We have seen White Houses engulfed by scandal before. But we have never seen a White House implode before it had the time to staff up. The Nixon, Reagan and Clinton White Houses had hired quality teams by the time their scandals came. They could continue to function, sort of, even when engulfed.
.. This is a White House in which the internal nickname for the chief of staff is Rancid.
.. As current staff leaves or gets pushed out, look for Trump to try to fill the jobs with business colleagues who also have no experience in government.
.. Members of this Congress are not going to be judged by where they set the corporate tax rate. They will be defined by where they stood on Donald Trump’s threat to civic integrity.
s The worst job in Washington right now: Working for Trump
Some White House staffers have turned to impeachment gallows humor. Other mid-level aides have started contacting consultants, shopping their résumés. And at least one senior staffer has begun privately talking to friends about what a post-White House job would look like, according to two people close to the staffer.
Trump largely thinks that his recent mishaps are not substantive but simply errors of branding and public relations, according to people close to him and the White House.
But his team is growing increasingly weary. Privately they say that the problem is not an incompetent communications shop, as the president sometimes gripes, or an ineffectual chief of staff, as friends and outside operatives repeatedly warn, but the man in the Oval Office, whose preferred management style is one of competing factions and organized chaos... “It’s torture — torture because of everything that is happening externally, but it’s also torture because of how divided the White House is internally,” Fleischer said of the challenges that Trump’s staff members face.
.. And a third said that others are sticking around purely for self-interest, hoping to juice their future earning potential. This Republican added that any savvy White House staffer should be keeping a diary.
.. “The problem with this White House is that there is no one, including Priebus, who is able to tell the president what he doesn’t want to hear and until there is, this White House will be broken, will be dysfunctional and so will Trump’s presidency.”
.. “How are they going to do any of this — tax policy, infrastructure, health care — when all this is distraction?
Report: Jared Kushner to Play ‘Key Role’ in Overhaul of Trump Team
“If and when Trump does overhaul his team, Jared Kushner is expected to play a key role in rethinking the structure and personnel within the West Wing.”
Restructuring his team is just one of a number of delicate problems that Trump expects Kushner to solve. Other tasks include resolving the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, managing diplomatic ties in Iraq and Syria, maintaining friendly ties to the government of Mexico and bridging the divide between the Trump administration and the Muslim community.Two weeks ago, it emerged that Kushner played a pivotal role in Trump’s decision to back down from its threat to withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). On the campaign trail, Trump promised to renegotiate the agreement or terminate it, describing it a “disaster.”