slowest in 40 years. Of the 575 key policymaking positions he needed to fill, he’d secured Senate approval for only 50; Obama, in his first seven months as President, had confirmed more than four times as many.4 Three years into Trump’s presidency, the data show that his administration has taken far longer to announce nominees than his immediate predecessor. The poor quality of his choices has also lengthened the vetting process.5

Equally striking has been the high degree of turnover across the upper ranks of the administration. The Trump administration had the highest first-year staff turnover in 40 years.6 By the end of his third year as President, Donald Trump was on his third Chief of Staff, fourth National Security Advisor, and sixth Communications Director. At one point in early 2019, Trump had five acting Cabinet Secretaries, and Mick Mulvaney was serving concurrently as the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and Acting White House Chief of Staff. According to the New York Times, the Trump staff had experienced the highest turnover rate of 21 key White House and cabinet positions during the post–Cold War era. In the first 14 months of the Clinton administration, only three of those positions turned over. In the Obama administration, it was only two; with the George W. Bush administration, only one. In contrast, nine of these positions turned over at least once during the Trump administration during the same time period.7

“It’s exhausting,” says a midlevel aide. “Just when you think the pace is unsustainable, it accelerates. The moment it gets quiet is when the next crisis happens.”. . . .

Staffers are frustrated by leaks about staff turmoil coming from Trump’s extended circle of allies. But Trump has so far resisted attempts to impose order, insisting on long stretches of unstructured time to watch television and call allies.

Michael Scherer and Alex Altman, “Trump’s Loyalty Test,” Time, May 17, 2017

West Wing aides privately admit they have no earthly idea what Trump will do about anything—whether it be guns, immigration, their own careers, or the fate of Chief of Staff John Kelly. . . .

Some aides feel the place is unraveling, that they can’t trust their colleagues, that they don’t know what’s going on, that there’s no path upward.

Jonathan Swan and Mike Allen, “In Trumpworld, Every Day Is Yesterday,” Axios, February 23, 2018

Trump’s first hires were a mixed bag at best. Some of his cabinet picks, such as Secretary of Defense James Mattis, Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, would have been predictable choices for any GOP administration. Many of the key figures selected in the first few years, however, had skeletons in their closet. This is best exemplified by White House Staff Secretary Rob Porter. By all accounts he did a competent job at handling Trump’s paper flow and running the White House policy process on trade, but he also was denied a permanent security clearance because of his history of spousal abuse.8 The less said about the qualifications of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, the better.

The shoddy caliber of those who worked for the Trump administration is demonstrated by how quickly their service ended. Trump fired his first Chief of Staff and first Secretary of State by tweet. Multiple cabinet officials, including Trump’s first Secretary of Health and Human Services, EPA Administrator, Interior Secretary, Secretary of Labor, and Secretary of Veteran Affairs departed under clouds of scandal. Other Trump officials, including his first National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, pleaded guilty to crimes. Even on small matters, such as correct spelling in press releases, the Trump White House has fallen short.9 It is therefore unsurprising that in an August 2018 Monmouth poll just 30 percent of respondents believed that Trump had hired the best people, whereas 58 percent did not. Only 19 percent of respondents expressed great confidence in the way that White House advisors and staff handled their jobs.10 Trump confidant Chris Christie, who ran Trump’s transition planning during the 2016 campaign, characterized Trump’s staff as a “revolving door of deeply flawed individuals—amateurs, grifters, weaklings, convicted and unconvicted felons—who were hustled into jobs they were never suited for, sometimes seemingly without so much as a background check via Google or Wikipedia.”11

There are several possible explanations for why the Trump administration is such a negative outlier in terms of quality. It would be safe to describe the Trump team’s personnel management as poor. From the moment Trump fired Chris Christie as his transition director the day after his election victory, his administration found itself woefully behind schedule on staffing.12 The new transition team did a horrendous job of vetting, leading to many reversals and resignations after the press uncovered a nominee’s past malfeasance.13 Trump went so far as to claim that press coverage helped the administration in its vetting.14

Another problem—Trump’s ideology and temperament was off-putting to many GOP stalwarts. Trump’s brand of populist nationalism and “America First” slogan was somewhat at odds with longstanding Republican positions in support for balanced budgets, freer trade and an internationalist foreign policy. It was sufficiently polarizing that many Republican wonks eschewed working for him. This was particularly true in the foreign policy realm. During the 2016 campaign, GOP foreign policy experts signed multiple letters stressing Donald Trump’s unfitness for higher office.15 Secretary of State Rex Tillerson later told Congress that the Trump White House refused to even consider hiring any of the signatories to these petitions.16 Because these names constituted a significant fraction of the GOP’s bench strength in foreign policy and national security, it became that much more difficult to find appointees. The State Department was very slow in announcing political appointments; when Trump fired Tillerson in February 2018, only two of the top ten State Department political positions were occupied by a political appointee.17

In the past two months, President Donald Trump has repeatedly surprised many of his own closest advisers with the timing or substance of major public pronouncements: a potential troop withdrawal from Syria, steep new tariffs on key imports and the possibility of rejoining the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement.

This week, it happened again, with U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley—a Cabinet member—left dangling after Trump decided not to proceed with new Russia sanctions she’d already mentioned on national television.

