White House Staff Turmoil: A Look at Presidential History
John Feehery
The removal of a White House press secretary after only five days has reignited questions about stability inside Donald Trump's administration. Yet staffing churn is common across presidencies, especially in the second half of a second term, when midterm losses and fading approval often force abrupt changes.
In the months before a bruising 2006 midterm election, President George W. Bush let press secretary Scott McClellan go and withdrew the nomination of his close associate Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. He waited until after the midterms, when Republicans lost control of Congress, to fire Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who had overseen an increasingly unpopular war in Iraq.
History repeats itself, though not exactly.
Last week, President Donald Trump abruptly ended Katie Zacharia's tenure just five days after she took on the role of White House press secretary. Beyond her dismissal, the most notable piece of information Zacharia announced was that Kimberly Guilfoyle had been removed from her post as ambassador to Greece.
There is speculation that War Secretary Pete Hegseth may be at risk of being replaced, particularly after the president rejected a plan to livestream the execution of Nidal Hasan — the terrorist who shot 13 people at the Fort Hood military base in 2009.
Clearly, there are differences between the two presidencies.
McClellan held the press secretary job for three years, not five days. Miers faced no scandal when her nomination was withdrawn; the media and the Senate simply questioned her qualifications. And the war with Iran is neither as bloody nor as costly as America's invasion of Iraq.
Still, the back half of any U.S. president's second term can be rough terrain.
During President Ronald Reagan's second term, his communications team had to manage the fallout from the Iran-Contra affair. In President Bill Clinton's second term, the Monica Lewinsky scandal dominated the news. President Richard Nixon faced the threat of impeachment in his second term. President Barack Obama dealt with the scandal surrounding the Benghazi consulate attack in Libya throughout his second term, which also engulfed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Staff turnover is also not unusual at the White House under any president, especially in a second term, particularly when voters are angry and polls show a bleak outlook.
Every midterm election is a referendum on the president, and it is not rare for the ruling party to be punished at the ballot box. In fact, in 18 of the 20 midterm elections held over the past 80 years, the president's party has lost seats in Congress.
The Trump administration is indeed facing difficulties from the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran and high energy prices. But the dismissal of a press secretary can hardly be read as a sign of a serious crisis within the apparatus.
It is unclear how Zacharia got the job. She did not work on Trump's re-election campaign, and while she has appeared in the media, she is not a professional journalist. She spent a brief stint in the press office of the Department of Homeland Security when Kristi Noem was secretary. But given Noem's short tenure, which was dogged by scandals and ended with her dismissal in March, that can hardly be considered positive experience.
Press reports suggest the president himself made the decision to hire Zacharia, and that White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles was not an essential part of the process.
Trump saw a problem with Zacharia and acted quickly to cut his losses. He has made clear that he is in control and that his operation is not "collapsing" or "in chaos" as newspaper headlines claim.
Not every president acts so decisively.
President Joe Biden, for instance, should have done the same with his final press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre. She was no more competent than Zacharia, yet Biden kept her in the job for three years, roughly the length of McClellan's tenure.
Hopefully Trump and his team will draw a valuable lesson from this unfortunate episode. Hiring people who lack competence, then letting them face the press and be destroyed, is bad for the White House and bad for those who are hired and then forced out.
Trump deserves credit for moving quickly to remove Zacharia before she became more of an embarrassment. He also deserves credit for firing Kimberly Guilfoyle, a personal friend, over corruption allegations in Europe.
But what the president really needs is a better process for hiring capable people in the first place. Perhaps next time, he should consult the chief of staff.
The views in this article are the author's and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
