President Donald Trump has once again been caught mistreating the White House staff who serve him — reportedly pushing one of his Cabinet secretaries to consider resigning.
Secretary of Homeland Security Kristjen Nielsen was on the receiving end of a Trump tirade on Wednesday while the entire presidential cabinet was present, according to The New York Times. Trump was apparently engaging in a longer venting session about his frustration with reducing undocumented immigration, one of his signature campaign promises and an issue on which he has struggled to deliver results during the second year of his term. Although the rant meandered a bit, Trump made it clear that he felt Nielsen (whose agency includes the 20,000 employees at Immigration and Customs Enforcement) bore primary responsibility for his ongoing difficulties in addressing illegal immigration.
This mistreatment in front of the cabinet prompted Nielsen to draft a resignation letter that she has not yet submitted. Instead, she released a statement in which she said that her plan is to "continue to direct the department to do all we can to implement the president’s security-focused agenda." She also argued that Trump is "rightly frustrated that existing loopholes and the lack of congressional action have prevented this administration from fully securing the border."
Meanwhile, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security has gone on record claiming that the stories about Nielsen drafting a resignation letter were "false."
Nielsen is hardly the first Trump staffer to be humiliated and scorned by the president when he faces a problem. The most prominent victim of the president's bullying has been his own attorney general, Jeff Sessions, who was most famously dressed down by the president last May after he decided to recuse himself from the Russia investigation. As The New York Times reported in September:
Shortly after learning in May that a special counsel had been appointed to investigate links between his campaign associates and Russia, President Trump berated Attorney General Jeff Sessions in an Oval Office meeting and said he should resign, according to current and former administration officials and others briefed on the matter.
The president attributed the appointment of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, to Mr. Sessions’s decision to recuse himself from the Justice Department’s Russia investigation — a move Mr. Trump believes was the moment his administration effectively lost control over the inquiry. Accusing Mr. Sessions of “disloyalty,” Mr. Trump unleashed a string of insults on his attorney general.
Ashen and emotional, Mr. Sessions told the president he would quit and sent a resignation letter to the White House, according to four people who were told details of the meeting. Mr. Sessions would later tell associates that the demeaning way the president addressed him was the most humiliating experience in decades of public life.
Trump and Sessions had been good friends prior to the president's tirade against him. The legendary Trump-Sessions bromance has now ended.
Sessions isn't the only person who was once close to Trump but either left or considered leaving as a result of the president's short fuse. Hope Hicks, who was one of the earliest staffers to work for Trump's presidential campaign and served as White House communications director, was so "rattled" by the president's decision to "berate" her and call her "stupid" that she resigned in February, according to Newsweek.
Trump's pattern of abusive behavior can be traced all the way back to his days on the presidential campaign trail. As former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and former top aide David Bossie wrote in a book last year about working for the Trump campaign:
Sooner or later, everybody who works for Donald Trump will see a side of him that makes you wonder why you took a job with him in the first place. His wrath is never intended as any personal offense, but sometimes it can be hard not to take it that way. The mode that he switches into when things aren't going his way can feel like an all-out assault; it'd break most hardened men and women into little pieces.
Trump's tendency to be a bad boss has even had major policy implications. Such was the case in October when he publicly undercut his own then-secretary of state, former Exxon executive Rex Tillerson, over North Korea. By saying that Tillerson was "wasting his time" trying to negotiate with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un (even though Trump is meeting with him now), Trump undermined Tillerson's ability to be taken seriously as a representative of American government policy in the region.
In July 2016, perhaps the shrewdest insight into Trump's tendency to publicly and viciously berate his own staffers was provided by a Politico profile. The analysis is worthy of closer inspection not only because it covers Trump's broader leadership style, but because it doesn't discuss any one person's experiences.
Based on conversations with people who have worked for him, people who still work for him and a half dozen of his biographers, the reality of Trump as an executive—his methods and his manner—bears little resemblance to the man viewers saw on the show. Rather than magisterial and decisive, Trump the actual boss swings wildly between micromanaging meddler and can’t-be-bothered, broad-brush, big-picture thinker. He is both impulsive and intuitive, for better and for worse. He hires on gut instinct rather than qualifications; he listens to others, but not as much or as often as he listens to himself. He’s loyal—“like, this great loyalty freak,” as he once put it—except when he’s not.
His unpredictability in the boardroom is not a quirk but a hallmark, according to those who’ve worked with him for years. He is on the job around the clock, and expects those on his payroll to be the same way, but also resists a rigid schedule—he is, in other words, an unstructured workaholic. The way he manages his people and properties, too, is a reflection of his abiding conviction in the value of unfettered competition—between his own staffers, between himself and his staffers and vendors and contractors, and ultimately between himself and the rest of the world.
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