On the afternoon of Feb. 27, news broke that deputy communications director Josh Raffel, a critical White House gatekeeper, was resigning from his post to return to the private sector. One day later, communications director Hope Hicks announced her resignation as well. The following week, it was President Trump’s top economic adviser Gary Cohn who announced his departure.
By March 13, Trump had fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
For two weeks, we’ve seen a steady stream of high-profile administration shakeups, gradually increasing in stature, all the way from Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump’s media gatekeeper up to the secretary of state.
By all indications, the first three exits were voluntary. Raffel and Hicks were said to have been considering an exit for some time. Cohn was dismayed by the president’s recent approach to trade policy. We don’t yet know conclusively why Tillerson was fired, though Trump intimated on Tuesday it was because the two “disagreed on things.”
The administration is now very different than it was only one month ago, let alone at the beginning of the year, or even before Christmas, when White House officials like Rob Porter and Dina Powell were still in their posts.
Trump’s penchant for organizational “chaos” is widely known, and whether or not that’s a sustainable practice for four years is up for debate. Top officials starting leaving the administration relatively early into Trump’s first year, almost numbing the public to constant personnel adjustments.
But with four high-level departures in three weeks — three from the White House itself, and one from Foggy Bottom — how would any administration cope with such a rapid and dramatic stream of change? Though there’s certainly no comparing Raffel or Hicks to Tillerson, each person who’s left since late February had a big job, to say the least.
From the top down, staffers are now left adjusting to new roles, new chains of command, new responsibilities, and the task of finding replacements.