These episodes have often left Trump’s staff scrambling to get more information, moderate the president’s position or change his mind altogether.

While people close to the president say Trump has always been mercurial, some of the president’s allies attribute the recent spate of public disconnects to the departure of loyal aides who were skilled at translating his impulses into legible stances on key issues—and, perhaps more importantly, at keeping all the relevant White House and agency staffers in the loop on big decisions.

“There’s nobody there that can say to him, ‘Mr. President, you can’t do that,’” said one former White House official.

Andrew Restuccia and Nancy Cook, “Trump Gets Lost in Translation amid West Wing Shuffle,” Politico, April 20, 2018

For the past 18 months, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and other top national security officials have mostly kept their heads down in public as they’ve tried to quietly counsel President Trump. But this low-key consultation process seems to be weakening, as a headstrong president becomes increasingly insistent about his judgment.

The Helsinki summit showed that Trump thinks he’s his own best foreign policy adviser. The formal interagency process that traditionally surrounds such big events all but disappeared for the U.S.-Russia encounter, with no full National Security Council meetings to prepare for Helsinki and none last week to discuss its results.

“I don’t think there is an interagency process now,” cautioned one prominent Republican foreign policy expert. “Trump glories in not listening to advisers. He trusts his instincts, as uninformed as they sometimes are.”

David Ignatius, “Trump Can’t Win at Foreign Policy the Way He Wins at Golf,” Washington Post, July 24, 2018

Over time, the toxic nature of Trump’s presidency also complicated this administration’s ability to attract talented staffers. With few exceptions, beleaguered Trump staffers contemplating their exit from government service did not find themselves overwhelmed with lucrative private-sector job opportunities.18 The lack of promising jobs after serving in the Trump administration deterred many potential applicants. According to BuzzFeed, “Keeping their future career prospects in mind is also one of the reasons why Republicans are turning down opportunities to work in the administration.”19

There is one other reason, however, why the 45th President has had such difficulties hiring the best people. Taking care of an ordinary toddler is hard work. Taking care of the Toddler in Chief is next to impossible. Reince Priebus, Trump’s first Chief of Staff, explained that he agreed to the job to provide “a sane voice in the Oval Office”: “There has to be a reasonable person in the room with him.”20 Imagine trying to rein in the Toddler in Chief nonstop, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That would exhaust even the best possible staffers, and the GOP was not sending its best to work for Trump.

Mr. Trump appeared heedless of his staff, unconcerned about Washington decorum, or the latest stock market dive, and confident of his instincts. He seemed determined to set the agenda himself, even if that agenda looked like a White House in disarray.

Inside the West Wing, aides described an atmosphere of bewildered resignation as they grappled with the all-too-familiar task of predicting and reacting in real time to Mr. Trump’s shifting moods.

Mark Landler and Julie Hirschfield Davis, “After Another Week of Chaos, Trump Repairs to Palm Beach. No One Knows What Comes Next.” New York Times, March 23, 2018

On some level, White House aides have simply reconciled themselves to the reality that they have little to no control over Trump’s actions and instead remain prepared to explain them away or clean them up.

“Trump is truly serving as his own chief of staff, communications director, and policy maven,” said a Republican strategist in frequent touch with the White House. “He’s singing the Frank Sinatra song, ‘I’ll do it my way.’”

Ashley Parker, Seung Min Kim, and Philip Rucker, “Trump Chooses Impulse over Strategy as Crises Mount,” Washington Post, April 12, 2018

Former White House staffers, demanding anonymity to avoid burning bridges to the administration, expressed relief that they no longer worked for Trump, recalling other tough moments in his tumultuous presidency.

“You just never knew what he was going to do, but usually it would make things worse,” said one former aide.

Noah Bierman and Eli Stokols, “Trump’s ‘Everybody Does It’ View of Politics Comes to Color His Conduct, and That of His Aides,” Los Angeles Times, August 22, 2018

Inside the West Wing, a sense of numbness and dread has set in among senior advisers as they gird for what Trump will do next. “It’s a return to the abyss,” said one former official who’s in frequent contact with the White House. “This is back to being a one-man show, and everyone is on the outside looking in.”

Gabriel Sherman, “‘Trump Is Nuts. This Time Really Feels Different’: Trump Rejects ‘War Council’ Intervention, Goes It Alone.” Vanity Fair, August 27, 2018

Less than two years into his term, the New York Times reported that “burned-out aides are eyeing the exits, as the mood in the White House is one of numbness and resignation that the President is growing only more emboldened to act on instinct alone.”21 Less than a year after John Kelly had been named Chief of Staff, he told visiting senators that the White House was “a miserable place to work.”22 The President had difficulties finding a replacement for Kelly. Trump’s first choice, Nick Ayers, declined the offer and instead moved his family out of Washington, DC.

Unlike other toddlers, Trump will never actually mature. Also unlike other toddlers, Donald Trump has all of the constitutional and political prerogatives invested in the presidency. Crudely put, he has the power to say no to his caregivers. Without the disciplinary authority that parents and caregivers possess, White House staffers face limited options in keeping the Toddler in Chief out of trouble.23 Over the span of Trump’s first term, his staff have tried to use a variety of coping mechanisms. Some of them, such as encouraging the President’s special interests, met with limited success. Most of the strategies, however, have failed and failed badly.

