Previously on White House Apprentice, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders—alias “Suckabee”—spun so many yarns in the act of protecting her lord and savior Donald Trump that even Fox News was giving her the side-eye. She has been called out on her lies and rightly dragged for them, but still she persisted—until now, that is. Suckabee wants out.
Sources inside the White House and close to the administration have told CBS News that Sanders—who became Trump’s personal spin doctor after former communications director Hope Hicks left—has said that she plans to leave the administration at the end of the year.
Those same sources say that principal deputy press secretary Raj Shah also wants to leave, but he has not indicated exactly when he will depart.
This administration has seen more turnover than a toddler tumbling class. People come and go through the revolving door that is Trump’s White House. Trump is not even halfway through his term as president, yet the turnover rate for his administration at this point is 51 percent. His first year in office saw a turnover rate of 34 percent, which is nearly four times higher than the turnover in the first year of the Obama administration.
As Mr. Big said to me in a conversation yesterday, people don’t quit jobs; they quit managers. The high turnover at the White House is a direct reflection of the leadership. Either people don’t want to work for Trump, or he gets in his feelings when someone fails the fealty test and fires them. Either way, it’s not a good look.
A source close to the administration told CBS:
There will be even more people leaving the White House sooner rather than later, laid off or just leaving out of exhaustion. And it is going to be harder to find good people to replace them. I do think they’re going to have a harder time getting the second wave of people in than the first, because those people were loyalists, and [new] folks will have to be recruited and encouraged and then survive the vetting process. In addition to all of that, the president prefers to have a small communications staff.
If a company in the private sector were to have this much turnover, the reviews on Glassdoor and LinkedIn would be atrocious, and as Kathryn Dunn Tenpas—a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution—told CBS, stock and shareholders would be “going nuts.”
As it stands, it’s just us lowly Americans, with a president who is supposed to serve the will of the people but who desires to serve only his own will and his massive ego. The field from which he could pick potentially qualified staffers continues to get slimmer and slimmer.
A source close to the administration told CBS: “Nobody wants to come in. So they’ve gone through two rounds and now they’re at [the] third tier of people who are just lucking out—battlefield promotion ends up promoting people who aren’t qualified for the position.”
As for Suckabee, The Root Senior Editor Stephen A. Crockett Jr. asked me in Slack a little while ago, “Who will run the handmaids now that Aunt Lydia is leaving the White House?”
I guess we shall see.