The Tribune

The sad, dangerous chaos that is the Trump administration was illuminated again last week when EPA administrator Scott Pruitt resigned. Pruitt, as venal and corrupt as any senior official in Trump’s government, was reportedly the subject of 13 different corruption or misconduct investigations when he finally resigned under pressure from the White House chief of staff.

That White House chief of staff, John Kelly, has himself been the subject of a barrage of rumours that he will shortly leave office or be pushed out.

Pruitt, like his acting successor at EPA and numerous other senior Trump administration officials, appears to owe allegiance to the very industries his department was established to regulate. The secretaries of the Departments of Interior and Treasury are two who come immediately to mind in this connection.

Tracking the unprecedented turnover and turmoil in Trump’s administration has become a point of journalistic integrity, with the New York Times and other leading publications actively keeping score.

The Times has studied rates of attrition among senior presidential appointees in recent administrations. Of 21 top jobs under presidents going back to Bill Clinton, Trump is far ahead – or far behind. Nine of those positions have turned over at least once in his first 14 months, several of them more than once.

This compares with three such changes under Clinton, two under Barack Obama and one under George W Bush.

Several top federal positions that have suffered from a lack of continuity are located near the seat of power in the White House.

Consider that seven such jobs alone are at top levels of the National Security Council, the president’s senior coordinating agency for international affairs and the nation’s defence. It would be easy to forget Trump’s first appointee as national security adviser Michael Flynn if he did not remain in the headlines for pending criminal charges and rumours of giving vital prosecutorial evidence to special counsel Robert Mueller.

Flynn lasted only a few weeks before he was forced out after apparently lying to the vice president and others about campaign contacts with Russian officials. Flynn was replaced with a sensible-seeming general, HR McMaster, who remained for over a year in office and seemed to some observers to offer a sane counterweight inside the White House to the impulsive ignorance of international affairs that characterizes Trump.

But McMaster may have been too sensible. Four months ago, he was forced out in favour of John Bolton, ideologically still in tune with neo-conservatives like Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld who guided innocent George W Bush into the phenomenally ill-conceived American intervention in Iraq 15 years ago. One shudders to imagine where the unrepentant Bolton, who still defends invading Iraq in 2003, will lead this current impressionable and unsophisticated chief executive.

With all this tumult at the top of the NSC, it is not surprising that several senior staff members were forced out after McMaster and then Bolton assumed office. But deputy national security adviser for strategy Dina Powell left on her own late last year. Her successor was pushed out five months later when Bolton arrived.

The White House staff reporting to Trump has been similarly ravaged. Deputy chief of staff Joseph Hagin, who served three other GOP presidents, resigned last month. There have been four different communications directors for this president, starting with overwhelmed Sean Spicer, who actually occupied the office twice.

The top White House economic adviser Gary Cohn resigned in March, reportedly after he gave up trying to resist Trump’s misguided lurch toward tariffs. Steve Bannon, supposedly the genius of Trump’s successful election campaign, resigned almost a year ago. Trump is already on his second chief of staff, the aforementioned and possibly lame duck John Kelly.

No such list would be complete without mention of turnover at the highest levels of the Departments of State and Justice and the CIA.

From one perspective, this is actually good news, inasmuch as many of these officials served the US poorly and their shortened tenure limited the damage they could inflict on the American national interest. But more miscreants and knaves are always waiting in the wings, and we have nearly 30 more months of Trump to endure.