After Trump fired Flynn in February for lying about his foreign connections, Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster took over the role.Since then, the administration has been moving to conduct what’s been called a “Flynn erasure” by ridding the council of ties to the former adviser.
McFarland didn’t exactly dazzle the National Security Council during her brief tenure. The New York Times reported yesterday that her style “grated against some of the professional staff,” including a meeting at which she boasted about “wearing shoes from Ivanka Trump’s brand.”The same article added, “At an earlier meeting about two weeks into the administration, Ms. McFarland invoked Mr. Trump’s campaign slogan, telling the assembled group of career staff members, most of whom had been in the same roles during the Obama administration, that they needed to ‘make America great again.’”Of course, there’s also the larger question of why in the world Trump appointed McFarland to this post in the first place, given her lack of qualifications and strange beliefs. (By all appearances, the president saw McFarland on television many times as a Republican pundit, which impressed him.)As for the state of the administration’s employment rolls, there’s been quite a bit of turnover since Trump’s inauguration nearly three months ago. I’ve been keeping a running list of some of the more notable departures, some of which were voluntary, some of which weren’t:- Michael Flynn, National Security Advisor- K.T. McFarland, Deputy National Security Advisor- Monica Crowley, advisor to the National Security Council- Katie Walsh, Deputy White House Chief of Staff- Boris Epshteyn, a Special Assistant to the President (he led the White House’s television surrogate operation)- Andy Puzder, nominee for Labor Secretary- Vincent Viola, nominee for Army Secretary- Philip Bilden, nominee for Navy Secretary- Anthony Scaramucci, White House liaison to the business community- Shermichael Singleton, Senior Adviser at HUD- Craig Deare, the NSC’s senior director for Western Hemisphere AffairsIf we want to expand the definition a bit, I suppose one could argue that Chris Christie was ousted from Team Trump — he was supposed to lead the president’s transition team — but that’s probably stretching things a bit.Still, for a White House team that’s only existed for 11 weeks, this represents a rather volatile employment environment.
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Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."