There’s an old line in Washington: personnel is policy. Right now, some of Donald Trump’s personnel are getting out.
Karoline Leavitt is leaving as press secretary. James Braid, Trump’s top liaison to Congress, is leaving. White House counsel Dave Warrington is leaving. So is Ed Martin, the pardon attorney and longtime ally. Four very different jobs, and I won’t pretend they’re all walking for the same reason — there’s no evidence of that. People leave White Houses all the time, especially near a midterm. And Leavitt gave a completely understandable one: she just had her second child and says she can’t be the mother she wants to be while doing one of the most demanding jobs in the city. Take her at her word.
So I’m not here to tell you everyone leaving is fleeing a sinking ship. But according to people around this White House, at least some of them are looking at what comes after November and asking a simple question: do I really want to be here for this? One former official told Politico that people are seeing exactly that — “the writing on the wall.”
Look at the timing. Trump is heading into what could be the roughest stretch of his second term. Republicans are fighting to hold narrow majorities. The war in the Middle East is still hanging over the building. The next Republican presidential primary is starting to take shape. And if Democrats take Congress, this White House will face a level of scrutiny it hasn’t dealt with this term. One analyst quoted by Politico called what’s coming “choppy waters,” “treacherous waters.” Some people have apparently decided they’d rather be off the boat before it hits.
And here’s the part I found most revealing. One person close to the White House summed up the calculation in a single word: marketability. If you’re a senior Trump official thinking about your next move, your value downtown depends partly on the relationships you have right now — you know the White House, you know congressional Republicans, you know who runs the committees. Lobbying shops and corporations pay real money for that access. But if Republicans lose, some of those relationships aren’t worth as much. So the advice, roughly, was: if you want a good job downtown, bounce now, while there are still relationships to trade on. Cash out before November.
That’s about as Washington a sentence as exists. But it tells you something. People at this level don’t wait until Election Day to start thinking about the day after. They’re constantly calculating where power is going and where they want to be standing when it gets there. So when the people inside start making big career moves before the vote, it’s worth noticing — not because they know what’s going to happen, but because they’re betting on what might.
It matters more in this White House than it would in most. Trump built his second administration to be the opposite of his first. The first term was a circus — hirings, firings, resignations, leaks, everyone going on TV to trash everyone else. This time he surrounded himself with a tighter circle that knows what he wants and, above all, that he trusts. That’s made the operation more disciplined and more effective at pushing his agenda. But there’s a trade-off: when you concentrate everything in a small group of fiercely loyal people, losing one of them hurts more. You can fill a job title. You can’t instantly replace years of trust. As one former Bush official put it, when someone is loyal, good at the work, ideologically aligned, and won’t leak, finding another person who checks every box isn’t easy.
Which gets at the thing that actually fascinates me here. Trump has demanded extraordinary personal loyalty from everyone around him for years — cabinet secretaries, members of Congress, lawyers, staffers, vice presidents, all of them. And loyalty is cheap when it comes with power, influence, and a good job. The real test comes when staying becomes the worse career move — when you might be staring at congressional investigations, when you might need your own lawyer, when the administration drifts toward lame-duck territory and everyone’s already maneuvering for the next campaign, and when that private-sector job available today might not be there in six months. That’s when you find out who was loyal and who was just standing close to power because proximity paid.
Now, I’m not going to be one of those media voices declaring the presidency is collapsing because four people changed jobs. That’s nonsense. Republicans could win in November, hold both chambers, and Trump could replace every one of these people with someone perfectly capable. Trump has survived roughly nine thousand supposed “beginnings of the end,” and I stopped counting a long time ago.
But people in this town don’t make decisions only on what they know — they make them on risk. And the people inside an administration see things most of us don’t: internal polling, conversations with members and donors, what campaigns are actually worried about, the stuff that never makes the paper. That doesn’t let them predict the future. It lets them read the room. And right now, some of the people closest to Trump are reading a room that looks a lot less comfortable after November — including the possibility that a Congress under new management comes after them for what they did in Trump’s name.
Power has a gravitational pull. When people think you’re gaining it, everyone wants to be your friend. When they think you’re losing it, the calls come back a little slower — and eventually people start heading for the door. Loyalty is easy when the boss controls everything. The interesting part is what happens when they start wondering whether he won’t.
Inside Trump’s own White House, the exits are getting crowded.
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