Then there were the former women of the Trump
administration. Stephanie
Grisham “didn’t have what it takes and that was obvious
from the beginning,” according to Trump. Grisham started with the Trump
campaign in 2015, served as his communications director and press secretary in
the White House before becoming Melania Trump’s chief of staff—all despite clear incompetence “from the beginning!” Truly Trump is a
personnel softy. Alyssa Farah Griffin was a “Backbencher in the Trump
Administration,” who “had only glowing reviews of the Trump Administration
until long after she left”—long in this case being roughly a month, when she
publicly condemned him after the January 6 assault on the Capitol. “When you
give a crazed, crying lowlife a break, and give her a job at the White House, I
guess it just didn’t work out,” Trump said of reality TV villainess Omarosa
Manigault Newman, raising the question of why even a softie like Trump would give
that kind of break. It seems like the only former staffer Trump didn’t later
insult and disown was Rob
Porter, who resigned in the face of spousal abuse allegations. (“We wish
him well…. He did a good job.”)
Observers
might be confused how the man who swore he hired only the “very
best people” would surround himself with such a cavalcade of feckless dolts. When Fox
News host Bret Baier asked him that question last year, Trump blamed his own
Washington naïveté for the bad apples in his otherwise spectacular, gilded
administration. “I now know Washington probably better than anybody,” he said. “I know the good ones and the bad ones and we will have really great,
strong people.”
Having run the administration with the highest
turnover rate in history presumably gave Trump plenty of experience to avoid making the same mistakes, but
it’s not like later-term personnel were much better than their predecessors in
his own estimation. John
Bolton, Trump’s third national security adviser, was a “dope” who “Never had a clue, was
ostracized & happily dumped.” Mark
Esper, Trump’s last confirmed defense secretary, was “weak and totally ineffective”; Attorney General Bill
Barr, who parted ways with Trump only after belying
his claims of widespread 2020 voter fraud and later said that Trump “shouldn’t
be anywhere near the Oval Office,” was “Weak, Slow Moving,
Lethargic, Gutless, and Lazy” (though once Barr endorsed him this year anyway,
the magnanimous ex-president retracted the “Lethargic” label).
