Most of the people leaving should never have been hired. Trump's judgment is abysmal. Look at his hiring of Manafort and Flynn. How could someone like Hope Hicks have a job in the White House? What exactly are Ivanka and Jared Kushner's experience and credentials? What does Ben Carson know about housing? What was Amarosa doing in the White House?
It's like a clown car. But the 35% love the clown show.
One the challenges in following the Trump administration soap opera has been sorting out sensationalist fact from fiction. A rabid and hostile press has ginned fears and rumors into "stories" of often dubious merit. On the other hand, if even half the office blood feud stories of the last year are true it paints a sorry picture of a back stabbing staff ruled by a mercurial, alpha male with an image obsession - driven to pick random twitter fights with detractors to "win".
Morale should be in the pits. Trump's "views" are little more than a collection of arbitrary and disconnected feelings, no more integrated that those of your local tavern's bar stool know-it-all. Many of his populist stances are no older than 2012, with very little learning or thought given to most of them. And having made promises, and put his "brand" on them, Trump feels that all opposition is personal...a challenge to his "winner" identity.
It was predictable, given his chaotic campaign. As in the campaign, he has hired a broadly eclectic set of advisors and policy makers with incompatible outlooks...none of whom share his whole set of gut feelings. Moreover, he has refused to hire any Republican who opposed him in the primaries ("disloyal"), and found it difficult to find anyone in the professional class willing to work for z seemingly incoherent whack-a-doodle, regardless of what party they identify with. The usual policy think tanks (e.g. Heritage, AEI, Brookings) for Trump are alien landscapes, unknown inhabitants lacking in their personal loyalty.
And into this mix you can add Trump's management style; impulsive, angry, superlative infatuated, demeaning and combative. Trumps "style" is shameless public humiliation of his employee "targets" weaknesses. Only family has been secure (so far) while staff have battled them and each other, constantly getting burned and driven out. As a Brookings study recently noted, turnover has been record setting (twice that of Reagan and several times greater than Bush):
"Six of the 12 Tier One positions saw turnover (Reince Priebus, chief of staff; Katie Walsh, deputy chief of staff; Sean Spicer, press secretary; George Sifakis, assistant to the president and director of the Office of Public Liaison; Michael Flynn, national security adviser, and KT McFarland, deputy national security adviser). By comparison, Obama lost one adviser from Tier One (Greg Craig, White House counsel), and George W. Bush did not see any turnover in these high-level positions."
https://www.brookings.edu/research/...ver-higher-than-the-5-most-recent-presidents/
Add to that Steve Bannon, Rob Porter, Scaramouche, Tom Price, Omarosa, Paul Winfree, Dina Powell, Sebastian Gorka and now Hope Hicks and you have an unprecedented number churned out of office in a first year.
And if Presidential history repeats itself, the second year will be far worse.
The only outstanding question is, is Trump starting to become seriously unraveled?
