The talent vacuum that is the Trump administration
The investigations can veer off in wildly unexpected directions, so no White House nook or cranny is safe.
After an eruption, volcanoes sometimes collapse at the centre.
The magma chamber empties out and the volcano falls in on itself, leaving a caldera and a fractured ring of stone around the void, covered by deadening ash.
That’s about the shape of Washington after the last stunning fortnight. The White House at the centre just collapsed in on itself and the nation’s policy apparatus is covered in ash.
I don’t say that because I think the Comey-russia scandal will necessarily lead to impeachment. I have no idea where the investigations will go. I say it because White Houses, like all organisations, run on talent, and the Trump White House has just become a human resources disaster area.
We have seen White Houses engulfed by scandal before. But we have never seen a White House implode this early. The Nixon, Reagan and Clinton White Houses had hired quality teams by the time their scandals came. They could continue to function, sort of, even when engulfed.
The Trump administration, on the other hand, has hundreds of senior and mid-level positions to fill, and few people of quality or experience are going to want to take them.
Few people of any quality or experience are going to want to join a team that is toxic. Nobody is going to want to become the next HR Mcmaster, a formerly respected figure who is now permanently tainted because he threw his lot in with Donald Trump. Nobody is going to want to join a self-cannibalizing piranha squad whose main activity is lawyering up.
That means even if the Trump presidency survives, it will be staffed by the sort of C- and D-list flora and fauna who will make more mistakes, commit more scandals and lead to more dysfunction.
Running a White House is insanely hard. It requires a few thousand extremely smart and savvy people who are willing to work crazy hours and strain their family lives because they fundamentally believe in the mission and because they truly admire the president.
Even on its best early days, the Trump White House never had that.
Trump was able to recruit some talented people, mostly on the foreign policy side, but organisational cultures are set from the top, and a culture of selfishness has always marked this administration.
Even before Inauguration Day, the level of leaking out of this White House was unprecedented, as officials sought to curry favor with the press corps and as factions vied with one another.
But over the past 10 days the atmosphere has become extraordinary. Senior members of the White House staff have trained their sights on the man they serve. Every day now there are stories in The Times, The Washington Post and elsewhere in which unnamed White House officials express disdain, exasperation, anger and disrespect for their boss.
As the British say, the staff is jumping ship so fast they are leaving the rats gaping and applauding.
Trump, for his part, is resentfully returning fire, blaming his underlings for his own mistakes, complaining that Mcmaster is a pain, speculating about firing and demoting people.
This is a White House in which the internal nickname for the chief of staff is Rancid. The organisational culture is about to get worse. People who have served in administrations under investigation speak eloquently about how miserable it is.
You never know which of your friends is about to rat you out. No personal communication is really secure. You never know which of your colleagues is going to break ranks and write the tell-all memoir, and you think that maybe it should be you. Even people not involved in the original scandal can find themselves caught up in the maelstrom and see their careers ruined. Legal costs soar.
The investigations can veer off in wildly unexpected directions, so no White House nook or cranny is safe. As current staff leaves or gets pushed out, look for Trump to try to fill the jobs with business colleagues who also have no experience in government.
It’s striking that the only person who this week seems excited to take a Trump administration job is Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke, who made his name as a TV performance artist calling the Black Lives Matter movement ‘‘black slime,’’ and who now claims he has been hired to serve in the Department of Homeland Security.
Congressional Republicans seem to think they can carry on and legislate despite the scandal, but since 1933 we have no record of significant legislation without strong presidential leadership.
Members of this Congress are not going to be judged by where they set the corporate tax rate. They will be defined by where they stood on Donald Trump’s threat to civic integrity.
The implosion at the centre is going to affect everything. The Trump administration may survive, but any hopes it will become an effective governing organisation are dashed.