April 5, 2018
What Trump wanted most were soldiers, not subject-matter experts. And this created a kind of stability; some of his most loyal employees have stayed with him for decades. But it was people he hired for their knowledge that lasted the shortest time. A work-flow diagram at the Trump Organization would have put Donald Trump at the hub and connected him by spokes to his small number of top staff. They numbered about a dozen, and he hired them with the same kind of gut instinct that propelled his political rise—he didn’t value traditional expertise as much as a willingness to give him undisputed loyalty and unlimited energy. When Trump first arrived at the White House, he stepped outside his usual comfort zone and appointed several people, including Tillerson and Gary Cohn, who had decades of experience in their fields. But they also had ideas that conflicted with Trump, and now they’re gone, replaced with more pliable figures. Mike Pompeo, a former Kansas congressman whose support for Trump netted him the top post at the CIA, will take over for Tillerson, who couldn’t get with Trump’s forget-diplomacy program, and Larry Kudlow, an economics pundit on TV and an early Trump loyalist, has replaced Cohn, who refused to sign on to Trump’s tariff plan.
Filling some positions, like the still-vacant communications director, don’t appear to be high on Trump’s to-do list; he had the perfect person in the job—the ultra-loyal and supremely deferential Hope Hicks—and for now he appears content to handle the White House messaging himself. Today, the hub-and-spokes model is facing its ultimate test. It was arguably sufficient for the Trump Organization, which currently has 22,000 people on its payroll, but as president, Trump is now the ultimate boss for 2.7 million people, a 122-fold increase. For him to rely on little more than his own gut instincts, maybe (or maybe not) modified by the last person he spoke to or by whatever a Fox News commentator just said, is a high-risk strategy. And it gets still more risky when his hiring policy esteems loyalty over resume, a priority that seems unduly reckless even to some of his appointees. And there’s another problem with this managerial style. Although it seems that the administration would love to privatize as much of the federal government as possible, the business methods that the Trump Organization regularly employed—no-bid contracts, ruthless cost-cutting, partial or sometimes no payment to vendors, and, ultimately, corporate bankruptcy—are not options available to the White House. As for the immediate future, the most likely prospect is that staff turnover will continue to set new records. As Trump himself recently tweeted, “People will always come & go.”
