Everything Trump Touches Dies

by Rick Wilson

  His choice to fire other officers, including Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, Ethics Advisor Walt Shaub, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, and FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, created media and political martyrs, guaranteeing them a role in the constellation of critics who were liberated and vocal.

  Capo of l’affaire russe MAGA crew Mike Flynn, a disgraced former army general, was so outrageously in bed with the Russians that even Trump was forced to fire him. A predecessor to Flynn as the Defense Intelligence Agency director once told me the Russophilic anti-Muslim general was “the most dangerous asshole ever to head a three-letter.”2

  The fastest route to being fired in the first six months of Trump’s regime was to have any record of working in Washington with actual adults. They should have known better, but Reince Priebus, Katie Walsh, Mike Dubke, Sean Spicer, Rick Dearborn, and other DC pros fell victim to Donald Trump’s unmanaged and unmanageable personality. They didn’t understand that Trump’s character would render their experience moot, their efforts for naught, and their reputation in tatters.

  Congressman Tom Price, an affable back-bencher from Georgia, was perfectly comfortable in Congress, but he made a critical mistake; Donald Trump liked him, and Price accepted the position of secretary of health and human services. Like many of Trump’s appointees, Price suddenly looked at the federal budget as his plaything, taking private jet flights instead of flying commercial. He was the first to be fired, but he wouldn’t even be close to the last.

  It wasn’t that Price was a particularly bad actor, in the great scheme of things. It was that the environment of the Trump White House made that kind of behavior normal. EPA head Scott Pruitt demanded first-class and private jet travel because—I kid you not—people said mean things about him on social media. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson was caught up in a scandal over a $31,000 dining room table for his office. It was all so tragic because it was all so petty. As of May 2018, Pruitt, Carson, and others under the clouds of scandal that seems to darken the days of almost every Trump cabinet official are still clinging to power.

  DOWN THE CHAIN

  At the beginning of the Trump presidency, official Washington still held out hope that Trump would bring in a professional team and that he would listen to counsel, allow a strong chief of staff to fulfill that vital role, and tap into some well of discipline, focus, and resolve heretofore unseen. They convinced themselves he would act and look and operate like a president and that the majesty of the office would bring his staff along into that same dignified frame.

  That didn’t quite work out. The Misfit Toys at the top, and the clowns, rejects, human refuse, ne’er-do-wells, and wild-eyed ideological edge-case drifters who populate the administration prove the Emerson rule is always right: an institution is the lengthened shadow of one man. As hire Bs and Bs hire Cs, and Trump hires people you could find sleeping on a subway grate or planning their basement abattoirs.

  Their greatest joy seems to come not from taking power in DC and executing the amorphous but passionate Trump agenda, but from attacking, insulting, and punishing those who did the actual work in the field for the Conservative Revolution. Nothing outrages this president or his minions more than the slightest resistance to his madcap urges and the stunningly terrible policy ideas that spring from his Fox-addled brain.

  In the long arc of American political history, a job in the White House—any White House—is considered one of the greatest career opportunities in the world. Serving the president of the United States is a singular honor and a privilege, a role for the best of the best, those driven and skilled enough to sacrifice four years of their personal lives for the 24/7 job of a White House aide.

  If you’re valuable to the president of the United States, corporate America is ready to snatch you up the moment you walk out those gates for the last time. A White House bump on one’s résumé has never been a Bad Thing, regardless of party, the politics of the day, or the success or failure of the administration. Not so in Trump’s White House; these jobs are a curse, and just as his death touch affects everyone he encounters, its effects linger.

  In early March 2018, the White House was suffering from a wave of scandals, departures, setbacks, crop failures, and political own-goals. Suddenly, many of the Masters of the Trump Universe were looking for jobs.

  You could hear the sound of the nanoscale violins of the reviled Old Guard and Never Trump crowd as résumés started hitting email inboxes from Trump White House and administration staffers looking for a quick exit from the disaster area. Their desperation was palpable: “The longer I stay, the more likely it is that I’m going to get Muellered,” said one when pitching a colleague of mine for a job.

  BuzzFeed reported that White House staffers were “not necessarily getting the kinds of high-paying offers in the corporate world [that] former aides usually do.” One White House aide said, “I’ve talked to several people in the last week trying to find a way out, but they can’t get out because no one is really hiring people with Trump White House experience. Not a fun time to say the least.”3

  Trump’s Island of Misfit Toys is chock-full of people who possess only the barest competencies one would expect from a White House staff, including little things like professionalism, a sense of personal honor, dignity, and the understanding that the White House is not a palace for a king, and that 1600 Pennsylvania isn’t a royal court.

  As policymakers go, none of them will likely leave a mark because all policy emerges—and I hope you’ll pardon this term of legislative art—from Trump’s ass. There was little to recommend them to start with, and nothing upon their exits. Those who left in scandal and due to the purges run by Chief of Staff John Kelly in some ways have a better story to tell than those who fled because the stress of working for our version of Mad King Ludwig broke their will to live.

