href="#litres_trial_promo">15 By contrast, Barack Obama’s 2008 transition team had begun vetting potential nominees before the election even took place, as did Hillary Clinton’s transition team in 2016.16 The Trump transition team’s failure to do this meant that the time-consuming process of gathering documents for background checks and financial disclosure requirements delayed the confirmation process for some nominees. Vetting derailed the process altogether for others, notably Trump’s nominee as Labor Secretary, Andrew Puzder.17 Puzder eventually withdrew from consideration after revelations about his business practices and personal life eroded support for his confirmation even among Republicans. Two days before Puzder withdrew, Michael Flynn resigned as Trump’s national security adviser after less than a month on the job amid controversy over his contacts with the Russian government. Proper vetting earlier on might have avoided those embarrassments.18
The Trump transition team largely ignored another important aspect of personnel: sub-Cabinet appointments. In all, more than 550 positions that the new president is expected to fill require Senate confirmation. By the end of his first hundred days in office, all fifteen of Trump’s nominees to fill the Cabinet had been confirmed by the Senate (the last, Alex Acosta to be Secretary of Labor, on the ninety-ninth day), as had six of the seven other Cabinet-level appointments that require Senate confirmation (with the seventh, the U.S. Trade Representative, being sworn in on May 15). But the president had not yet even nominated 465 of the other executive-branch posts requiring Senate confirmation.19 Thorough vetting of these nominees also proved to be a problem.
Well into the summer of 2017, hundreds of key jobs remained unfilled, stymieing the work of departments and agencies. (Most of the State Department’s top thirty-eight appointed positions remained empty, for example.20) Perhaps compounding the problem, the White House Office of Presidential Personnel, the unit that oversees the selection process for presidential appointments, had a much smaller staff than its predecessors in previous administrations, with fewer than forty employees compared to more than one hundred under Bill Clinton.21 By the end of July 2017, only fifty nominees total had been confirmed, in contrast to the more than 225 at the same point in the Obama administration in 2009.22 Although Trump publicly claimed that he purposely left many of the posts unfilled because “they’re unnecessary to have,” evidence suggested that the vacancies had more to do with a chaotic and under-staffed selection process that, when Trump became president, appeared to be excessively micromanaged by warring factions within the White House.23
Those warring factions reflected Trump’s preferred management style. In business, Trump liked to establish competing power centers with conflicting points of view, and he wanted to bring that style to the White House. Thus, during the transition, Trump embraced a “team of rivals” approach to staffing his inner circle of advisors, with Chief of Staff Priebus and Chief Strategist Bannon epitomizing the competing camps.24 He appointed Kellyanne Conway, his third and final campaign manager, as another Counselor to the President. But he also surrounded himself with family, naming his son-in-law Jared Kushner, a former real estate developer and newspaper owner with no experience in government, as Senior Advisor, and his daughter Ivanka (Kushner’s wife), a former fashion model and Trump Organization executive, as Assistant to the President. Rather than giving his chief of staff seniority over the other advisors, Trump initially gave equal access and authority to Priebus and Bannon, and provided many others as well with “walk in” privileges (that is, the ability to speak to the president in the Oval Office without making an appointment). Many believed Kushner, with his family connection, to be—as Kushner himself reportedly claimed—“first among equals.”25 Certainly he occupied an advantageous position to sway the president.
Photo 3 Counselor to the President Steve Bannon and White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, the most prominent early symbols of Trump’s “team of rivals” approach to staffing.
MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images
Some presidents have used a “team of rivals” approach to great effect. Franklin Roosevelt, for example, used competition among his staff to extract the best possible range of policy options.26 But for a president like Trump, with no government experience and an apparent lack of interest in the specifics of policy, the approach proved far less productive—at least in the early months of his administration. From his first day in office, the media focused on the power struggle among his senior advisors,27 with political observers noting that Trump thrived on chaos.28 Within a month, however, the chaos came to be described as a problem.29 Although apparently intended on Trump’s part, the process he embraced arguably made enacting policy more difficult and led to a variety of self-inflicted wounds, with the warring camps often leaking damaging information on their rivals to the media.
Policy remained the wild card during the Trump transition. Unlike Hillary Clinton, a policy wonk who surrounded herself with policy advisors and working groups, Trump’s presidential campaign had avoided developing substantive white papers; his specific policy stances on many issues were still a mystery after his election.30 Observers looked at his appointments for clues. While his attorney general and homeland security secretary backed away from civil rights measures and ramped up enforcement of immigration law, as promised in the campaign, the “team of rivals” approach added little clarity in most policy areas. Even into the early weeks of his administration, Trump governed as he had campaigned, with little interest in the specifics of his legislative proposals and a willingness to reverse course on his broad-brush pronouncements. He deemed NATO a “bulwark of international peace” after months of calling it “obsolete,” authorized U.S. military intervention in Syria after years of opposing it, declared that China was not a currency manipulator after repeatedly railing against China for currency manipulation, expressed a willingness to renegotiate NAFTA after promising to withdraw from it on “Day One,” and abruptly fired FBI director James Comey for (as the White House initially claimed) mishandling the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s e-mail server after praising him for the way he handled that investigation during the campaign.31 Legislatively, he backed a House measure repealing the Affordable Care Act that undercut a variety of his campaign pledges on the topic, then called the bill “mean,” then proceeded to support even more stringent versions in the Senate.32 As Trump told reporters in April 2017, “I like to think of myself as a very flexible person. I don’t have to have one specific way,” adding that particularly with regard to foreign policy, “I don’t like to say where I’m going and what I’m doing.”33
In short, the transition and early months of the Trump administration fell short of the ideal launch of a new presidency by falling short on appointments, by embracing an advising process that did not seem to help the president get the information he needed, and by failing to articulate clear policy directions on many issues. Both of Trump’s predecessors came to office under much more difficult external conditions: Bush after a contested election that was not decided until December, and Obama in the midst
