A week of bad headlines spawned by Omarosa Manigault Newman has once again called into question one of President Trump’s top campaign assertions: that he hires only the best people.
Trump was hit yet again by a former aide whose relationship with him proved purely transactional as Omarosa made the rounds promoting her scathing new book, Unhinged.
“When you give a crazed, crying lowlife a break, and give her a job at the White House, I guess it just didn’t work out,” Trump tweeted last week. “Good work by General Kelly for quickly firing that dog!”
Dog-gate breathed new life into Omarosa’s flagging PR campaign for Unhinged, but Trump’s tweet raises a more obvious question: If true, then what was she doing at the White House in the first place?
“The president hasn’t always been helped by his staffing choices,” admitted a former campaign aide. “He can be stubborn about people.” But his management experience was one of the main arguments he made for his candidacy in 2016.
There are several reasons Trump has had trouble delivering on this promise.
[Also read: Most Americans say White House not filled with the ‘best people’]
Not enough Trump true believers in Washington
Karl Rove was with President George W. Bush in Texas. Valerie Jarrett was with President Barack Obama in Chicago. Kellyanne Conway was working for a pro-Ted Cruz super PAC in the same cycle when Trump was elected president (she had previously advised Trump campaigns for president and governor in 2012 and 2014, respectively, that never got off the ground).
Trump came to the White House with fewer entrenched political relationships than most recent presidents. The Republican strategist he has known the longest — Roger Stone, possibly the next domino to fall in Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia probe — never worked on the campaign or in the administration in any official capacity.
Another longtime Trump friend in politics, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, is now a personal attorney and television surrogate for things Mueller-related.
Filling this vacuum was a cast of characters whose relationships to Trump were briefer and who were either interested in ideological goals (Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions, Stephen Miller, Michael Anton) or gaining positions they probably could not acquire working for a more established politician (Paul Manafort, Corey Lewandowski, and even Conway were unlikely to ever run an American presidential campaign).
Trump tried to close the loyalist gap by bringing in his family, specifically tapping son-in-law Jared Kushner and first daughter Ivanka Trump as senior advisers. He also elevated people like Hope Hicks, who worked in his business, and rewarded capable cable news defenders like Anthony Scaramucci. He also hired one particular “Apprentice” co-star.
The “Javanka” power couple has found it difficult to move the ball against Washington insiders, to the extent that they are even on the same page with the president. Hicks grew weary of the Beltway intrigue and left the White House. Scaramucci flamed out in fewer than a dozen days.
Trump’s political team was largely assembled on the fly. So, after an unexpected victory, was much of his government.
The pitfalls of populism
It’s easy to imagine an alternate universe in which Trump ran a more centrist campaign — something closer to his short-lived Reform Party presidential bid in 1999 — and largely staffed his administration with his friends in business. But it was the more populist Trump who flipped the industrial midwest and actually got elected president.
That made Trump’s rich friends, even loyalists like Tom Barrack, less inclined to take administration jobs, and businessmen like Gary Cohn less willing to keep them. The Charlottesville controversy a more moderate Trump would likely have avoided led to the collapse of his business advisory council, featuring people who could have been in the president’s talent pipeline for other jobs.
Trump has had to strain harder to find advisers who share his views on trade, though he does now have a core group willing to defend his tariffs and generally aligned with him on protectionism. He has not had much success at all recruiting a national-security team whose foreign-policy views are closer to his than Lindsey Graham’s. The less interventionist Republican bench isn’t terribly deep.
The president’s ideological positioning has also contributed to the lack of racial diversity among his staff and surrogates, directly leading to the hiring of Omarosa.
Never Trump
Opposition from conservative and Republican elites did little to block Trump’s path to the nomination and ultimately the White House. But it did deny him access to some of the party’s most seasoned operatives and strategists.
“Never Trump” was disproportionately made up of the kind of political professionals a candidate needs to run a Republican campaign. They were unwilling to lend their talents to Trump and discouraged others from doing so even after he clinched the Republican nomination.
Some even felt peer pressure to stay away from a Trump campaign that seemed unlikely to win in November. “Every time I thought of working for him, I decided it wasn’t worth the career hit,” said one Republican strategist who requested anonymity to speak candidly.
Trump supporters often downplayed the importance of GOP campaign veterans, arguing their man was winning precisely because he wasn’t reliant on advice from people who worked for losing candidates like John McCain and Mitt Romney. Nevertheless, it prevented the professionalization of the Trump campaign and, aside from a brief window after his unexpected election, further shrank the universe of people ready to join the administration.
Trump’s own management style
Trump thrives on chaos and conflict, presides over constant turnover, can be difficult to please and leaks liberally to the press. That is going to attract a certain kind of employee — the type that might be prone to turn on the boss or write a tell-all book.
There is also a significant difference between the family business, however large, that Trump has run for decades, and overseeing the executive branch of the federal government. Staffing changes have proceeded at a record pace, according to the Brookings Institution, discouraging others from joining. Some Trump alumni have struggled to find private sector work, partly due to the stigma of working for a polarizing president, and in some cases because the perception existed they weren’t very good at their jobs.
White House chief of staff John Kelly and Attorney General Jeff Sessions would be difficult to replace if the president even wanted to at this point, among other key roles.
John Dean, the former White House counsel under President Richard Nixon, recently tweeted a warning to Trump staffers. “Very few people who worked at Nixon’s White House later included that fact on their resumes,” he wrote. “It doesn’t do much for a career to be on the wrong side of history, nor to have worked for the worst president in American history.”
Dean’s career path depended on his stint at the White House, only through trashing the president he served. It’s one being followed by Omarosa Manigault Newman now.
