In fairness to President Donald Trump, when he famously promised to "hire the best people" for his administration, he didn't say when exactly he would do so.

As with the theory that if you give a million monkeys a million typewriters, one of them will bang out the collected works of Shakespeare, maybe if Trump is given enough chances to fill the ranks of his administration he will through sheer blind luck produce ... well, at least the most adequate people if not the actual best. But in the meantime, like the monkeys, he's mostly flinging poo.

A bit more than eight months into his presidency, even adequacy seems like a high bar for Trump given the dizzying rate of turnover his administration has experienced, from the Russia-compromised national security adviser Mike Flynn to the feckless Reince Priebus to the brief and wondrous tenure of White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci to GOP frenemy Steve Bannon and so on.

Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price joined those august ranks on Friday afternoon with his resignation, bringing a sudden end to yet another Trump administration death-watch by consensus. Price was swallowed by a burgeoning scandal involving his habit of chartering private aircraft on the taxpayer dime (kudos to Politico's Rachana Pradhan and Dan Diamond for ferreting out the facts); he did himself no favors with weasel-like responses, including his offer to cover his share of the flights he had arranged, a bit more than $50,000 on a $400,000 check.

And of course Price had done himself no favors with Trump by being part of the Beltway brain trust that had blithely promised the new president that Obamacare repeal was a slam-dunk, the low-hanging fruit that would kick off the endless, tiresome winning upon which he had campaigned. It's true that as someone who aspired to the presidency, Trump should have known better, but one imagines that he's just as furious and mystified as every other low-information, right-wing voter that the GOP hasn't made good on its promises in this regard. Price was the point man in that bumbling effort and is now the latest victim of Donald Trump, the professional death panel of one. "He better get [the votes]," Trump joked about Price over the summer (to the Boy Scouts of all people). "Otherwise, I will say, 'Tom, you're fired.'"

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The best people. Before long we'll be at the point where if you line up all the Trump administration exes, also-rans and never-weres, they'd stretch clear from the actual White House to Trump's Mar-a-Lago summer White House. There have been high-profile disasters like Flynn, the unregistered foreign lobbyist who was "compromised" by Russia (facts which didn't prevent Trump from regretting his departure); Scaramucci, who incredibly managed to embarrass himself out of President Locker Room Banter's White House, after days on the job as Trump's second communications director; and of course Bannon, who still carries an alt-right Tiki torch for Trump even while vowing war on the rest of the GOP from his once-and-again perch at Breitbart; the unhinged likes of Sebastian Gorka and other Bannonite clash-of-civilizationalists.

Others never made it into the administration: Paul Manafort, whose home was subject to a surprise raid as part of the Russia investigation over the summer; Jason Miller, who was supposed to be Trump's first communications director (making Hope Hicks, the current occupant of that position, Trump's fourth choice for it in the last year); Monica Crowley, the commentator who withdrew from her position under allegations of plagiarism (and subsequently took up work lobbying for a pro-Russian oligarch); and various other nominees who withdrew, from fast-food executive Andy Puzder, who wasn't going to get confirmed, to Daniel Craig, who earlier this month withdrew his nomination to be the number two at the Federal Emergency Management Agency over questions of whether he had falsified records during a previous stint with the government. Hey, it's not like FEMA's important, am I right?

Not everyone has left the administration because of incompetence: Walter Shaub, the head of the Office of Government Ethics quit because the White House didn't so much drain the swamp as gild it. And Chuck Rosenberg, a veteran prosecutor, is resigning as head of the Drug Enforcement Agency because he concluded that President Law-and-Order is not so interested in the actual law part.

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The list goes on long enough that you literally need a scorecard to keep track of all the churn. Somewhere safe in the ivy walls of Harvard, Press Secretary Number One Sean Spicer, is chuckling and reaching for a beer while thanking the good lord he doesn't have to explain the latest departures.

So no, Tom Price won't be the last to depart this dumpster-fire of an administration. Other members of Trump's jet-setting cabinet are under scrutiny for their own use of private aircraft, including Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke (who is also under investigation for allegedly punishing career civil servants for being insufficiently loyal to the dear leader). What's next, a blossoming scandal about Team "Lock Her Up!" all using private email accounts? Why yes, actually. And who knows which heads will roll when special counsel Robert Mueller starts making his case.

It calls to mind the famous lament of another garrulous New Yorker who led a band of merry incompetents: Can't anybody here play this game? At least old Casey Stengel knew what he was doing even if none of his players did. The same can't be said of Trump.

Of course Trump's ever-growing army of the unemployed is a symptom of his administration's problems, not the cause. What was the phrase popularized during the age of Scaramucci? That the fish stinks from the head down?

The Trump administration's biggest problem has been and remains not the staffers and cabinet secretaries who can be driven out but instead the untouchable rot at its core.The biggest hurdle the Trump administration must clear is the president: unqualified, ill-suited, ill-tempered, thin-skinned, impulsive ... and almost certainly the only person who will still be on the job three years from now.