Morale inside the White House, never high to begin with, has turned particularly bleak, according to interviews with 10 former West Wing officials and Republicans close to the president. The issue is that many see Trump himself as the problem. “Trump is hated by everyone inside the White House,” a former West Wing official told me. His shambolic management style, paranoia, and pattern of blaming staff for problems of his own making have left senior White House officials burned out and resentful, sources said. “It’s total misery. People feel trapped,” a former official said. “Trump always needs someone to blame,” a second former official said. Sources said the leak of Trump’s private schedules to Axios—which revealed how little work Trump actually does—was a signal of how disaffected his staff has become.

Gabriel Sherman, “‘Trump Is Hated by Everyone Inside the White House’: The State of the Union Left Trump Stoked—But Some of His Staff Are Miserable,” Vanity Fair, February 8, 2019

Some current White House officials say they are exhausted amid the constant fighting and lack the energy to constrain a willful president bent on having his way. . . . A White House official described a “Who cares?” attitude creeping through the building under Mulvaney’s hands-off management style.

Daniel Lippman, “Trump Veterans See a Presidency Veering off the Rails,” Politico, October 19, 2019

Over time, Mr. Trump bridled and demanded the unstructured time he had so valued as an executive at Trump Tower. Mr. Priebus, who initially outsourced the details of Oval Office scheduling and paper flow to a deputy, has now taken over those tasks himself. He has reduced the pace of public events and, like a Montessori teacher, modulates structured work time with the slack periods Mr. Trump craves.

Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman, “Second Chance for ‘Obamacare’ Repeal. And for Reince Priebus.” New York Times, May 5, 2017

The first and easiest staff response to the Toddler in Chief was simple accommodation to minor behavioral issues. For example, Trump likes to rip any piece of paper to shreds once he’s done with it. That habit, however, is a violation of the Presidential Records Act, a law that requires all presidential documents to be preserved. Trump’s staff failed to stop him from doing it. Instead, they assigned an entire department of records management analysts dedicated to taping Trump’s papers back together.24 This was not the best allocation of the federal government’s human resources, but it likely saved the White House staff some agita.

There were other instances in which, right from his inauguration, Trump’s senior staff would accommodate rather than constrain him. According to Politico’s Nahal Toosi, in some instances key staffers accepted and even dispersed what White House Counselor Kellyanne Conway called “alternative facts”:

In the days ahead of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s first visit to the White House during the Trump presidency, in March 2017, NSC [National Security Council] career staffers were told the president wanted to tell Merkel that other NATO countries owed the US money. Could they prepare a report on the topic? Career NSC staffers got to work and returned with the basics: that NATO countries don’t owe the United States money because that’s not how the military alliance works; that every NATO country is supposed to spend at least 2 percent of its GDP on defense, and that while many had fallen short of that commitment, others met it or were on track to do so. In short, no one ‘owed’ the United States anything.

NSC career staffers presented this information to a senior administration official in the West Wing. According to one of them, the official replied: “The president is going to say it anyway, so we need to help him. I mean, it’s not a legal document.”25

Trump staffers also attempted to placate the President through overindulgence. His subordinates took care to reassure the Toddler in Chief that he was doing a super-awesome job as President. In one notorious June 2017 example, senior Trump administration officials gathered for their first full cabinet meeting. While television cameras filmed them, cabinet members took turns in extoling the President for his leadership and thanking Trump for the opportunity to serve him. The New York Times explained that “the show of support for the President was in keeping with an intense effort by the White House to boost Mr. Trump’s mood” in the face of lackluster poll numbers.26 The strategy of fulsome praise continued with a steady drumbeat of White House press releases overflowing with cabinet members bestowing flattery on Trump, a tactic that most prior administrations had not used.27 Allied leaders also attempted this gambit on several occasions during Trump’s first year as President.28

Another indulgence strategy was to provide Trump with folders containing nothing but favorable press coverage. Starting in his first few months in office, Trump was given a folder twice a day “filled with screenshots of positive cable news chyrons, admiring tweets, transcripts of fawning TV interviews, praise-filled news stories, and sometimes just pictures of Trump on TV looking powerful,” according to one account.29 When there was an insufficient number of positive headlines, White House officials would ask the Republican National Committee for flattering photos of the President. Staffers would vie with each other for opportunity to deliver the folder to Trump, because it put him in a better mood. One former RNC official justified the practice by saying, “Maybe it’s good for the country that the President is in a good mood in the morning.”30 This practice was fully institutionalized by 2018.31

The staff’s habit of trying to feed him good news extended to polling data. According to Politico, “Aides in the White House often show Trump polls designed to make him feel good. . . . Usually they’re the ones that focus just on voters who cast ballots for him in 2016 or are potential Trump supporters.”32 As the midterm elections approached, aides scheduled political rallies to boost Trump’s mood.33

The indulgence strategy did not cause the President to stop acting like a toddler. Too many staffers had unrestricted access to the President, making it easy for them to distract or spin up the Toddler in Chief. Similarly, the tactic of providing the President with slanted or upbeat news stories had its downsides. One reason the President was slow to react during the family separation crisis on the southern border in June 2018 was that the public photos of crying children being separated from their families were not in keeping with the more positive photos Trump’s aides showed him, which depicted the detained children smiling, playing video games, and exercising outdoors.34 In trying to keep the President’s spirits up, the Toddler in Chief’s staff failed to warn him about brewing scandals until they received widespread media exposure.

