Trump has always demanded loyalty from the people around him far more than their competence. Few of those initially selected to cabinet post would have been chosen by any other Republican president. And, those few competent and qualified people are long gone. Over a third of Trump senior staff was gone in his first year in office. Top to bottom the Trump misadministration is now staffed with incompetent sycophants and it shows.
There have been prominent misspellings in official White House statements (the pharmaceutical company whose treatment Trump took is Regeneron, not Regeron). Trump bungled the name of a well-known Republican senator (that’s James Inhofe, not Imhofe) in a video message. Communications Director Alyssa Farah did much the same in a television interview, repeatedly mispronouncing the name of Trump’s physician (it’s Dr. Sean Conley, with two syllables, not Connelly with three).
It’s easy to dismiss these flubs as minor communications errors, but communicating with the public is one of the most important things White Houses do. And this one has made such a hash of things that it has compounded the very real substantive problems confronting an administration that has more of its fair share of those as well.
In 2016, Trump told voters he was connected with the best people in every field of government, finance and public administration. It was just another of his tens of thousands of lies. The few competent people who joined Trump are long gone. They were fired for being competent or for actually taking their oath of office seriously. Or, they simple got sick of working for an incompetent buffoon. Now the White House is being managed by a crew that is being selected based on loyalty and administered by a personnel office headed by previously fired Trump personal assistant, Johnny McEntee. He was tossed out of the White House in 2018, unable to complete the security clearance process due to his gambling addiction and problems with the accuracy of his personal income tax filings (kind of like his boss).
The source of many of the poor staffing these days in the White House and administration that comes up time and time again in conversations with folks inside and outside the administration is the problematic role played by the Presidential Personnel Office, now headed up by 30-year-old former Trump body man Johnny McEntee, who’s viewed as the “keeper of the flame” in parts of Trump-world, but despised in other corners for foisting unqualified, but sycophantic, young appointees — some even without college degrees — onto their agencies.
It's our own fault. When Trump said he would only hire the best people, he meant the best for himself not the United States.
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