Back in 2012, Donald Trump thought going through top staff too quickly kept a president from passing his agenda.
The departure of White House Chief of Staff John Kelly at the end of 2018, announced Saturday, is just the latest confirmation that President Donald Trump burns through senior staff much faster than normal presidents.
Trump hasn’t yet been in office for two years, but many of his original picks for top White House positions (and sometimes even their first replacements) have either been fired, been bullied into resigning, or quit in protest .
This seems like a problem for any large organization — something that longtime business executive Donald Trump might have some experience with, and might even have been able to foresee as an issue.
Which, of course, he did. When the president in question was Barack Obama (and the problem of staff turnover wasn’t nearly as bad).
Obama did have unusually high chief of staff turnover during his first term, which began in January 2009. His first chief, Rahm Emanuel, left in October 2010 to run for mayor of Chicago. Three months later (with staffer Pete Rouse serving as interim chief of staff in the meantime), Obama selected Bill Daley — who departed after a year in January 2012. He was replaced with Jack Lew, who served until January 2013 — the beginning of his second term. So depending on how you count, Obama had either three or four chiefs of staff during his first four years in office.
That was a lot in historical context — the previous 11 presidents, going back to the creation of the position in 1946 under Harry S.
