Rats continue to flee Trump’s sinking ship
- Jul 11, 2024
- 2 min read
Updated: Jul 12, 2024
July 12: On This Day In 2019
Unprecedented levels of instability at the White House. The number of top staffers who quit or got fired from the Trump Administration during his first year in office was completely unprecedented. Those working for Trump came to see the job as “toxic.”
Shocker? By the end of Trump’s time as president, things there had gotten…not much better.
OTDI 2019, Labor Secretary Alex Acosta announced his departure. Before Trump recruited him, Acosta had led the prosecution of Jeffrey Epstein for running a sex trafficking ring of underage girls. Acosta now was criticized for having arranged a “non-prosecution agreement,” which essentially allowed the guy to continue his crime spree for another decade+.
(No, the fact that Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump were friendly and flew together 7 times on the sex offender’s infamous “Lolita Express” airplane played no part in that plea deal).
The numbers are staggering. But Acosta’s exit was simply part of a long-running pattern. By the end of his term, Trump had burned through 75% more Cabinet secretaries than anybody else over the past 40 years. More than the four presidents surrounding his term combined. And the turnover of Trump’s full “A Team” of advisors was also higher than that of any of those others.
Experience matters. When there’s constant replacement of top people, it impacts the ability of the department to get something constructive done. It impacts the morale of the entire team. It results in enormous amounts of lost time and training. It’s expensive and bad for the United States.
Not much of a surprise, but of course things have been different under Biden. Only 1/7th as much disruptive turmoil. This analysis from Brookings explains it all.
Dive Deeper
The two Brookings studies are here:
On This Day In The Trump Administration: Trump cabinet turnover is staggering