None of the advice seemed to have any lasting effect on a president who views acting on his own impulses as a virtue. And these days, the staff has basically stopped trying: There is no character inhabiting the West Wing who is dispatched to counsel the president when he aims the powerful weapon of his Twitter feed at himself. . . .

Some Republicans have expressed concern that chief of staff John Kelly doesn’t try to control the president’s Twitter feed, which often distracts from enacting his legislative agenda. “Someone, I read the other day, said we all just react to the tweets,” Kelly told reporters traveling with the president in Vietnam last week. “We don’t. I don’t. I don’t allow the staff to. Believe it or not, I do not follow the tweets.”

Annie Karni, “Aides Give Up on Trying to Control Trump’s Tweets,” Politico, November 17, 2017

Inside the White House, aides over the past week have described an air of anxiety and volatility—with an uncontrollable commander in chief at its center.

These are the darkest days in at least half a year, they say, and they worry just how much further President Trump and his administration may plunge into unrest and malaise before they start to recover. As one official put it: ‘We haven’t bottomed out.’. . . .

Trump is testing the patience of his own staff, some of whom think he is not listening to their advice. White House counsel Donald McGahn and national economic council director Gary Cohn have been especially frustrated, according to other advisers.

The situation seems to be grating as well on White House chief of staff John F. Kelly, who had been on the ropes over his handling of domestic-abuse allegations against former staff secretary Rob Porter but who now appears on firmer footing. Talking last week about his move from being homeland security secretary to the West Wing, Kelly quipped, “God punished me.”

Philip Rucker, Ashley Parker, and Josh Dawsey, “‘Pure Madness’: Dark Days inside the White House as Trump Shocks and Rages,” Washington Post, March 3, 2018

The brief rise and long descent of John Kelly’s time as White House Chief of Staff perfectly encapsulates the arc of staffers who attempted to discipline Trump into not acting like a toddler. The fact that Trump wanted the former Marine general in the first place suggests that the President was aware on some level that he needed a more structured environment. When Kelly first came on board, press coverage stressed his desire to impose military discipline in the White House. Kelly ensured that all calls to and from the President went through the White House switchboard, so he could sign off on them. He acted as a veto point for any piece of information that could reach the Resolute Desk. He required that all staff members, including Trump’s children, go through him to reach the President.35 The New York Times reported that Kelly was “intent on cosseting Mr. Trump with bureaucratic competence and forcing staff members to keep to their lanes.”36 In that very same story, however, there were hints at the limits of Kelly’s ability to constructively mold Trump’s environment: “[Kelly] has told his new employees that he was hired to manage the staff, not the President. He will not try to change Mr. Trump’s Twitter or TV-watching habits. . . . He has privately acknowledged that he cannot control the President and that his authority would be undermined if he tried and failed.”37

On one level, former staffers acknowledge that ignoring the Twitter feed, however impossible that may be, might just save Kelly a losing battle. Since the campaign, aides have tried—and failed—to control the president’s use of Twitter. Trump is familiar with the criticisms—he knows that his retweets and his commentary are “not presidential,” he will tell aides, pre-empting the criticism he knows is coming. “The most success anyone has had, through numerous angles and schemes, has been to stop it momentarily, or to slow things down,” said one former aide of Trump’s tweets. “But it’s just not possible to control it.”

Annie Karni, “John Kelly’s Losing Battle with Trump’s Twitter Feed,” Politico, November 29, 2017

For months, aides were mostly able to redirect a neophyte president with warnings about the consequences of his actions, and mostly control his public behavior. . . .

Worried aides. . . . view the weekend’s attacks on Mr. Mueller and the F.B.I. as a particularly disturbing taste of what they believe could come. They say privately that Mr. Trump does not understand the job the way he believes he does, and that they fear he will become even less inclined to take advice.

Maggie Haberman, “Newly Emboldened, Trump Says What He Really Feels,” New York Times, March 18, 2018

Kelly’s efforts to impose constraints on Trump had some initial success—and by initial, I mean a month at most. Less than three weeks after Kelly became Chief of Staff, Trump’s “both sides” comments about Charlottesville highlighted the limits of his influence. One unofficial White House advisor explained to the Washington Post: “The Kelly era was a bright, shining interlude between failed attempts to right the Trump presidency and it has now come to a close after a short but glorious run. . . . Like all people who work for the president, he has since experienced the limits of the president’s promises to cooperate in order to ensure the success of the enterprise.”38 Press reports soon appeared about Trump chafing at Kelly’s restrictions.39 By September 2017, whatever ability Kelly had to influence Trump’s messaging had collapsed completely. He was unable to restrain the President from attacking NFL players in one breath and Kim Jong Un the next.40

Trump would face [a] crisis with deep demoralization and discord within his ranks, backed by advisers who consider him erratic, a national security adviser (H. R. McMaster) and economic adviser (Gary Cohn) who are both rumored to be eyeing the exits or being pushed that way by others, and a White House chief of staff in John Kelly, whose relationship with Trump is being frayed to near the breaking point.

All three of these men were once described as steadying forces for a president who likes to wing it on instinct. But all three are described by administration officials as wondering whether Trump is impervious to discipline.

