The rapid rise and brutal fall of Ronny Jackson was practically Moochian in its velocity, with less than a month passing between the day Donald Trump nominated his personal doctor to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs and the day Jackson withdrew in disgrace, his reputation in tatters. This is, of course, a familiar pattern in Trumpworld, where nearly every top adviser has been burned flying too close to the Trump sun. Some, like dictatorship consultant Paul Manafort or Putin guest of honor Michael Flynn, were already radioactive when Trump took them in, and have now been charged with or pleaded guilty to crimes. Others, like Rex Tillerson and Gary Cohn, were respected businessmen who ran billion-dollar companies before falling in, and out, with Trump. There are those like Jeff Sessions who hang on in the twilight of Trump’s discontent, neither welcome nor exiled but occupying a hellish space in between, at great and continuing cost to their personal dignity.

There have been various attempts to classify this phenomenon. Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall has described the human wreckage orbiting the president as the Trump Dignity Wraiths: “men and women (though mainly men) of once vaunted reputations or at least public prestige who have been reduced to mere husks of their former selves after crossing the Trump Dignity Loss Event Horizon.” The prolific never-Trumper Rick Wilson has even coined a hashtag, #ETTD—or Everything Trump Touches Dies. (The accompanying book comes out this summer.) The Grand Unified Theory of Trump got a boost Thursday when two articles attempting to quantify the collateral damage were simultaneously published in Politico (“Trump’s Ever-Mounting Scrap Heap”) and The New York Times (“For Many, Life in Trump’s Orbit Ends in a Crash Landing”).

Indeed, only about half of the top aides and advisers who entered the White House with Trump remain by his side. The president has churned through three secretaries of Homeland Security, four national security advisers, four secretaries of Health and Human Services, and four communications directors. The supersonic burn rate has left few qualified people in Washington willing to work for Trump, either forcing him to scrape the bottom of the barrel (Jackson, Larry Kudlow), hire hard-liners (war-monger John Bolton, torture queen Gina Haspel), or recycle current Cabinet members. In the last year, Trump made his D.H.S. secretary his chief of staff, moved his C.I.A. director to State, and is now considering moving his chief of staff to the V.A..

Part of the problem, as Politico details, is Trump’s apparent disinterest in vetting any of the people that he hires. Jackson, who withdrew from consideration to lead the V.A. amid allegations of pill pushing and public drunkenness, was reportedly given no more than two days’ notice before his nomination was made public, and received little help to prepare for his (now canceled) confirmation hearing. Even when it was clear that Jackson would not survive the nomination process, given his total lack of qualifications, Trump doubled down because he liked the guy—a habit that he developed during his time in the private sector. Several of Trump’s former associates from his decades at the helm of the Trump Organization, where he dabbled in everything from real estate to board games, steaks, and television, described a management style based entirely on Trump’s whims: