Trump surprisingly has made some pretty bad personnel choices.
Agreed, and he has paid the price for almost every one.
Agree
Maybe, but I think Trump thought they would be patriots first. It’s a hard lesson to learn that people this high-up in the federal government would sell out, or destroy, their own country to get their way.
I don’t there’s much for choices. During 8 years of fundamental transformation, Obama evidently cleaned house.
Meanwhile Trump still has unfilled positions because he went from the Russia bs to impeachment. You can blame repubs for that to some extent. McConnell said no, you can’t get anyone through right now. Repubs were around while Obama was prez and they didn’t do squat.
Yes. He trusts people at their word, and therefore fails to have them vetted. He should have learned by now that this is not a business environment. This is back-stabbing, agenda-driven, politics.
Ironically, one thing I actually believed from his reality show that he was good at picking people. He is not.
President Trump is a Washington outsider. In an interview a couple of weeks ago, in response to a question about having to fire so many of his picks, he said that he before he was elected president he had only been to Washington 17 times.
I’d like to see any other outsider do a better job instead of criticize as if it’s easy.
Yes, and as Morton Blackwell always would remind us, personnel is policy.
What has amazed me about Trump is he seemed, for a VERY long time, how evil and demented the Democrats and the professional bureaucracy is...how self-serving and self-enriching and criminally deviant they are right down to their soul-less cores. How on Earth could he have not understood this? Practically everyone here knows it, it’s in plain sight for anyone who looks. Trump didn’t understand this coming in, how he didn’t I’ll never understand.
I think he was insulated by his massive wealth...and thought it was all just politics because he had rubbed elbows with so many of them socially for decades...politicians always kiss the ass, wink and nod with the Uber-wealthy. It’s how they grift. But he didn’t grasp the evil down deep in them. And that is the root of his many poor personnel choices, I think. He took advice...from THEM, them who wanted to kill him as quickly and neatly as possible.
I guess all we can be glad for is that he surely KNOWS now. But his first term was only a shadow of what it could have been had he understood their rotted, fetid souls going in.
“Trump surprisingly has made some pretty bad personnel choices.”
Yes, he picked many swamp/beltway type Republicans. They are not his backers and supporters. He gave short shrift to many who helped his campaign. I think he has gotten bad advice from his daughter/son-in-law. He needs to stop listening to both of them.
I have said it, again and again. Mattis was a poor choice. Never liked him back when he ran 1st Marine Division.
I don’t think it’s surprising at all.
People here on FR seem to have no idea what a gargantuan job staffing the federal government is. Some time, go to D.C. and walk down the Old Executive Office Building. These are people supposedly “close” to the president. You see floor upon floor, office upon office of “Assistant Associate to White House Boot Polishing” kind of titles.
When Reagan came in, his transition was heralded as the greatest ever. Harvard Business School wrote it up as a case study. Why? Because Ed Meese worked with Heritage Foundation from the Convention on to identify candidates in every single position, and the vetting started the day after the election. They had almost the top 300 candidates vetted by FEBRUARY. This is insane, but it would not have been possible without a massive connected think tank like Heritage.
Well, Trump didn’t have any such thing. Nothing even close. First, no one thought he would win, so no one put out any effort on the transition. (I sent Sessions, his head of Transition, a long memo in the summer of 2016 outlining the Reagan success and urging him to identify at least 100 key people to have vetted before March). Second, the only ones around who had connections to people who “knew how to do the job” were GOPe and Bushies. They, of course, were only to happy to help. And finally, even when people had the creds, it didn’t mean they were Trumpers (i.e., Tillerson, Kelly, Mattis, McMaster).
If you want a real-world look at this in action, go no further than Stalin. He purged virtually ALL of the Soviet military leadership in the early 1930s because he didn’t trust them. But he paid a very heavy price. His replacements were loyal, but utterly inexperienced. In 1941 he found out just how inexperienced they were-—but most of them learned. However, it cost the Soviets millions of casualties and nearly lost the war before they figured it out.
Trump is in the same spot, though the purge is much slower and piecemeal due to the Senate confirmation process. I should mention that was a fourth, major hurdle Trump had that Reagan didn’t have. Reagan’s senate was committed to getting his guys in. Trump’s senate was a bunch of butthurt, has-been, neverTrump snakes who STILL haven’t approved all his nominees.
This is a major reason he can’t fire Wray. The senate won’t confirm a real Swamp Drainer.