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While there’s nothing inherently wrong with change, when it comes to pretty much any institution — from your local eatery, to a sports franchise, to a university, and certainly to the White House — a constant churn of personnel is almost never a good sign.
You can probably tell where this is going. With Donald Trump threatening to begin his next White House occupancy as a vengeful “dictator” hell-bent on “retribution,” much ink, including my own, has been devoted to sounding the alarm about just how devastating Trump Redux, the Trump 2.0 “upgrade,” would be for America and the planet.
It is easy to forget, when prospectively picturing a deranged and unbound Trump-as-Hitler, just how chaotic things were during Trump 1.0, with Trump-as-Trump burning through just about every adult who happened to wander into the room. As a reminder, I thought it would be useful to compare the rates of turnover of Cabinet members and top staff at Chez Trump and Chez Biden.
This will be in the nature of an overview, as the Brookings Institution has already done the heavy lifting, charting the position-by-position movement for the Biden and Trump administrations, along with those of Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan.
It should come as no surprise that Trump is the outlier in this group of seven presidents, the unrivaled champion of churn.
The top-line Brookings numbers tell part of the story. In the three years he has been in office, Joe Biden has lost just one of 15 cabinet members; Trump burned through 10, along with four more in his final year (the four-year numbers for Trump’s five predecessors, from Reagan through Obama, were five, five, three, two, and three, respectively).
Without going into the individual merits and qualifications of the various cabinet members, the tableau — worthy of a whole season of bad Celebrity Apprentice episodes — speaks for itself.
The circumstances of the departures help fill in the picture: These were not high officials moving on to greener pastures or desperate to spend more time with their families. Of the 14 total leaving the Trump administration, an astounding eight cabinet secretaries — Tom Price at HHS, Rex Tillerson at State, David Shulkin at Veterans Affairs, Jeff Sessions at the DOJ, Ryan Zinke at Interior, Kirstjen Nielsen at Homeland Security, Alex Acosta at Labor, and Mark Esper at Defense — resigned under pressure.
And an additional four — Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, Attorney General Bill Barr, Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao, and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos — resigned in what could best be characterized as a combination of protest and disgust.
Without going into the individual merits and qualifications of the various cabinet members, the tableau — worthy of a whole season of bad Celebrity Apprentice episodes — speaks for itself.
Closer to home, in the White House itself, the carpet was even bloodier. Here, the Brookings numbers, although a bad look for Trump, actually conceal the full measure of carnage, since Brookings counts as top staff turnover (in what Brookings calls the “A Team”) only the departures of the original appointees to each position. This is because, pre-Trump, subsequent departures (a phenomenon Brookings calls “serial turnover”) were rare.
As a result, while Trump still leads the pack, with 83 percent three-year staff turnover to Biden’s 65 percent and an average of 62 percent among his five predecessors, the comparison at first blush seems less egregious than that of cabinet positions. There are, however, two notable features of the Trump White House Shuffle not evident from those numbers.
The first is the extraordinary multiple, or serial, turnovers of the same positions, not counted in that 83 percent Brookings number. Brookings, understanding the significance of Trump’s unprecedented serial turnover problem, devotes a special section to detailing the successors to the successors for each position.
Out of 65 Trump “A Team” top staff positions, just five stayed the course; 33 turned over once and 27 turned over twice or more. And these 27 positions were filled by a remarkable 99 different staffers. Doing a little arithmetic, the total number of staffers came to 170 for 65 positions, a total turnover rate of 161.5 percent. “Like nothing you’ve ever seen before!” as Trump has been heard to say.
Notables on the carousel included four chiefs of staff (Reince Priebus, John Kelly, Mick Mulvaney [acting], and Mark Meadows), four press secretaries (Sean Spicer, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Stephanie Grisham, and Kayleigh McEnany), four national security advisers (Mike Flynn, H.R. McMaster, John Bolton, and Robert C. O’Brien), and seven communications directors (Michael Dubke, Anthony Scaramucci, Hope Hicks, Bill Shine, Stephanie Grisham, Alyssa Farah, and an undisclosed final replacement).
