Few things about the Trump administration surprise me, but I can’t understand the constant purge of apparently loyal aides from the White House.
Is it over personality clashes or policy differences?
It doesn’t seem like any one faction is winning out - for instance, Priebus and Bannon are both gone. What’s going on?
Consider what you know about Trump, then consider how long you could stand to work alongside the man unless you were bound by blood. I think I’d last 10 minutes, then I’d hide in the toilets until such time as I’m inevitably fired.
Trump is an incompetent manager who doesn’t handle criticism or disagreement well, doesn’t know how to delegate properly, pays little attention to what his subordinates are doing except as it relates to whether or not it makes him look good, demands complete loyalty from his subordinates with no expectation of reciprocity, and seems to delight in setting his employees against each other in a contest to see who loves him more.
That’s about all there is to it.
You have to put the blame for all these problems on somebody. And Trump isn’t going to take it upon himself. So aides get fired.
Yep. This is the reason. Terrible management and leadership.
If the rumor mill can be believed, Jared and Ivanka have consistently been trying to make the White House political staff more professional, in an attempt to protect their father.
That may be correct – at any rate, you will notice that they seem to retain all their influence.
Not even they can fully control him, but they seem to come closer to it than anybody else. Which, under the circumstances, is probably a good thing.
I agree it’s terrible management - the idea that he’s a real billionaire with his own money and who has some understanding of economics (even at the micro level) is one of the greatest con jobs in American history.
But there’s another explanation for his revolving door, which is his pathological narcissism and his authoritarian instincts. He can’t accept blame for anything - he is never wrong. If healthcare fails, it’s McConnell and Ryan’s fault. If he gets bad press, it’s a media conspiracy by CNN, WaPo, and the NY Times. And it’s the inability by his staffers like Sean Spicer and Reince Preibus to fend off criticism. Trump also has to be the smartest guy in the room. He can’t for a moment tolerate anyone who might challenge his knowledge or intelligence. He can’t allow Steve Bannon for helping him win the election. And most of all, people are just disposable like toilet paper the moment he no longer needs them (see Paul Manafort). That’s how the revolving door started spinning the day he arrived.
But it’s his authoritarian personality that has made the door spin ever faster. Authoritarians have no use for rules, conventions, laws. They are impediments to how they think and operate. People who obey rules are useless to an authoritarian who prefers instead to rule by fiat, which is how Trump is used to managing his (failing) businesses and making his (probably unlawful) deals. What I’m getting at is that by ignoring and challenging the conventions that others in politics tend to respect (like Jeff Sessions recusing himself, for instance) authoritarian personalities inevitably make enemies. And as they generate more and more enmity, they become fearful of the consequences that they may have created for themselves. When the rule of law and institutions are still strong, justice is meted out with firing them from their positions, suing them in civil courts, or embarrassing them in the media. But as the rule of law and institutions begin to deteriorate and are progressively replaced with the rule of men, the threats of unemployment and lawsuits are replaced with threats of jail - and worse.
This is why he’s so fond of holding rallies in front of thousands of his supporters all the time.
We’re gonna need a smaller room. 
He’s also particularly poor at selecting personnel, another indictment of his management ‘skills’ (and I use that term incredibly loosely).
Guys guys - has nobody seen The Apprentice, or Celebrity Apprentice? That’s all he knows.
So, every week, he just has to say “Your fired!” to somebody.
He really can’t help himself.
The guys that have been getting fired are literal white supremacists and incompetent conspiracy theorists. They were in the team in the first place because no bona fide experts signed on with his campaign. Why would they? So not that he’s president you have the adults in the room clearing out the riff raff.
Only Congress has the power to clear out the riff raff.
Preferably one with bars in the window and a locked door.
Ever had a really really bad boss? Think about that x10.
It’s quite simple really. Trump is an asshole. He has been for his entire life. There is no need to try to understand it, or deconstruct it.
He’s an asshole, that’s probably the nicest thing that can be said about him.
One of the reasons Bannon is gone is because he can take some legitimate credit for Trump’s election. Trump has been slowly purging anyone like that. He doesn’t like to share credit.
Trump has fired people ranging from moderate centrists to literal white supremacists and conspiracy theorists like Steve Bannon. They’re not always being fired for the same reason (and newly-empowered General Kelly did the actual firing of a few of them). Many of the people left of their own volition due to clashes, not always even clashes with Trump.
While I’m happy to see a horrible person like Bannon go, I’m pretty sure Kelly fired him because he wouldn’t and couldn’t follow orders like “play nice with others” rather than his beliefs; if Kelly couldn’t work with a supremacist, why is he working for Trump? Although it’s nice to see a Bannon supporter, Seb Gorka, leave too.
This is an interesting and important question to consider. I think the generals believe that they are supporting the office of the presidency rather than the individual who is serving as the president. Whatever you want to call it, the consequence is that it is enabling a president who willfully behaves more like a dictator than a democratically-elected office holder.
People might be temporarily relieved at the removal of Bannon and Gorka, but that relief needs to be put into some perspective. He removes Bannon and Gorka at the same time that he pardons Joe Arpaio for contempt of court in a case of racial profiling. If anything, the pardoning does more to promote racist causes than keeping one or two cranky ideologues who ultimately probably don’t have much real influence on the president’s everyday decision-making process anyway.
I don’t necessarily think that racism is at the heart of what drives Trump’s authoritarianism, though. Trump is a cornered animal and knows that, according to the system’s rules, he’s in legal and political jeopardy. If the system has you in its clutches, then you break the system.
How does someone like Trump break a system of political checks and balances? By ignoring the political system’s values and norms and appealing to the worst instincts of people, by finding people on the fringes who need to be normalized just as much as he does. Trump uses their popular support and energy in exchange for lending them his political cover. “Go ahead and knock the crap out of them - I will pay for the legal fees, I promise you.” And telling a crowd of thousands not to worry because a Sheriff who has violated basic civil rights is “gonna be just fine.”
At what point does Trump’s pardoning of a cowboy sheriff turn into a more ominous threat like the one that Rodrigo Duterte made by telling police that it’s okay to kill ‘idiots’ who resist arrest. Remember, a president’s power to pardon is virtually unlimited. Could we seriously not see him saying “It’s okay to kill alt-left protesters who become unruly and riot - I will pardon them”? We’re getting closer and closer to a Reichstag fire moment.
Someone who worked with him told me that Trump is like Carter, a micromanager. Trump has yet to evince any of Carter’s good qualities.
Eh, they both built houses.