Democracy & Government

Don’t Let the Door Hit You on Your Way Out

People are leaving the Trump administration in droves — fired or under their own steam.

When Things Fall Apart

The White House. (Photo by Brent Pliskow/ flickr CC 2.0)

It’s just happened again. Someone has fled the White House. This time under her own volition. The CEO of Campbell’s Soup, Denise Morrison, stepped down today from Trump’s Manufacturing Jobs Initiative. She was preceded a hour earlier by Inge Thulin of 3M and Richard Trumpka, president of the AFL-CIO, yesterday afternoon.

After some of her co-members fled over the weekend, Morrison had initially said she’d stay on. But evidently President Trump’s news conference yesterday changed her mind. She said in a statement today:

Racism and murder are unequivocally reprehensible and are not morally equivalent to anything else that happened in Charlottesville. I believe the president should have been — and still needs to be — unambiguous on that point.

So great was the outflow from Trump’s two business councils — the Manufacturing Jobs Initiative and the Strategic and Policy Forum — that he announced via his favorite medium that he, yes, he, was ending both endeavors.

The announcement came after reporting from both The New York Times and Bloomberg that the remaining members of the Strategic and Policy Forum had scheduled a conference call to discuss the group’s future.

Although the president has stated many times that his White House is not “in chaos”

… the facts and figures tell a different story. Not only has Trump failed to fill a record number of political positions, but the roster of administration has-beens is quite long. Luckily, the Los Angeles Times is keeping track for us. In their graphic-filled newsletter, they update each prominent exit with the number of days served and reason for leaving. Check it out so you don’t miss a beat. And don’t miss Vanity Fair’s tongue-in-cheek take, “Trump Has Fired Enough Staffers for an All-Trump Season of Dancing with the Stars.”

The Los Angeles Times’ running list of White House exits.

 


 

Read more installments in our series “While He was Tweeting” — keeping an eye on Trump’s wrecking ball.

Kristin Miller

Kristin Miller is a senior producer for Billmoyers.com. She has worked on Now with Bill Moyers, Bill Moyers on Faith & Reason, Moyers on America and Bill Moyers Journal. She’s also been a producer for TED, Sesame Street and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

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