Now that Donald Trump has fired his chief of staff, the atrocious John Kelly, he is scrambling to find a replacement because it is the Trump style to take action without thinking things through. While he no doubt thinks that people would jump at the chance to work with him in the White House, that is turning out to not be the case and the names being floated so far do not seem to be panning out. But someone will take the job and although we do not know who it will be, we can make some definite predictions about certain qualities that the person will have.
We can forget about media speculation that such a person will be the ‘adult in the room’ who will bring ‘discipline’ and ‘order’ to the administration. Such a person can only be effective if the person at the top wants order and discipline and anyone can see that Trump either does not care for those things or actively seeks to create chaos in order to distract attention from actual criminality.
One thing that we can be sure of is that the person will be someone with little or no integrity. It should be clear to even the meanest intelligence that the Trump administration, starting right at the top with him and his family, is full of grifters and/or ideologues. Anyone who takes on the job will be unable to avoid the stench that will quickly envelope them and will leave with a vastly diminished reputation. The only people who will take the job are those who are also grifters who will use their tenure, however brief, as a way to line their own pockets or is willing to serve as an agent of wealthy interests who will use them to push their agenda on Trump.
We also know that the person will have no self-respect because it is clear that Trump wants everyone around him to be fawning sycophants. Trump also displays no loyalty whatsoever to the people who work for him and the slightest thing is enough to cause him to belittle and publicly humiliate even those who go to great lengths to ingratiate themselves with him, even if they were to show Mike Pence levels of nauseating obsequiousness.
The idea that someone will take the job because of noble reasons, like wanting to provide the nation with sound leadership, is highly unrealistic unless that person is someone with an incredible level of naivete, bordering on childlike innocence, who thinks they can do the impossible.
Anyone who could take on such a job for noble reasons, regardless of the amount of naivete, would never get chosen by Trump. The scheming needed to get the job would preclude anyone with noble intentions from being selected and anyone willing to do the scheming would not have noble intentions..
I would take that job in a heartbeat. Because then I’d be inside the perimeter.
Yeah, they would never hire Marcus and even if they did he’d last roughly half a day. He is far too prone to stating his mind. That would never fly with Trump.
Better idea: instead of Marcus pretending to be a full-on sycophantic VP (and I expect 45 to be very Acute at spotting fake sycophants), he could pretend to be a naive and easily manipulated IT guy on a wingnut mission to protect DJT’s phone from Müeller’s snooping. He could wear a hoodie and draw decades-old diagrams of White House IT systems which would look good, and Trump’s people would know no better.
Once inside, he could divert Trump’s phone to a fake version of Twitter which is just like the real thing but in demo mode: nothing actually goes outside into the real world, but Trump would see a constant stream of adulation and approval for all his tweets.
But on his way out, of course, the secret service guys would catch him, take him into a side room and … give him a tactical doodah, wink, and let him go.