I thought this article from The Onion was a joke:
In an effort to make the frequent festivities for departing staffers more efficient, White House officials announced Tuesday that the administration is now just holding one continuous going-away party.
No, really, I did. But then came this report from WaPo just yesterday:
Josh Raffel, a senior communications official in the White House who has been a go-to crisis manager and who has worked closely with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, is leaving the administration, officials confirmed Tuesday.
Raffel’s departure, which will take place within the next two months, comes as Kushner, President Trump’s senior adviser, is under increasing scrutiny for his inability to secure a complete FBI background check for his security clearance, and with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation intensifying.
And Steve Benen adds:
The Raffel news came just one day after Joseph Yun, a top U.S. diplomat overseeing North Korea policy, announced his retirement.
And that news came three days after Elaine Duke, the deputy secretary of Homeland Security, announced her retirement.
And I’d quote more from Steve, but we have an interruption here! Communications Director Hope Hicks has resigned:
White House communications director Hope Hicks, one of President Donald Trump’slongest-serving and closest aides, is resigning, the White House confirmed Wednesday.
Hicks’ departure capped her meteoric rise from Trump Organization communications aide to the upper crust of power in Washington in just a few years, during which Hicks sought to maintain a remarkably low profile for someone in her position.
Her resignation will undoubtedly reverberate for months to come inside the West Wing, where Trump will find himself for the first time in more than three years without the constant presence of his most loyal aide — who is among the handful of aides who worked with Trump at his company, during the rollicking campaign and into the White House. [CNN]
Some of these folks came along for the Trump ride and discovered it was excessively bumpy, while others are long-time bureaucrats with a lot of expertise, and their retirements really do hurt our government.
So what to think of these goings? There’s the temptation to take a bit of schadenfreude in an unprecedented wave of people leaving government, and Steve Benen tries to keep a list of all the important people who leave, which can be found at the above link. I fear his list is becoming unwieldy.
But behind each leave-taking is another step into chaos. True, for the high level ideologues such as Bannon and Gorka, it’s just as well that they and their peculiar beliefs and theories are gone. But a lot of these people have real, useful skills, and those exits destabilizes our government more and more, leaving us vulnerable both in the short-term and in the long-term. How so? Because we miss possibilities, we fail to pursue activities to take advantage of opportunities. Our current government, which is basically leaderless, fails to pursue possibilities and I have to wonder if, 20 years in the future, we’ll look back on this clown show and wonder how much betters things could have been if we’d had a competent leader in place, rather than our self-centered amateur.
When will Speaker Ryan finally act?
