Trumps Problem Isn't Who's Leaving-It's Who's Staying

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https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-problem-isnt-whos-leavingits-whos-staying?ref=home

Trump’s Problem Isn’t Who’s Leaving—It’s Who’s Staying
The press is fixated on all these White House departures. But spare a thought for all those still in the executive branch who would serve the country by leaving.
Margaret Carlson
03.08.18 5:15 AM ET


Gary Cohn resigning as national economic adviser is bad for the adult quotient in the West Wing, as well as for the Dow Jones.

But just as big a worry as who’s leaving is who’s staying. Although not the shiny object that Cohn (or Hope Hicks, Rob Porter, or Steve Bannon), cabinet secretaries who would be long gone in any other administration are hanging on, redecorating (see HUD Secretary Ben Carson’s $31,000 desk while removing anti-discrimination language from his agency’s mission), flying flags over their headquarters to signal they are in charge while turning over public lands to oil drillers excepting his home state of Montana (Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke), and increasing security details with a new $25,000 safe room lest anyone hear him endangering clean water (EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt).

While each has violated norms in his own way, one thing unites them: the president is not insisting they leave because they haven’t violated his standard. And that standard is: If you don’t beat your wife with a picture that proves it, or dump all over Trump and his family in a best-selling book, you are doing a helluva job.

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Like Shulkin, Pruitt is paranoid, diverting agents from environmental crimes to expanding his security detail to round-the-clock unprecedented size, and sweeping his office for bugs. On Tuesday, Democratic Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Thomas Carper sent a letter to Pruitt demanding an explanation by March 21 for how he justified awarding that contract to a business in which a member of his current security detail has a financial interest. That’s reminiscent of another no-bid contract award to the Republican opposition research firm Definers Public Affairs last December to search out "resistance figures" opposed to his agenda.

This pales next to what he’s costing the planet. "I think there's assumptions made that because the climate is warming, that that necessarily is a bad thing. . . it's fairly arrogant for us to think that we know exactly what it should be in 2100." What about the temperature on Wednesday in New York bringing with it snow thunderstorms, a new phenomenon. Pruitt quotes the Bible to defend exploiting the earth, saying that God expects it and hopes it will benefit business. Rescinding the regulation prohibiting the coal industry from dumping their runoff directly into streams benefits mine owners, not mine workers who live nearby.

Trump is sanguine about Cohn leaving even as he carves out exceptions to the trade war. Trump doesn’t follow his annoying globalist but he does follow the markets. On Tuesday, Trump, who knew Cohn was leaving, said he didn’t mind losing people and that, in fact, he had a few other positions “he’d like to change.”

He could begin with Shulkin and Pruitt; let another adult, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, stay on; and move on to Carson, who admits running HUD is harder than brain surgery. Trump likes setting records and losing those three for starters would keep up his current one for turnover—43 percent in his first year, with fewer than half of the 12 positions closest to him still occupied by his initial choices, according to the Brookings Institution. If, as Trump said Tuesday, people are clamoring to join his staff, he will hardly have time to miss them. We certainly won’t.