At this rate Donald Trump will soon have the West Wing all to himself. Bad for him and even worse for the rest of us

Finding new jobs may be tough because having the Trump White House on their resume is not exactly helpful

Cutting a lonely figure: the President at his desk in the Oval Office (AP)

Wait a second. Weren’t we told all would be OK with Donald Trump in the Oval Office because there’d be enough grown-ups around him to keep him in check? On taking the oath he had the cream of the crop of Republican policy experts in Washington DC to choose from. Academics and wonks aching to come out of eight years of Obama-induced hibernation.

Even at the start, it didn’t work out quite that way. Trump was elected in part because he had made “expert” a derogatory term. Likewise “establishment”, to which almost all the more obvious candidates for positions in his West Wing clearly belonged. On top of that, he had stamped his feet and ruled out hiring anyone who had not been supportive of him during the campaign.

That limited his hiring pool somewhat. The result was Javanka, Bannon and Michael Flynn. Good Lord, he even named Omarosa spokesperson for the White House’s Office of Public Liaison. Unlike Javanka, she is only one person, by the way. Her qualification for public service? A sizzling career as a contestant on The Apprentice.

Spin-the-bottle drama ensued. Flynn was fired. (He awaits sentencing after pleading guilty to lying about talking to Russians.) Bannon was fired for getting too big for his boots. Reince Priebus was fired as Chief of Staff for, in Trump’s view, failing to fill his boots. Sean Spicer was ousted as spokesman because he was too easy for Melissa McCarthy to lampoon. I forget why Omarosa was let go, but she was.

There may have been brief periods, however, when the West Wing could have been described as functioning, more or less. Foreign policy types in the GOP, like Senator John McCain, were reassured that the man who replaced Flynn as National Security Advisor was HR McMaster, a widely respected retired general. And they trusted John Mattis over at the Pentagon.

But that Trump had proved unable or unwilling to achieve a modicum of stability within his own inner circle was highlighted by the Brookings Institution on the first anniversary of his coming to office. His bleed-rate of “A Team” advisors in his first year, it reported, had far outstripped that all of all his five immediate predecessors, double the rate even of Ronald Reagan, the previous leader in the field.

Now it’s got a lot worse. Rob Porter, the Staff Secretary who with Chief of Staff John Kelly was in charge of smoothing the flow of papers to the Oval Office desk, was fired last month, in bungled fashion, after it emerged he was a wife-abuser. (Two of them.) Hope Hicks, Trump’s Director of Communications, has since announced her departure. And now Gary Cohn, his top economic advisor, is taking his leave after falling out with the boss over tariffs.

What we have now, clearly, is a West Wing in deep disarray. We know this because Trump has seen the need publicly to insist otherwise. “Believe me, everyone wants to work in the White House,” Mr Trump said during a news conference last week with Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven. “They want a piece of the Oval Office, they want a piece of the West Wing.”

No they don’t. Equally unconvincing was his tweeted claim that turmoil is healthy. “The new Fake News narrative is that there is CHAOS in the White House. Wrong! People will always come & go, and I want strong dialogue before making a final decision. I still have some people that I want to change (always seeking perfection). There is no Chaos, only great Energy!”

Perfection in the West Wing? By every reckoning it’s a miserable place to be. Those left behind frequently are doing multiple jobs at once, because there are now so many gaps. “They are left with vacancies atop of vacancies,” said Kathryn Dunn-Tenpas of Brookings, which now estimates that turnover in the Trump inner circle has reached a mad 43 per cent. “That kind of turnover creates a lot of disruption,” she said, not least because those who have already gone have taken so much policy and institutional knowledge with them.

Many are exhausted for other reasons. They fear they too may have a target on their backs working for a boss who has demonstrated not a scintilla of loyalty to anyone but himself. They worry about getting caught up in the ongoing probe by special counsel Robert Mueller into Russia and the legal fees they could incur. Worse, if they also head for the exits finding new jobs may be tough because having the Trump White House on their resume is not exactly helpful.

But leave many still will, whether by their own volition or after being pushed. There have been waves of speculation about both McMaster and Kelly. Ivanka and Jared equally appear to be on the ropes. There was even a report this week that Trump had lost patience with Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the current spokesperson, for being insufficiently fierce with reporters seeking comment on Trump’s past relations with Stormy Daniels, a one-time adult film star.

Where is this all taking us? For one, it’s evident, now that Cohn has thrown in the towel, that the forces that were dedicated to containing Trump’s anti-globalist instincts have finally been routed. In the ascendant are Wilbur Ross, the Commerce Secretary, and Peter Navarro, Director of Trade and Industrial Policy, both of whom share his zeal for protectionism.

We may not be there quite yet – there is still life in the West Wing beyond the closed door of the Oval Office – but increasingly this is becoming a presidency if not quite of one then of a very few. Any president being left to his or her own devices would be inherently unhealthy. No leader, however smart, however wise, however filled with energy, can be a good caretaker of their country if they are bereft of good and steady counsel.

But when that leader is Donald Trump it is especially unnerving.