The Trump White House experienced an unprecedented level of staff turnover in 2017, shedding aides and advisers of every political persuasion: nationalists Michael Flynn, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, and Steve Bannon; establishment Republicans Reince Priebus, Sean Spicer, and Mike Dubke; “globalists” like soon-to-be-departed Dina Powell. We lost alleged crypto fascists in Sebastian Gorka and self-immolating oddballs like Anthony Scaramucci. Deep-state saboteurs James Comey, Sally Yates, Walter Shaub, and Preet Bharara have been summarily expunged. Altogether, the Brookings Institution concludes, Donald Trump’s exhausted administration has overseen more exits than any first-year president in the last four decades, losing 34 percent of his senior staff in the past year alone.

That number is almost certain to keep rising in the New Year. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is likely to resign within the next four weeks, as my colleague Abigail Tracy has reported. Chief economic adviser Gary Cohn, too, could leave by Trump’s State of the Union speech, one of his friends recently told our own William D. Cohan. The exact timing of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s expected departure has become an ongoing parlor game. (The current gossip has them staying through the end of the current school year, according to Emily Jane Fox.) The prospect of further indictments in Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation has lent fresh urgency to the usual year-end West Wing shuffle, with several staffers facing imposing legal bills to retain representation, even as hundreds of administration positions remain unfilled.

The shake-up is expected to continue, reports Axios, with a 2018 “reshuffle” of the White House’s political office overseen by Bill Stepien, which has weathered much of the blame for Trump’s 2017 legislative failures. Johnny DeStefano, a senior aide, is said to be in line to assume several roles within the politics shop, including responsibilities from departing Deputy Chief of Staff Rick Dearborn. He will also take over the Office of Public Liaison, overseeing the White House’s outreach to interest groups, and the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, which strengthens the relationship between the presidency and other political figures throughout the country. “The move makes DeStefano one of the administration’s key point people to the wider Republican universe,” reports Jonathan Swan.

Appointing DeStefano to take over multiple roles seems a temporary fix to the problem of high turnover rates. But it also speaks to the greater problem plaguing the Trump administration: getting people to come work for them in the first place. After watching an endless stream of colleagues get fired, reassigned, or quit under humiliating circumstances, from the axing of Scaramucci to the alleged spat between Omarosa Manigault and the Secret Service agents who reportedly removed her from the White House premises, there is a dwindling number of qualified candidates in Washington willing to submit their résumés to the White House.

So far, Trump’s solution seems to be promoting from within, a move he made with John Kelly (formerly the Department of Homeland Security adviser), and Hope Hicks, the loyal 29-year-old campaign aide he promoted to communications director after burning through two others earlier this year. If and when Tillerson leaves the State Department, Trump is expected to task C.I.A. director Mike Pompeo to take his place, leaving an opening at the spy agency that may also be filled by another administration official. But reshuffling deck chairs on the Titanic can only accomplish so much before the president is forced to scrape the bottom of other barrels. Last week, as the White House celebrated its first and only legislative victory of the year, Trump and Kelly reportedly oversaw a contentious discussion over the administration’s political future in 2018, as Democrats ramp up efforts to take back the House. According to The Washington Post, Trump listened carefully as his pugilistic ex-aide Corey Lewandowski made an angry pitch for the president to begin receiving better advice in the New Year, arguing that he was being ill-served by his current advisers. If the president is receptive to that line of thinking, and continues shedding staff, he may end up with an even more combative, and potentially more chaotic, inner circle within the next few months.