John F. Harris and Andrew Restuccia, “Demoralized West Wing Stokes Fears over Trump’s Capacity to Handle a Crisis,” Politico, March 2, 2018

Mr. Kelly himself is also on thin ice, according to officials in the White House. He is said to have angered the president by privately saying “no” to the boss too often.

Michael D. Shear and Maggie Haberman, “‘There Will Always Be Change,’ Trump Says as More Personnel Shake-Ups Loom,” New York Times, March 15, 2018

After more than 14 months in office, Trump is reshaping his administration, seeking people more likely to fall in line with his policies and tolerate his moods. The factionalism that defined the early days of his tenure has faded and he has lost some of the close aides who could manage his volatile impulses. To some, the White House is increasing taking on the feel of a squad of cheerleaders more than a team of rivals. . . .

The president believes that his recent decisions on tariffs and North Korea have breathed new life into his administration, and he is eager to take more “bold steps” that make his own mark. He has told confidants he wants to rid himself of staffers who hold him back. . . .

Trump has expressed frustration with aides [who] he believes try to “manage” him according to several current and former White House officials—and has grown tired of efforts by his staff to stall controversial actions they disagree with. Trump, the officials said, wants a lively discussion—he often talks about enjoying conflict among his aides—but has grown irritated that some try to undermine his decisions.

Zeke Miller, Jonathan Lemire, and Catherine Lucey, “Trump Jokes ‘Who’s Next?’ as Tumult Engulfs His White House,” Associated Press, March 16, 2018

Another source of tension was Trump’s demand for unstructured time. During the first few months of Trump’s presidency, early morning and breakfast meetings were on the schedule. The Toddler in Chief soon rebelled, however. When Kelly came on, he accommodated the President by instituting “Executive Time,” long blocks of unscheduled time during which the 45th President could watch television, tweet, and call friends and cronies. According to White House schedules, on most days Trump would not arrive at the Oval Office until 11:00 a.m. His day would end at 6 p.m., earlier than for most of his predecessors. Subsequent staff efforts to cut back Executive Time and add more official meetings failed; one staffer acknowledged in June 2018 that “there’s no going back.”41

Unstructured playtime can be good for toddlers, but too much of it can be problematic—particularly if so much of the free time is devoted to watching television. The same appears to be true with Trump. According to Axios’s Jonathan Swan, “Aides say Trump is always doing something—he’s a whirl of activity and some aides wish he would sleep more—but his time in the residence is unstructured and undisciplined.”42 Trump associates have acknowledged that this unstructured time encourages all of Trump’s worst toddler instincts. Barry Bennett, a 2016 Trump campaign advisor, told the Los Angeles Times that “you’ve got to give him suggestions because you’ve got to fill the vacuum.”43 Kelly attempted to do that with the creation of “Policy Time”—daily meetings in which advisors debated competing views over a specific issue, with Trump presiding.44

Those close to the president say that Trump has increasingly expressed fatigue at Kelly’s attempts to shackle him and that while Trump is not ready to fire Kelly, he has begun gradually freezing out his top aide.

Trump recently told one confidant that he was “tired of being told no” by Kelly and has instead chosen to simply not tell Kelly things at all.

Jonathan Lemire and Catherine Lucey, “Inside a White House in Tumult, John Kelly’s Clout Dwindles,” Associated Press, April 5, 2018

As the fall of 2017 progressed, it seemed clear that Trump’s staffers had decided not to fight Trump on the small examples of toddler behavior. The Atlantic’s David Graham noted, “As every parent knows, sometimes you just have to give in—let the kid have a victory on something less significant. Aides can try to prevent war with North Korea, and they can seek compromise on the Iran deal, and they can quietly kill the demand for more nukes, but they’ve got to let the president have his way on occasion. When Trump demands ‘goddamned steam’ to power catapults on aircraft carriers, aides shrug and let it go.”45 Trump staffers rationalized their service in the administration by arguing that they were preventing Trump’s even crazier ideas from being implemented.46

One former senior administration official said the president’s advisers tried the best they could to manage the president’s discussions with world leaders, “but once he’s up in the residence, we never know who he’s speaking to.”

At the start of his presidency, Mr. Trump’s freewheeling conversations with world leaders prompted consternation among the president’s senior aides, who took steps to keep him from making inappropriate comments or divulging sensitive information.

On more than one occasion, John Kelly, the White House’s then-chief of staff, who was often in the room during calls with world leaders, briefly muted the line so he could caution Mr. Trump against continuing to talk about sensitive subjects, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. The small group of advisers in the room for the calls would also often pass the president notes offering guidance, the person said.