The second, somewhat more subtle, indicator involves the timing of staff turnover. The historical pattern is for turnover to be at its highest in the second and third years of the presidential first term, clustered around the midterm elections, when the White House, ordinarily facing congressional losses of varying magnitudes, traditionally takes stock and reboots. Accordingly, turnover rates in the first year of a presidency are generally low: 17 percent for Reagan, 7 percent for H.W. Bush, 11 percent for Clinton, 6 percent for W. Bush, 9 percent for Obama, and 8 percent for Biden.
Trump saw 35 percent of his top staff leave within his first year in office. Of the 23 top staffers to leave in 2017, 13 resigned under pressure. And an additional 31 percent of original staffers left in Trump’s second year. After that, since two-thirds of the original staffers were already gone and Brookings was not counting subsequent turnovers of these positions, it was relatively smooth numerical sailing for Trump, who lost only 17 and 9 percent of original staffers in his third and fourth years respectively — while churning through dozens of replacements for replacements.
But the significance of the extraordinary first-year exodus lies in the quick recognition by many of the would-be adults in the room that they were dealing with a situation beyond their initial imagining and beyond their control. Many who had been inclined to “give Trump a chance” were swiftly disabused of that fantasy. Some raced for the exits; some others remained, only to resign under pressure as it became clear that adults were not wanted in Trump’s room.
It is a media bylaw to pay little attention to things that run smoothly. So the Biden administration — high-ranking, if not extraordinary, for its relative lack of turnover, turmoil, and chaos — has received little more than the occasional off-hand kudo for not being a circus. But it is a question every voter should ask themselves this November: competence and continuity or circus and chaos?
We all should be familiar with how things worked out for the few adults who were determined to stay and exert whatever restraining influences they could on an increasingly belligerent and unhinged president with a rapidly growing messiah complex. The internal battles and heroics have been well documented via leaks, hearing and trial testimonies, tell–some memoirs, and book–length narratives.
It is a media bylaw to pay little attention to things that run smoothly. So the Biden administration — high-ranking, if not extraordinary, for its relative lack of turnover, turmoil, and chaos in a tumultuous time — has received little more than the occasional off-hand kudo for not being a circus. But it is a question every voter should ask themselves this November: competence and continuity or circus and chaos?
And, of course, the churn we witnessed in Trump 1.0 would be a best-case scenario, in which Trump once again merely wrestles with and burns out his minders. But he now knows better than to let any adults into his room in the first place. And any adult, looking back at his first term, now knows better than to even think about knocking on the door.
So Trump 2.0, the “upgrade,” will see the room filled with the likes of Michael Flynn, Stephen Miller, Mike Lindell, Elise Stefanik, Marjorie Taylor Greene (if the congressional GOP, which has suffered a few turnover and stability problems of its own, can spare them), Jack Posobiec, and a host of other ultra-MAGA non-adults with devout and unquestioning fealty to the God-made “shepherd to mankind.”
Many commentators have been sheepish about putting it in such stark and glaring terms, as if it were hyperbole, rank partisanship getting carried away. A few continue to be sheepish, self-conscious, reluctant. Not here. This — as grotesque and surrealistic as it seems — is reality. And it should terrify.
And motivate.
Here’s a 2024 checklist: Is my voter registration valid and up to date? Do I know what documents are required to cast my vote in 2024 and do I have all of them? Have I checked my state’s (and/or county’s) official elections website? Do I know what my voting options are — where I can vote, when I can vote, and how? How about my family, friends, neighbors? Do I/they live in a swing state? Have I figured out where my support — labor and/or capital — can make the most difference? Do I have a 2024 Election Year Plan?
Yes, it can feel like it’s all happening to us. And that it’s all just too much. It’s easy to become paralyzed, numbed, exhausted, pull the covers up over your head the way you might on a bitter cold morning. The terrible can have a way of feeling inevitable.
It’s not. But it will take our best effort, maximum and sustained, to pass this test of our political wisdom, will, and strength and come through 2024 with our democratic faculties intact.
Jonathan D. Simon is a senior editor at WhoWhatWhy and author of CODE RED: Computerized Elections and the War on American Democracy.
