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The problem for Trump, though, is that he doesn't really have any cronies other than the kind of people for whom ass-kissing is their only skill. Trump's most notable battles weren't with faceless lifetime bureaucrats who refused to follow his orders, they were with people he chose himself. The constitutionally-mandated role of the Cabinet is to advise the President. If he's not willing to take advice when it goes against his own preconceived notions then the Cabinet is basically useless. If he's unable to select well-qualified people whom he's willing to listen to and who broadly agree with him on policy without getting into public spats whenever they give him advice he doesn't like, it says more about his own ability as a policymaker than it does about "The Swamp" or whatever.
Yup. If he's elected he'll appoint Ken Paxton as AG or something, then 11 months later Paxton will be out on his ear for some dumb petty reason and writing books about what a shithead Trump is.
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You're not necessarily wrong here but I think it is worth pointing out that the inability to hire good people was actually a direct result of said faceless bureaucrats. Anybody who signed up for a prominent job in Trumpland also signed up for an immediate bad-faith prosecution and investigation (this was one of the reasons the Mueller special counsel was spun up). This is also a case of the process being the punishment - even defending yourself against one of these investigations would be extremely expensive, and they'd be going back over your entire historical record. Finding competent people is hard enough when you aren't also asking them to subject their entire life to the baleful gaze of a motivated deep state.
Really? The only people in the Trump Administration I can think of who were prosecuted were Steve Bannon, who briefly held a position that was created specially for him, Michael Flynn, and Mark Meadows. So two people in important positions he actually had to appoint. There were a few minor aides indicted in Georgia but nobody of any consequence. Kellyanne Conway was accused of Hatch Act violations but nothing ever came of it. The wave of Trump associate indictments is mostly people outside of government — personal lawyers, campaign advisors, Trump organization employees, etc. Other than those I mentioned above, I am unaware of any high-ranking Trump Administration officials who have been blackballed from polite society because of their associations with him. There are plenty of conservative think tanks and consulting firms out there who are willing to put people from any administration on the gravy train. It certainly beats working for a living.
This gets exceedingly difficult to untangle, because several of the people involved in the Trump administration, including Trump appointees, were working against him for the entire time. Take Rod Rosenstein for example - he was a Trump-appointee, and took over managing the Mueller investigation after Sessions recused himself... but he was one of the people who signed off on the Carter Page warrant, and he authorised the raid on Michael Cohen's offices to boot. Several of the people in Trumpland were actively working against him for the entire time he was in office, and that doesn't include the people who were simply passively resisting. Nobody's going to blackball Rod Rosenstein for being a Trump hire, because he was never actually working for Trump and did everything he could to bring him down.
I include those mentioned above as people who were subject to this kind of politically motivated prosecution, and the other problem is that the strategy worked. Trump had an exceedingly difficult time finding people who he could trust to staff various positions, and in many cases he didn't. The Mueller investigation was a massive sword hanging over Trump's head, and it had a big impact on what he could do and the people who would have been willing to work for him.
Why do you think he inspires so little loyalty in those closest to him?
I don't think that's the right lens to view this with - it doesn't matter how good you are at inspiring loyalty when you're being forced to recruit from a pool of people that are diametrically opposed to both you and your base of support. The main problem that I was talking about was that the recruiting pool for a lot of these positions is not that deep - how many people do you think would have been viable contenders for Comey's job? Picking ones who actually supported Trump's goals from that extremely small list would have been extremely challenging and I'm not at all surprised that he ended up with a bunch of people in his orbit that were actively working against him.
...such as John Kelly, Mike Pence, Bill Barr, Jeff Sessions, etc, etc, etc.
Actually I was referring to people like Rod Rosenstein, Reince Priebus and Christopher Wray. The US government is actually exceedingly complex and has a lot of moving parts - I'm not going to disagree that some of those people were turned off Trump by his conduct or actions, but I object to the implication that there can only be one cause for all these personnel issues. And as for Jeff Sessions, I'm honestly not sure where he stands - his original recusal seemed explicable, but his own connections to the issue were actually far less substantive than Rosenstein's (who notably did not recuse himself and then went on to actively work against Trump).
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Because they're not suicidal. Even if you agree with him, always having the rest of the political establishment as your enemy will be bad for you.
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I agree - that's why I'm optimistic about Heritage just doing the lower-level staffing for him. Trump isn't going to give a shit about who the Senior Advisor and Interagency Coordinator for Artificial Intelligence Information Technology Policy is, but the thousands of people in those sorts of roles will set policies for four years if Heritage gets their way. Having a roster of actually competent people signed up to take those roles in the first 6 months of the administration would be huge.
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