Vivian Salama, “Embarrassing Leaks Led to Clampdown on Trump’s Phone Records,” Wall Street Journal, September 28, 2019

Trump continued to rebel against Kelly’s strictures in a variety of ways. As noted in chapter 7, his simplest gambit was to go to Mar-a-Lago. As the Washington Post reported in November 2017, “Trump feels especially liberated when he is at Mar-a-Lago. . . . There, Trump enjoys a less structured and disciplined environment than at the White House, where Kelly attempts to tightly control whom the President sees and what information he receives.”47 Indeed, Trump feels so relaxed at Mar-a-Lago that he has consented to impromptu interviews while there, flustering his staff.48

The President also took actions in the White House to bypass Kelly’s paternalistic structures. He called aides to his residence in the evening and gave them assignments, along with instructions to keep them a secret from the Chief of Staff. Trump would also bypass the normal scheduling of White House phone calls so that he could talk to outside confidants without Kelly’s knowledge.49 After Kelly fumbled questions about his knowledge of White House Staff Secretary Rob Porter’s history of domestic abuse, his ability to constrain Trump’s toddler traits was weakened further.50

Kelly has done away with “meeting crashers,” the West Wing aides who showed up for meetings uninvited, according to a White House aide, but he has not been able to curb Trump’s practice of adding and subtracting advisers to meetings throughout the day or of turning scheduled gatherings into freewheeling discussions of subjects that suit his interests—including those suggested to him by his coterie of outside advisers, including Fox News host Sean Hannity.

“He comes down for the day, and whatever he saw on ‘Fox and Friends,’ he schedules meetings based on that,” said one former White House official. “If it’s Iran, it’s ‘Get John Bolton down here!’ . . . If he’s seen something on TV or [was] talking to Hannity the night before, he’s got lots of flexibility to do whatever he wants to do.”

Eliana Johnson, “How John Kelly Became ‘Chief in Name Only,’” Politico, July 29, 2018

By March 2018, most of Kelly’s strictures had been eviscerated. An exodus of Trump staffers began, led by Gary Cohn, H. R. McMaster, and Hope Hicks. Trump told friends that he wanted to be less reliant on his staff, because he believed they gave him bad advice.51 Like any toddler free from adult supervision, Trump reveled in his newfound liberty, announcing tariffs and summits in a manner that surprised even his closest aides. He hired John Bolton as his third National Security Advisor against John Kelly’s recommendation.52 As one account put it, Trump was “acting as his own chief of staff, chief strategist, cable news producer, and communications director all rolled into one.” Trump confidants described him as “‘giddy’—a man who has finally fully indulged his itch to break free of John Kelly’s restraints.”53 At the end of March 2018, Trump confidants were telling reporters: “This is now a president a little bit alone, isolated and without any moderating influences—and, if anything, a president who is being encouraged and goaded on by people around him. It really is a president unhinged.”54

From the spring of 2018 onward, the press coverage suggests that White House staff have had to rely on more extreme carrots and sticks to get the President to do things expected of him. They scheduled a few days at Turnberry Country Club, Trump’s golf resort in Scotland, to entice him to attend the July 2018 NATO Summit in Brussels.55 John Bolton rushed to lock in the policy communiqué well before Trump arrived at the summit. This contravened usual practice but was done to ensure that Trump could not wreck the meeting once he arrived on the scene in the same manner that he did at the 2018 G-7 summit.56 Even then, Trump continued to transgress in ways that embarrassed his staff. After his disgraceful performance at the Helsinki press conference, White House staff expressed shock and disappointment about the President’s fawning over Russian President Vladimir Putin.57

The president’s aides have begun to choose their battles or shape their advice to his approach. While the phrase “DO NOT CONGRATULATE” was written on Trump’s briefing materials for his call with Putin last week . . . the president’s senior advisers also chose not to orally brief him on the talking point because they didn’t think it would make a difference, officials said.

“He’d say what he wants anyway,” one official said.

Carol E. Lee, Courtney Kube, and Kristin Welker, “Trump Tells Aides Not to Talk Publicly about Russia Policy Moves,” NBC News, March 29, 2018

His aides seem resigned to indulging the president’s habits. White House staff tell Axios that rather than trying to force Trump to conform to the norms of presidential decorum and discretion, or to prevent him from spilling state secrets before dining-room guests—an effort reportedly spearheaded by John Kelly during his first few months as chief of staff—aides now mostly leave Trump alone, allowing him to do as he pleases. Besides his “working” lunches and dinners, Jonathan Swan reports, the president will be free to enjoy what White House officials describe as “Executive Time.”. . . .

At first, Trump staffers tried to trick the president into doing his job, merging his professional duties with playtime—turning golf outings into political planning sessions, for instance, or scheduling working lunches with foreign leaders. Yet after initially trying to adapt Trump to the presidency, they seem to have conceded that Trump has remade the office in his image. . . . These days, Trump’s babysitters are more like chaperones, allowing the president to blow off steam on Twitter and do and say what he likes. The logic, perhaps, is that Trump has already demonstrated that nothing he does can hurt his popularity with his base, which has maintained its support of him through Charlottesville and Helsinki and the horror of family separation. At this point, his staffers seem to realize, they might as well let Trump be Trump.

Tina Nguyen, “White House Staff Have Given Up on Being Trump’s Babysitter,” Vanity Fair, August 6, 2018

After Helsinki, Kelly seemed to be increasingly checked out as Trump’s minder. Press reports indicated he was coming in to the White House later, leaving earlier, and going to the gym in the middle of the day.58 By the time Kelly formally departed in December 2018, he described the Chief of Staff position as a “bone-crushing hard job” or “worst job in the world.” He also told associates that Mr. Trump was not up to role of President.59 Kelly suggested to the Los Angeles Times that his greatest accomplishments as Chief of Staff had been invisible—it was the array of harebrained Trump schemes that he was able to veto.60 His successor Mick Mulvaney said, “I don’t think I’m telling any secrets—John hated the job.”61

Trump has a pattern of catching his aides off guard with random policy announcements that are rooted more in his imagination and desires than any organized administration initiative.

