These are dark days inside the White House. The fledgling administration has sprung innumerable leaks, evidence not just of a government riven by infighting, but also President Donald Trump’s deliberately chaotic management style. “The way that Trump treats his senior staff is one of those places where he is totally and completely off the charts,” writes The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza, who is usually given to normalizing Trump. “Most presidents do everything they can to show public support for the men and women in their inner circle...Trump, on the other hand, not only seems entirely comfortable airing his issues with senior staff but also appears to enjoy doing so.”

In the popular imagination, Trump is the boss behind the big desk who chews out failing employees and yells, “You’re fired.” There has been real continuity between the Trump of Celebrity Apprentice and the president who keeps his underlings in a state of permanent insecurity. The main difference is that he hasn’t fired anyone of importance—not explicitly, anyway. National security advisor Michael Flynn resigned on Monday night after it became clear he had misled the White House about phone calls with the Russian ambassador late last year.

Conway at 4:07: "Gen. Flynn does enjoy the full confidence of the president."

Spicer at 5:11: "The president is evaluating the situation." — Terence Burlij (@burlij) February 13, 2017

Two other top members of the Trump administration remain on the hot seat: Press secretary Sean Spicer, whom Trump is reportedly trying to replace because of the president’s disappointment with his press conferences (and also, it seems, for being unmanned by a Melissa McCarthy imitation on Saturday Night Live); and chief of staff Reince Priebus, who is being blamed by some in Trump’s circle for the bad publicity of the first three weeks, including the botched rollout of the executive order restricting immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries (Priebus also pushed Trump to hire Spicer). Their days may be numbered, too.



By some accounts, a staff shakeup is exactly what the Trump administration needs. After all, it’s fairly common for new governments to get off to a rocky start until the president finds a team that gels. That was certainly true of presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton. Writing in Axios, Mike Allen predicted that Trump’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner “will outlast everyone. Many Republicans think the two will recognize the damage to Trump’s brand and their own—and help engineer a return to a more conventional West Wing.” Writing in Politico, Josh Dawsey and Alex Isenstadt suggest that Trump was “mulling an early staff shake-up.” To add to these rumors, Trump reportedly is meeting on Tuesday with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who has been hovering like a vulture in the hopes of returning to Trump’s inner circle.



The idea that a staff shake-up might bring order to a chaotic White House is superficially plausible, but crumbles on closer inspection. Unlike Carter, Reagan, and Clinton, Trump has no political or governmental experience whatsoever. His management style—fomenting chaos and insecurity among his subordinates so they compete to please him—might have served him well as an entertainer but less well in enterprises that involve more than performance and brand-burnishing. Hence Trump’s long string of business failures and bankruptcies in fields outside of entertainment and brand licensing.