An article in WaPo by Philip Bump tries to answer the extremely important question, “Who keeps hiring these administration staffers Trump thinks are so terrible?”
Maybe all the problems we are having with our economy, health, foreign relations, race relations, education, hatred, and on and on, are just due to one or two bad apples in the Human Resources department at the White House who are hiring bad staff. We just need to find those incompetent HR people and fire them!
After all, Trump repeatedly promised during his campaign that he would only hire “the best people“. But just look at how many bad hires there have been!
- The most recent is John Bolton. According to tweets from Trump, Bolton is a “wacko”, “a disgruntled boring fool who only wanted to go to war” and “Never had a clue, was ostracized & happily dumped. What a dope!” Many people (including me) probably agree that Bolton is a wacko, but still. Trump says he should have fired Bolton “early on”, but somehow Bolton managed to stay on for a year and a half, despite Trump’s concerns about him.
- Jim Mattis, Trump’s defense secretary for two years. Trump now says Mattis is “our Country’s most overrated General. He talked a lot, but never ‘brought home the bacon’. He was terrible!”
- Jeff Sessions, Trump’s first Attorney General. Trump said that hiring Sessions “was a mistake, a big mistake” and that Sessions was “played like a drum” and “didn’t have a clue”. Last month Trump said that he “didn’t want to make him attorney general”, but somehow he got the job anyway. Who in HR screwed up?
- Daniel Coats, Trump’s director of national intelligence for two years, but now says, “He sat there, he didn’t do anything.”
- Stephen K. Bannon, senior aide, who Trump says was “sloppy” and “leaked more than the Titanic.”
- Anthony Scaramucci, one of Trump’s communications directors. Trump was especially nasty about the Mooch, saying that he was “totally incapable of handling” the job, is “a highly unstable nut job” and displayed “gross incompetence” and “made a fool of himself”. This might have been a simple mistake, as Scaramucci only lasted 11 days in the job. Well, except for the fact that before that he had worked for Trump’s election campaign. Surely someone must have noticed that he would not be a good employee.
- Omarosa Manigault Newman, of whom Trump said afterward “People in the White House hated her. She was vicious, but not smart” and she “never made it, never will”.
- Rex Tillerson, who was Trump’s first secretary of state (a very important job!). After which, Trump said Tillerson is “dumb as a rock”, “lazy as hell” and simply “didn’t have the mental capacity needed” and was “totally ill prepared and ill equipped to be Secretary of State”. Trump said he “couldn’t get rid of him fast enough” but tellingly claimed he was hindered from ousting Tillerson for reasons out of his control. Aha! It was someone else’s fault! Could it have been someone in HR?
UPDATE: At today’s press briefing, a reporter asked press secretary Kayleigh McEnany the following question:
Why does the president keep hiring people that are “dumb as a rock, overrated, way over their heads, whacko, and incompetent”?
Her answer shows that she just might qualify as one of those people who actually is “dumb as a rock” and “way over their heads”:
He likes the model of having a team of rivals, like what we saw in President Lincoln’s administration.
Not only that, but when CBS News asked Donald Trump himself why he keeps hiring “wackos” and “liars” … Trump just stared in silence, like he was dumb (definition of dumb: temporarily unable or unwilling to speak).
