President Donald Trump complained again Monday that Democrats haven’t approved his ambassadors, but his White House is so far behind on staffing decisions that it’s taken months to sign off on a communications director for the Small Business Administration — let alone actually nominate all but a handful of ambassadors, or replacements for all the United States attorneys whose resignations he forced in March.

And that’s slowing operations and brewing complaints even among his closest allies in the administration, as prospective employees are still being asked in interviews about any negative thing about Trump they might have put on Twitter or Facebook last year.


“We’re not even staffed up to where we need to be or where we were, to do a lot of our regular activities,” Linda McMahon, the SBA administrator and the member of the Trump Cabinet with the longest, most personal relationship with the president, told me in an interview sitting around the conference table in her personal office for POLITICO’s Off Message podcast. “A lot of the staffing that I’m talking about does have to have White House approval. … There’s been some bottleneck, you know. They’re trying to fill a lot of roles at one time. And it’s a lot of people to process.”

McMahon first met Trump decades ago, when he invited her and her husband to a Rolling Stones concert in New Jersey. Trump, of course, eventually turned “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” into his closing campaign rally song last year, but she doesn’t know whether he’s a fan and remembers he wasn’t doing much singing along then. But she remembers rocking out herself.

She says Trump didn’t seem to her like an obvious future president then, but at that point, she never thought she’d run for Senate herself (she did, twice, in two consecutive cycles in Connecticut), and McMahon certainly never thought she’d be sitting in his office in Trump Tower, hoping to get picked as his Commerce secretary.

Breaking News Alerts Get breaking news when it happens — in your inbox. Email Sign Up By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Trump was the one who proposed that she be SBA administrator, and she accepted on the spot, but it wasn’t until the end of March that he nominated a deputy for her. Senate Republicans moved that deputy through committee only at the end of May. That’s well ahead of most other department deputies and other administration positions the White House has to fill.

McMahon is still left waiting on the West Wing for staff that doesn’t require Senate approval. I asked her how right Trump was, from what she’s seen in her department, about the need to completely revamp the government, and she said she’s been pleased with the lean operation she found waiting for her: “I can’t say that I’ve seen things relative to draining the swamp here,” she said.

All the while, she’s trying to change up some operations, doing more outreach to district directors and bringing them in for what she calls a “Spark” conference, followed by an “Ignite” tour around the country to spread the word about what the SBA does.

Running without the staff she wants has made all of that more complicated, she said.

“There would be the head of your communications division, our general counsel, inspector general position here, our advocacy attorney. All of those are White House approvals, and they’re big jobs, so that the positions underneath them are not able to be filled. Some of them are filled with acting people who are here and who are doing a good job,” McMahon said. “But until you have that leader in that position who can really manage and evaluate the work that’s been done, you do have a little bit of a time gap there.”

McMahon appears to be enjoying her new life and says she’s in for Trump’s full term, that she has “no intention of running again.” She is not, however, done with politics, and says she plans to keep writing checks, though they may not be quite as large as those that made her one of the GOP’s larger individual donors in recent election cycles.

“Time will tell,” she said, stressing that she’d check with the ethics officers to make sure she’s in compliance for any appearances she makes or money she spends.

In the meantime, McMahon is hoping to use her experience both turning her wrestling business into an empire that made her a millionaire and then going bankrupt to the point of watching her car repossessed in her driveway to help promote the SBA mission.

“What informs how I talk to people is, ‘Look, I know how that feels.’ I know what it’s like to have to start talking to one creditor who’s calling when you’re trying to not pay the gas bill that month and you’re just going to pay the electric bill, and you put them off for a little bit, and you send them 10 bucks, and they’re happy for a while,” McMahon said. “And you’re trying to balance all of that while you’ve got a child and you’ve got a household and you’ve got a business that you’re trying to get off the ground. So I say, ‘I get all that.’”

That doesn’t mean she supports every business: “Sometimes that guidance is tough love. We’re saying, ‘You don’t really have a good business model.’”

One person who she said hasn’t come to her for advice is her former employee, Dwayne Johnson, who’s been saying he might run for president as part of his promotion for his new “Baywatch” movie.

She said the thought of a political career for the man who’s become “The Rock” didn’t cross her mind when she first met him.

Still, I asked, is there a world in which she could imagine there being a President Dwayne Johnson, or maybe a President The Rock?

“Listen, there are worlds that I think happen and you wouldn’t imagine that they had happened,” McMahon said. “But it’s not one I think about. I’m in current day. I’m very happy with the president that we have, and I want to do everything I can to help him be successful.”