  Those who leave soon discover there are only so many slots for contributors at Fox News. Washington’s lobbying firms and think tanks are looking for people with abilities beyond boot-licking, knob-polishing, and obsequious ass-kissing of the Umber Overlord. Those skills may be sine qua non in Trump World but are, to put it mildly, less valuable elsewhere. Other Trump Team skills, like dog-whistling the alt-right, stoking ethnic and racial tensions, and fighting for the return of 19th-century trade and industrial policies, are also in low demand on K Street, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the civilized world.

  Some senior White House staffers will wander into the new ecosystem of Trump cheer squads, media outlets, and ScamPACs as long as The Donald is still around. Future administrations won’t beat a path to their doors or consider them voices of counsel and consequence in the long run. No Wise Men will emerge from this debacle.

  It’s the lower-level appointees who will suffer longest, even those who came on board for the good of the country in hopes of moderating and managing Trump’s catalogue of pathologies and obsessions. They’re stained. They’ll spend their lives explaining why they elected to serve a president destined for disgrace, and if that fails, a barista position at Starbucks or selling blood plasma are good options.

  Are you surprised they’re about to be unemployed and unemployable? Don’t be. Everything Trump touches dies.

  ROT FROM THE BOTTOM UP

  Donald Trump hasn’t drained the swamp or changed Washington in part because the only people he could find to join his government are human train wrecks.

  Setting aside the clown show of the inner White House team, Trump’s administration combines all the things you’d expect: venality, incompetence, a stunning lack of policy knowledge, and a slurry of people dragged from Trump’s business world who couldn’t manage a Waffle House.

  Trump doesn’t have staff; he has acolytes. He doesn’t have experts; he has enthusiasts.

  In every administration, the true power of a president comes from staffing the government with his people. Every president picks appointees who represent his values and policies and who—to use a technical term—get
shit done. Within weeks of Trump’s inauguration it was clear: things weren’t going well, and never would. CNN reported Trump’s administration still had over 1,900 vacancies in March 2017.

  Even allies like National Review’s John Fund wrote, “The Administration needs to pick up the pace of hiring. . . . If nothing is done, the problem will only get worse. At the current rate of nominating individuals to positions, we could see the Trump administration’s first or even second anniversary before it would actually be filled with Trump people.”4

  In every prior modern administration, the thousands of jobs each government must fill were a matter of transition discussions long before election day. Leaders have allies, friends, subject matter experts, and policymakers they start talking to well before election day. Personnel, famously, is policy.

  Trump staffed his administration so slowly and so poorly that the federal bureaucracy couldn’t believe their luck. Far from draining Washington’s swampy bureaucratic precincts, the Trump administration—when they bothered to staff them at all—put in place appointees without the skills, experience, or judgment you might find in the staff of a particularly badly run K-mart in some small Midwestern town.

  The handful of Trump appointees who made it into appointed positions were soon made aware that making America great again would depend on Donald Trump shutting the hell up from time to time. They barely made it through the day, waiting for their impulsive commander in chief, the tweeter of the free world, to go off the rails. This president’s skill isn’t the art of the deal but the art of setting his own ass on fire and causing the world around him to panic.

  Not every person in the Trump administration is a low-rent, mouth-breathing doofus who couldn’t get hired at a car wash. Many serving in Cabinet, sub-Cabinet and White House roles joined Team Trump in good faith, believing they could help steady the ship, smooth the rough edges, and, just maybe, put some conservative policy wins up on the board.

  All of them understood that President Trump’s undisciplined style was risky but hoped his distractions would give them cover to work steadily and quietly on the administration’s legislative priorities.

  A few were of the Bannonite taint, with a history of overtly racist douchebaggery, like Carl Higbie and Sam Clovis. Some of them even bought into the ’merica First new nationalism. Many quietly assured friends in Washington that Trump would settle into his job. After all, he did reassure Americans, “I can be the most presidential person ever.”

  Uh-huh.

  They figured Trump would turn his political capital, social media power, and deal-making acumen into big, popular Republican legislative wins, and that his lack of interest in policy details would let them and their allies, former bosses, and friends in Congress set the agenda.

  Feeding Trump’s ego came with the territory, but why not let him take a victory lap after every success? Then reality set in. The tax bill being the notable exception, 2017 and 2018 were legislative disasters, and the tax cut survived only because Ryan and McConnell kept Trump a million miles away from the process.

  The president botched Trumpcare 1.0 and contributed little as Speaker Paul Ryan managed to ram the public relations nightmare, Trumpcare 2.0, through the House at the cost of much political blood and treasure, only to see it fail in the Senate. Policy wins beyond that? Not much, unless you count executive orders.

  Instead, Trump’s fumbles in 2017 left many members of Congress ducking town hall meetings like they were in the witness protection program. By the end of the year most of Trump’s agenda was deader and more pungent than six-day-old fish. Then, almost unbelievably, 2018 was worse.

  Most Trump appointees were treading water, not really doing much except playing defense and wondering which of their colleagues was leaking to the Washington Post, Axios, and the New York Times.

