Turns out proximity to power isn’t the flex it used to be. According to new reporting, most of Trump’s staff wants out of the White House.
During a Thursday appearance on MS Now, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, who co-wrote a recent book on Trump, gave a pretty unvarnished read on the situation. “He is not in a great place with his staff, according to everyone we talked to,” she said. “Most people have decided that they want to go do something else.”
That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement of the workplace culture.
Haberman went on to describe a president who’s “lashing out a lot,” which, in her assessment, tends to happen when things aren’t going well.
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On CNN days earlier, she went further, calling the current mood inside the building “not a happy environment by any of the reporting that we have.” Coming from someone who’s covered Trump for close to a decade, that’s not a throwaway line.
The response from the White House said a lot by avoiding the actual question entirely. Spokesman Davis Ingle told The Independent that Haberman “just has a creepy obsession with the President and clings onto him for relevance,” adding that “it’s been very sad to watch for years.”
The exits piling up do a decent job of making Haberman’s case for her. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt just wrapped her final day, and while she’s framed it as a family decision, reporting suggests Trump had been calling her constantly during her maternity leave, which probably wasn’t the gentle nudge toward the door she was hoping for.
Behind the scenes, the tension apparently runs deeper than one departure.
Trump reportedly confronted Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at Camp David over a munitions shortage tied to the Iran conflict, telling people close to him he thought the issue had already been fixed. When the story leaked to the Washington Post, Trump didn’t exactly take it in stride. He blasted the reporting on Truth Social as “100 percent fake” and vowed that leakers would face “long term jail sentences.”
There’s also been quiet grumbling about aide Natalie Harp, whose intense loyalty to the president apparently hasn’t won her many friends internally. Haberman had more to add on CNN, noting: “She is not beloved by a lot of her colleagues.”
Names have been dropping from this administration all year. Kristi Noem was pushed out as Homeland Security Secretary back in March, and Pam Bondi followed a month later amid fallout from the Epstein files.
Featured image via Political Tribune Gallery
