Trump prepares to hire a new round of people he'll inevitably turn on

Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., speaks before Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally at Madison Square Garden, Sunday, Oct. 27, 2024, in New York.

Donald Trump is preparing to hire a new round of people to help him run the country. With Trump’s track record of never-ending chaos and disorder, they may want to keep their resumes handy.

Trump is reportedly considering a team of loyalists, the people who will tell him he’s never wrong when he suggests policies like injecting bleach to fight off COVID-19 and launching nuclear weapons at hurricanes.

Among the names in circulation are former ambassador and social media troll Richard Grenell heading the State Department; apostrophe investigator Rep. Elise Stefanik as U.N. ambassador; Taliban meeting coordinator Mike Pompeo as secretary of defense; and anti-vaccine crackpot Robert F. Kennedy Jr. running the Department of Health.

When Trump last held the presidency, his top team was in near-constant rotation, because they either ran into Trump’s ego and he let them go or they quit in disgust. According to the Brookings Institution, during his time in office there was a 92% turnover of senior level Trump officials over his four years.

That is significantly higher than every other president that Brookings has measured. For comparison, Trump’s immediate predecessor, former President Barack Obama, had 71% turnover. Trump’s fellow Republican, George W. Bush, had a 63% turnover. Through three years—the last complete data that has been published—the current president, Joe Biden, had a 65% turnover rate.

During his time in office, Biden didn’t follow in the footsteps of Trump and hire figures like former “The Apprentice” contestant Omarosa Manigault Newman. Her time in the Trump White House was brief. She went from Trump campaign loyalist to federal hire to feuding with Trump—becoming the subject of a federal lawsuit, secretly recording Trump, writing a tell-all, and coming out in opposition to Trump.

When he wasn’t feuding with figures like Omarosa, Trump saw turnover from officials like former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis. Mattis resigned over his disagreement with Trump on Syria policy, then Trump later made up a story about firing Mattis. Mattis described Trump as “the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try.”

Other figures who saw him up close, like former Trump chief of staff Gen. John Kelly, ended up describing his leadership style as “fascist.”

And the people who do stick around under Trump are not “the best people.” A prime example is white supremacist Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s widely condemned family separation policy and giver of cringe dating advice.

Trump’s chaos had very real effects on ordinary Americans. He mishandled the COVID-19 outbreak and hundreds of thousands died. During his time in office, more jobs were lost than under any president in decades. He doesn’t hire the best people and even the ones he does put in power don’t stay there for long, because he’s very bad at this.