The White House is bleeding staff, and President Donald Trump’s “tight ship” could be heading into stormy waters, insiders have revealed.
With eight aides announcing their exits this summer alone, Trump has a much smaller circle of people he actually trusts, people with knowledge of the exodus told Semafor.
The list is topped by press secretary Karoline Leavitt and deputy chief of staff James Blair, who left in April to run Trump’s outside political operations for the midterms. Leavitt, who is departing to focus on her small children, is expected to stay in Trumpworld, but her exit from the White House has been seen as a major loss for Trump’s PR machine, given her role as one of his most visible defenders.
“You’ve begun to see a deterioration of the tight ship that was run in the first year,” one person close to the White House said. However, this insider insisted that staff changes in the West Wing will ultimately be positive because a lot of the old guard “are f---ing obese now, from the power and from the influence.”
Also packing up his desk is James Braid, White House director of legislative affairs and a longtime Trump aide, who announced earlier this month he would be quitting within weeks.
Nearly a dozen staffers have left lately, including deputy press secretary Abigail Jackson, Deputy National Security Adviser Andy Baker, special assistant to the president and director of Cabinet affairs Lea Bardon, Stephen Miller adviser Emily Underwood, director of media affairs Sonny Joy Nelson, deputy director of legislative affairs Pace McMullan, and Sriram Krishnan, who helped shape the administration’s AI policy.
Searches are underway to replace Leavitt and Braid, and a group of younger staffers is reportedly eager to move up in Trumpworld. But few people close to Trump believe he’s ready to bring in a wave of new faces, the insiders added.
Sean Spicer, one of Trump’s first-term press secretaries, doesn’t see that as a problem. He acknowledged the senior staff changes could hurt, but agreed with several current and former aides who describe Trump as comfortable enough in his own instincts to lean on a small circle. “The president’s comfort in the job is exponential to what it was in Trump 1.0,” Spicer told Semafor.
“This movement is bigger than any one staff member, and the president’s mission to make America greater than ever before will continue unabated,” White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said in a statement to Semafor.
The exodus extends beyond Trump’s closest aides. Roughly 11.4 percent of his Senate-confirmed appointees have left the administration during his second term so far, a pace that far outstrips his first term, according to a Partnership for Public Service analysis covered by GovExec.
More senior officials are weighing whether to leave in the coming months, Bloomberg News reported. Staff turnover ahead of midterm elections isn’t unusual, but some exits, including Leavitt’s, caught staffers off guard, according to the report.
The shrinking inner circle comes as Trump grapples with a failing war effort in Iran, a trade war with Canada that’s expected to push prices even higher, and historically low approval ratings.
Democrats are widely expected to retake control of the House, and possibly the Senate, in the midterms, a shift that could expose the administration to a wave of subpoenas and congressional investigations.
Filling the newly emptied roles won’t be easy, according to Lisa Camooso Miller, a former Republican National Committee communications director. “This also is, without question, the hardest time to hire into an administration,” she told Bloomberg.
“The real question is, who’s going to fill these roles?” she said. “Will they be the right people, and will they be people that the president listens to? It’s not so much about the vacancies, but who’s willing to go into the second two years of an administration that largely will face headwinds with a change in Congress.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment on this story.
