Throughout his presidential campaign Donald J. Trump extolled his business acumen and management skills, and just before his inauguration he insisted the transition to his administration was going “very, very smoothly.”

Yet so chaotic was his first year in office that in January, after publication of the Michael Wolff tell-all, “Fire and Fury,” the president had to publicly defend himself as a “stable genius.”

The White House suffered a staff turnover rate of 34 percent during Mr. Trump’s first year, a rate that would be unfathomable at nearly any for-profit enterprise. Even by political standards, it’s off the charts — triple that of the Obama administration, and twice that of Ronald Reagan, the previous record-holder — according to a study by the Brookings Institution.

And that was before the recent messy departure of Rob Porter as staff secretary in the wake of spousal abuse allegations, or the announcement on Wednesday by the White House communications director Hope Hicks — the fourth person to hold the job — that she, too, was leaving.