Trump has sometimes issued directives publicly if he believes his subordinates are not executing his agenda forcefully enough or taking his wishes seriously. “He thinks, ‘Hey, if I say it on Twitter, then these guys will have to follow,’” said one former White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly share the president’s process.

Philip Rucker and Ashley Parker, “‘In the Service of Whim’: Officials Scramble to Make Trump’s False Assertions Real,” Washington Post, October 23, 2018

Despite his imposing military credentials, however, Mr. Kelly slowly realized the futility of trying to control the president, and ultimately resigned himself to a stalemate of coexistence, simply letting Trump be Trump and complaining to his colleagues about how miserable he was in the job. In the past year, he has often come to work late and left early, telling colleagues, “I’m leaving and I’m not coming back.”

Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman, “John Kelly to Step Down as Trump, Facing New Perils, Shakes Up Staff,” New York Times, December 8, 2018

By 2019, Trump’s senior staff had reverted to an appeasement strategy. Approximately 60 percent of President Trump’s schedule was devoted to unstructured “Executive Time.”62 Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney adopted a “let Trump be Trump” approach, loosening access to the President and enabling the Toddler in Chief’s disruptive behavior.63 Mulvaney made it clear to reporters that he enjoys the perquisites of power and is uninterested in attempting to constrain Trump’s impulses.64 He confirmed that Trump does not come down to the West Wing until around 11 a.m.; Trump’s personal secretary complained that it was often later than that.65 National Security Advisor John Bolton largely ended his predecessors’ meetings of NSC principals, because they were disconnected from Trump’s instincts. The result was “a national security process that, officials say, has shrunk to little more than the instincts of an impulsive president” according to the New York Times.66 His new national security team prevented Trump from acting on his most catastrophic instincts, but only barely.67 Indeed, Trump told reporters that he constrained Bolton’s bellicose impulses rather than vice versa.68

For two years, they tried to tutor and confine him. They taught him history, explained nuances and gamed out reverberations. They urged careful deliberation, counseled restraint and prepared talking points to try to sell mainstream actions to a restive conservative base hungry for disruption. But in the end, they failed.

For President Trump, the era of containment is over.

One by one, the seasoned advisers seen as bulwarks against Trump’s most reckless impulses have been cast aside or, as Defense Secretary Jim Mattis did Thursday, resigned in an extraordinary act of protest. What Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) once dubbed an “adult day care center” has gone out of business.

Philip Rucker, “‘A Rogue Presidency’: The Era of Containing Trump Is Over, Washington Post, December 22, 2018

For over a year, Mattis has been trying to reassure congressional leaders that he could help check some of Trump’s impulses, in part by intervening in the nuclear chain of command. In a break with normal procedures, Mattis reportedly told the commander of the Strategic Command to keep him directly informed of any event that might lead to a nuclear alert being sent to the president. He even told the Strategic Command “not to put on a pot of coffee without letting him know.”

Bruce Blair and Jon Wolfstahl, “Trump Can Launch Nuclear Weapons Whenever He Wants, with or without Mattis,” Washington Post, December 23, 2018

This surrender to the Toddler in Chief has extended to Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign. According to the Washington Post, “Campaign advisers say they have come to trust Trump’s political instincts, though they also recognize that he sometimes goes too far. Still, they say, they can only control what they can—and that often does not include the president.”69 As a Trump campaign aide described it, “He blows the hole and everyone else runs into the breach.”70 A former staffer explained, “The only way to preserve your sanity is to understand that wave after wave of people have tried to get [Trump] to do certain things and so you either sign up for who he is or get out while you can.”71

By now the pattern for White House staffers under Trump has been locked in. They have admitted to reporters that they go through “a cycle of being enamored of Trump’s larger-than-life persona, but then become frustrated by the environment he creates and allows, followed by anger at his self-destructive tendencies.”72 Similarly, the Toddler in Chief treats his staffers like new toys, enjoying them at the beginning, growing weary of them soon afterward, and eventually discarding them.73 Former staffers have expressed concern to reporters that “after casting off advisers who displeased him at a record rate in his first two and a half years in office, Mr. Trump now has fewer aides around him willing or able to challenge him, much less restrain his more impulsive instincts.”74 According to former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci, Trump’s staff serves little purpose to him other than being “a prop in the back.”75

What should have been a quiet weekend at home for President Trump—a small birthday gathering to celebrate his son, Barron, turning 13, and a Lenten service at the historic St. John’s Episcopal Church—instead mushroomed into a manic blur of frenzied, raging Twitter messages.

Trump tapped out 52 tweets in just 34 hours, marking his second-most prolific two-day stretch since becoming president—surpassed only by a 53-message flurry last fall focused largely on the arrival of Hurricane Florence. . . .

While Trump was pecking out angry nuggets, press secretary Sarah Sanders spent her weekend on vacation in West Virginia, and chief of staff Mick Mulvaney did the same in Las Vegas. White House officials made no real effort to intervene or rein Trump in, according to people familiar with how the president spent his days.

One Republican strategist in frequent touch with the White House said the staff had largely “given up” on trying to control their boss.