  Trump’s appointees learned quickly that failure in Washington rolls downhill and that the bureaucracy was going nowhere. No swamps were getting drained, no Walls were getting built, and their chances for leadership and achievement in their agencies were next to zero. They discovered that their job wasn’t actually to serve the nation, manage an agency, or do their job on the White House org chart. In reality, they spent most of their time fluffing Trump’s delicate ego and worrying about rivals shanking them.

  Those ordained to appear on television as administration surrogates learned that for the most part their job wasn’t to advocate for their agency or issue but to lavish the president with praise. Only Kellyanne Conway and Soulless Steve Miller seemed to relish the job truly. After Sean Spicer’s inglorious heave-ho, Sarah Huckabee Sanders took to the podium with a daily dyspeptic glare.

  The Trump curse meant this White House was in turmoil from the very first day. Unmanaged and unmanageable, this president governs by ragetweet and paranoia. Most White Houses have an 18-month shakeup, during which the president decides what works and what doesn’t. With a president unable and unprepared for the job and surrounded by a circle of incompetents, toadies, family, reality-TV flotsam, and corporate vassals, the first reset stories hit within days.

  A February 5, 2017, New York Times piece by Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush gave us a prescient look at the way the White House under Trump was a chaotic shitshow from the jump. Its first moves were a disaster: “The bungled rollout of his executive order barring immigrants from seven predominantly Muslim countries, a flurry of other miscues and embarrassments, and an approval rating lower than that of any comparable first-term president in the history of polling have Mr. Trump and his top staff rethinking an improvisational approach to governing that mirrors his chaotic presidential campaign.”5

  Trump’s war on James Comey and the FBI—and even his own hand-picked attorney general—sent chills through prospective appointees. In most administrations, people are beating down the doors to get these positions.

  In the era of Trump, people with experience, competence, and judgment were fleeing from the Five-Finger Quivering Palm Death Touch: “Republicans say they are turning down job offers to work for a chief executive whose volatile temperament makes them nervous. They are asking headhunters if their reputations could suffer permanent damage, according to 27 people the Washington Post interviewed to assess what is becoming a debilitating factor in recruiting political appointees. The hiring challenge complicates the already slow pace at which Trump is filling senior leadership jobs across government.”6

  Every day a couple hundred Trump appointees wake up in their homes in the DC suburbs, slide into their Trump-stickered SUVs (and if they’re high-ranking or wealthy enough, exchange a few polite words with their driver), and check Twitter.

  Whatever they feel each day, it sure isn’t Morning in America. Aside from the tiny handful of true, crazed dead-enders, they know this is what it must feel like in some faraway kleptocracy where the center hasn’t held, the airfield and radio station have fallen to the rebels, and the Maximum Leader is holed up in his secret bunker, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  By the fall of 2017, they knew they couldn’t save Trump because he never wanted to be saved. White House and administration staffers were determined to escape. Without even the traditional year under their belts, 23 White House staffers had been fired or resigned by that point and were “talking to headhunters about positions as in-house government affairs experts at major companies, or as executives at trade associations, universities, or consulting firms.”7

  Morale was at what they thought then to be rock bottom. Most had determined by that point that a different, better version of Trump would emerge from its cocoon like some portly, gold-plated butterfly. But it never, ever got better.

  The scandals and legal troubles in the White House—not simply Russia, though that’s one of the most fearful ones—rumble on the horizon like a summer thunderstorm, drawing nearer. Many wake up wondering, “Is today the day I need to lawyer up?”

  When regimes collapse, dead-enders are the most fun to watch—the ones who end up with the profita
ble concessions and sought-after mistresses. When this regime falls, the most interesting part of the show will be watching those who say “Not me. I’m out” and those who want to go out like a Baath Party generalissimo.

  Sticking with Trump to the bitter end and pretending the unfolding chaos is just “fake news” won’t save anyone’s reputation as the walls close in. It won’t ease the judgment of history. It won’t do anything to polish up their future Wikipedia entries. Some of the most absurd—Conway, Sanders, Miller—will be the punchlines of the future histories of this strange time.

  Others—the midlevel appointees, the campaign kids who took a spin in government—will be asked in future job interviews, “So I see a four-year gap in your résumé. Weren’t you in the Trump administration as a deputy assistant to the deputy undersecretary for praising the president at the Department of MAGA?”

  That former Trump loyalist will squirm and mutter something about prison or how he ran a brothel in Berlin, or spent that time curating his My Little Pony plushie collection, or how those four years were spent on the run from Interpol.

  The following transcript was provided by Wikileaks in the Fall of 2024.

  * * *

  – INTERCEPT 2 –

  TOP SECRET//SI//ORCON//REL USA, FVEY

  [BEGIN TRANSCRIPT]

  [CALL BEGINS IN PROGRESS]

  TRUMP: . . . and two Filet-O-Fish, extra sauce. Sorry, that was Ryan.

  HANNITY: Gross. What does he want?

  TRUMP: Who cares? He’s weak. No stamina.