Eight days after being sworn in as president, Donald Trump spoke on the phone with Russian President Vladimir Putin while surrounded by five of his top advisers, as you can see in the above photo.
The chaos of the Trump administration, in one picture
With Steve Bannon’s ouster, four of these five Trump advisers are now gone.
Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty, Annotation: Javier Zarracina/Vox
Andrew Prokop is a senior politics correspondent at Vox, covering the White House, elections, and political scandals and investigations. He’s worked at Vox since the site’s launch in 2014, and before that, he worked as a research assistant at the New Yorker’s Washington, DC, bureau.
And now four of those five advisers are gone from the White House.
The ouster of White House chief strategist Steve Bannon Friday was just the latest personnel shift in an administration that’s had a remarkable amount of turnover so far.
Of the others in the photo:
- National Security Adviser Michael Flynn didn’t even last a month in his job — he was fired in February after news broke that he had misled the vice president about his contacts with the Russian ambassador during the transition.
- Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and press secretary Sean Spicer departed in July after Anthony Scaramucci was hired as communications director — Spicer quit in protest, and Priebus was ousted.
- Only Vice President Mike Pence — who was elected and can’t actually be fired, except through impeachment — remains.
And there’s been much more high-level White House turnover even than that.
- Trump’s first communications director, Mike Dubke, who never had much of a public profile, departed in May.
- His replacement, the infamous Anthony Scaramucci, was then fired by the new Chief of Staff John Kelly just 10 days after being named to the job — apparently because Scaramucci was incompetent and unqualified.
- And Deputy White House Chief of Staff Katie Walsh, a Priebus ally, left the administration in March, after her rivals attempted to brand her as a leaker.
That’s not to say that everyone has been cleared out. Many of the top White House staffers first appointed in January still hold their posts, including senior advisers Jared Kushner and Stephen Miller, counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway, press aides Hope Hicks and Dan Scavino, legislative affairs director Marc Short, and White House counsel Don McGahn. Furthermore, under any president, White House staffers have difficult and stressful jobs, and turnover naturally occurs.
Still, it’s remarkable that Trump has burned through so many of his choices for senior jobs in less than seven months in office. For instance, his predecessor Barack Obama went through four official chiefs of staff and one interim one over his eight years in office — something Trump mocked at the time:
Trump is far exceeding that pace — not just for his own chief of staff (who had the shortest stint of anyone since the position was created) but for a whole swath of top-level White House jobs.
Interestingly, there’s been far less turnover in Trump’s Cabinet so far, with the only change being John Kelly’s move from secretary of homeland security to White House chief of staff. This makes sense — firing Cabinet members is more of a headache, since Trump would have to get their replacements confirmed by the Senate. But he has a much freer hand with filling White House vacancies.
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