Ashley Parker, “Fifty-Two Tweets in 34 Hours: How a Trump Twitter Frenzy Defined a Weekend,” Washington Post, March 24, 2019

Trump’s remaining staffers fall into one of three baskets: sycophants, Faustians, and rejects. The sycophants are the ones who excel at telling Trump that everything he does is great, even when what he has done is objectively awful. Dan Scavino epitomizes this group best, offering nothing but fulsome praise for the President. It is not a coincidence that the White House Director of Social Media started out as Trump’s 16-year-old golf caddy.76

The Faustians include Mick Mulvaney, Economic Advisor Larry Kudlow, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Attorney General Bill Barr. These individuals were not anyone’s first-best or even second-best options for their positions. Trump hired them because he could not find anyone competent beyond those exiled to the Island of Misfit Wonks. These folks are Faustians because of the bargain they made with themselves to staff the Toddler in Chief. On the one hand, they must display fealty at every turn, endorsing policies and statements that they would have excoriated if they were out of power. On the other hand, Trump’s short attention span enables them to pursue their own preferred policies so long as they do not publicly contradict the President. Pompeo will accede to Trump’s wishes on North Korea provided he can be hawkish on arms control. Barr will preserve and defend Trump at all costs if it permits him the ability to extend executive power. Mulvaney will tolerate the Toddler in Chief in return for the freedom to run roughshod over Cabinet Secretaries to set regulatory policy. Because the President knows so little about policy, each of these subordinates can exercise considerable autonomy over their own policy bailiwicks.77

The final group are the rejects. As previously noted, Trump’s first crop of staffers and administration officials were not the best people. As Trump’s brand has become more tarnished, finding replacements for those exiting the administration has become ever more difficult. In numerous instances, the Toddler in Chief has resorted to hiring people whose reputations had already been tarnished. In 2018 Trump hired Bill Shine to be his Communications Director even though Shine had been forced out at Fox News for his poor handling of sexual harassment scandals. Ken Cuccinelli’s immigration positions are too hardline to earn him Senate confirmation, but Trump tapped him to be the Acting Head of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services. Perhaps the best example is former Fox News commentator Monica Crowley. In early 2017 she withdrew her name from consideration for a National Security Council position after stories in CNN and Politico confirmed that she had plagiarized parts of both her PhD dissertation and her most recent book.78 By 2019, however, Crowley had been hired to be a spokesperson for the Treasury Department.

Stepping back, the staffers who survive in the Trump administration tend to be those who tolerate and even emulate Trump’s toddler-like traits. This raises a rather disturbing implication. The Mueller report’s assessment of whether the President obstructed justice concluded, “The President’s efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.”79 All of the officials who resisted Trump’s entreaties—FBI Director James Comey, White House Counsel Don McGahn, Deputy White House Chief of Staff Rick Dearborn—are no longer in government. In their place, Trump appointed more pliant subordinates such as Barr, Kudlow, and Mulvaney. With each passing day, the only people eager to work for the Trump administration are those individuals who are willing to subordinate everything to the whims of the Toddler in Chief. These are staffers willing to prostrate themselves publicly by saying that the President did not have a temper tantrum, even if they were not in the room during the moment in question.80

Several White House officials expressed agreement during a staff meeting on Monday morning that the president’s attacks [on U.S. Representative Elijah Cummings] were a bad move, according to people informed about the discussion, but they were uncertain who could intervene with him—or if anyone would even dare try.

Mr. Trump has told aides he sees his latest outbursts as smart strategy. The president has long been petrified of losing his base, and some aides believe he will need to maximize turnout from the voters who helped put him in the White House the first time given the highly partisan environment.

Several advisers said they were aghast that he was making such a target of Mr. Cummings. If anyone had tried to persuade the president of that, they were keeping it to themselves on Monday. But many advisers sounded defeated as they talked about a tweetstorm they hoped would end soon.

Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman, “Trump Widens War on Black Critics While Embracing ‘Inner City Pastors,’” New York Times, July 29, 2019

This makes it easier to conceive of Trump being allowed, or even encouraged, to act on his worst instincts.81 Former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan acknowledged this problem in 2019: “Those of us around him really helped to stop him from making bad decisions. All the time. It worked pretty well. . . . I think now . . . he sort of feels like he knows the job.” Ryan added, “We helped him make much better decisions, which were contrary to kind of what his knee-jerk reaction was. Now, I think he’s making some of those knee-jerk reactions.”82 Impeachment compounds these difficulties. It will make it even more difficult for the Trump White House to attract competent staff. Those remaining will have to devote extra time to preventing the Toddler in Chief from careening off the rails. One former White House aide acknowledged, “It may lead to less structured output from the White House.”83

A senior administration official bemoaned how much of a gigantic pain impeachment proceedings would be for the White House staff to manage. The official said that is, in part, because being impeached would inevitably devastate Trump’s focus, mood, actions, and agenda for the remainder of his first term.

Asawin Suebsaeng and Sam Stein, “Trump Ponders Violent Retribution as the White House Projects Impeachment Calm,” Daily Beast, September 27, 2019

To take care of the Toddler in Chief three years into his term, the Trump administration has little choice but to scrape the bottom of the bottom of the barrel. This is fine. After all, what damage could a person with impulse control problems and the ability to launch nuclear weapons possibly do?