Donald Trump Jim Bourg | Reuters

The Trump administration is abnormally vicious

This context is necessary to make sense of Wednesday's big news: NBC News's report that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called the president a "moron" after a July 20 meeting. In the months prior to the comment, Trump had repeatedly contradicted Tillerson and publicly undercut him. In early April, for example, Tillerson said that the Trump administration would be fine with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad staying in power. Just days later, Trump ordered the US to bomb Assad for the first time, and Tillerson was forced to publicly reverse himself. On June 9, Tillerson called on Saudi Arabia and its allies to end their political isolation of Qatar; less than two hours later, Trump sided with the Saudis by labeling Qatar "a funder of terrorism at a very high level." The "moron" comment thus appears to be a backlash to the lack of policy direction and public reprimands by the president, at least in part. "It's not like Cabinet officials are just walking around calling the president a moron," as Musgrave puts it. There are a number of examples of top-level officials being mistreated on top of Tillerson, Kelly, Sessions, and McMaster: During an April meeting with United Nations ambassadors from various countries, the president joked about firing America's representative, Nikki Haley. "Now, does everybody like Nikki? Otherwise she could easily be replaced," Trump said.

When Steve Bannon was in the White House, Trump publicly dismissed his importance, telling the Wall Street Journal that he was just "a guy who works for me" who "was not involved in my campaign until very late."

Trump reportedly referred to Kelly's predecessor, Reince Priebus, by the deliberately demeaning nickname "Reincey" and mused about shipping him off to Greece. Presidents don't always treat their staff well: Lyndon Johnson would famously force staff members to follow him the bathroom while dressing them down. But the severity and frequency of Trump's outbursts, in some cases without any clear cause, really is not normal. "You're dealing with very high stakes, so there are some tense professional interactions," says Julia Azari, a scholar of the presidency at Marquette University. "But the more those aren't personal, and that expectations are clear, and people who are being yelled at are people who haven't met expectations, that's obviously going to be better management." Sessions is perhaps the most telling example. He's the Cabinet member who's perhaps most closely aligned with Trump ideologically and most willing to follow orders. It was Sessions, for example, who signed off on Trump's highly unusual decision to fire FBI Director James Comey after the director refused to back off from the investigation into the Trump campaign's ties to Russia. Yet Trump repeatedly humiliated Sessions, both by screaming at him in private and by publicly musing about firing him. The cause was Sessions recusing himself from the Russia investigation, a decision he made to try to take political heat off the Trump administration. Sessions, as Musgrave puts it, "gave almost nothing but loyalty and still got abused." Sessions's treatment illustrates how pervasive and defining these levels of attacks were. There is no way to say that Trump's management of his subordinates is normal or healthy, even in a pressure-cooker environment like the West Wing. "It's important to emphasize that this isn't just a bunch of academics pissing and moaning about Trump because we don't like him," adds Azari. "There were many qualified Republican candidates who would not be having these problems."

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