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blank stare. It also fed one theory of why hiring in the West Wing and throughout the executive branch was so slow—filling out the vast bureaucracy was out of his view and thus he couldn’t care less. Likewise, visitors with appointments were befuddled by the West Wing’s own lack of staff: after being greeted with a smart military salute by the dress marine at the West Wing door, they discovered that the West Wing often lacked a political- appointee receptionist, leaving guests to find their own way through the warren that was the Western world’s pinnacle of power. Trump, a former military academy cadet—albeit not an enthusiastic one—had touted a return to military values and expertise. In fact, he most of all sought to preserve his personal right to defy or ignore his own organization. This, too, made sense, since not really having an organization was the most efficient way to sidestep the people in your organization and to dominate them. It was just one irony of his courtship of admired military figures like James Mattis, H. R. McMaster, and John Kelly: they found themselves working in an administration that was in every way inimical to basic command principles. 1 OK Ok Almost from the beginning, the West Wing was run against the near-daily report that the person charged with running it, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, was about to lose his job. Or, if he was not about to lose his job, the only reason he was keeping it was that he had not had it long enough to yet be fired from it. But no one in Trump’s inner circle doubted that he would lose his job as soon as, practically speaking, his losing it would not embarrass the president too much. So, they reasoned, no one need pay any attention to him. Priebus, who, during the transition, doubted he would make it to the inauguration, and then, once in, wondered if he could endure the torture for the minimally respectable period of a year, shortly reduced his goal to six months. The president himself, absent any organizational rigor, often acted as his own chief of staff, or, in a sense, elevated the press secretary job to the primary staff job, and then functioned as his own press secretary—teviewing press releases, dictating quotes, getting reporters on the phone—which left the actual press secretary as a mere flunky and whipping boy. Moreover, his relatives acted as ad hoc general managers of whatever areas they might choose to be general managers in. Then there was Bannon, conducting something of an alternate-universe operation, often launching far-reaching undertakings that no one else knew about. And thus Priebus, at the center of an operation that had no center, found it easy to think there was no reason for him to be there at all. At the same time, the president seemed to like Priebus more and more quite for the reason that he seemed entirely expendable. He took Trump’s verbal abuse about his height and stature affably, or anyway stoically. He was a convenient punching bag when things went wrong—and he didn’t punch back, to Trump’s pleasure and disgust. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019967