A new study found that a stunning 78% of top positions in the Trump administration have already turned over at least once.
It's official: Top political appointees have fled the Trump administration in record-breaking numbers, despite the president's now-laughable campaign promise to surround himself with only "the best people."
As a candidate, Donald Trump spent a great deal of time attacking the people appointed by President Barack Obama and others, positioning himself as a businessman who would bring in the greatest team imaginable to fix everything.
"I'm going to surround myself only with the best and most serious people," he told the Washington Post in 2015. "We want top of the line professionals."
"I want the great negotiators negotiating our deals, I don't want these nice people that got there because they gave political contributions," he explained around the same time.
It has not happened that way at all.
Over less than three years in office, Trump has seen departures at a faster rate than any other president who has served a four-year term, according to a Brookings Institution study.
The report found that of the top 65 positions in the Executive Office of the President, 51 had seen turnover since Trump's January 2017 inauguration — a rate of 78%. And of those, 16 positions turned over at least twice.
The turnover in positions like chief of staff, communications director, press secretary, and national security adviser, amazed the study's author.
"It's historic, it's unprecedented, it's off the charts," she told NBC News. "I've never seen this kind of turnover before." She blamed Trump for the massive instability, noting she had "never seen a chief executive who fires staff more frequently and more publicly than President Trump."
Employment problems have been an Achilles' heel for a president who's reality show tagline was "You're fired."
Trump's Cabinet has seen historic turnover, and his administration has been plagued by huge numbers of vacancies. He begged the press in December to stop accurately reporting that few wanted to work in his chaotic administration. He has repeatedly attacked his own appointees in public, even calling his own handpicked Federal Reserve chair an "enemy" of the people.
The administration has been so desperate to find people willing to join that it has resorted to hosting a mid-administration job fair and drastically reducing the vetting process for positions.
Trump recently praised himself for an administration with "tremendous stability."
Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.
