Jonathan Bernstein, Columnist

Trump's Random Policy Generator

In this White House, personnel is policy for all the wrong reasons.

May 10, 2017 at 4:58 PM UTC

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics. A former professor of political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio, he wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.

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"Personnel is policy" is one of the most dependable truisms of Washington politics. It's never been as accurate as it is with Donald Trump in the Oval Office -- and in a way that's quite unsettling to anyone trying to understand how he operates.

We're going to see that in the selection of a new FBI director after Trump's abrupt firing of James Comey. But perhaps a better example comes courtesy of my View colleague Eli Lake's reporting about National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster potentially falling out of favor with the president. Of course, White House infighting is nothing new.1494360648630 But the stakes are higher in this administration since the president has so little experience with complex policy issues and such a flawed criteria for resolving disagreements among staff.