Report: White House Staff “Scared to Death,” Working in “Survival Mode”

So, yeah, this week for the White House hasn’t exactly been great. Mike Flynn resigned as National Security Adviser on Monday night for misleading Vice President Mike Pence and other top White House officials about conversations with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Omarosa, the Apprentice villain and aide to President Donald Trump, has been sharing a recording of a “heated exchange” between her and a reporter without the reporter being told she was being taped. Meanwhile, on Tuesday night, a New York Times story revealed that Trump campaign aides had “repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials.” And since the start of the week, there have been murmurings about more possible shakeups. Now, on Wednesday, White House staff members are reportedly in “survival mode.”

According to “a top source” interviewed by Axios, there is “borderline chaos” breaking out in the White House. Leaks are starting to become the lingua franca in the administration. Mike Pence’s spokesman, Marc Lotter, has said that the VP only learned of the Flynn infidelities from a WaPo story. Agency sub-cabinet positions and various ambassadorships are still vacant, according to another WaPo story. Staff are tittering about who gets sent up on each week’s SNL. Kellyanne Conway and Sean Spicer are giving conflicting accounts on stories such as the Flynn case.

And at the center of it all, their boss has been gung-ho about taking to Twitter to make grand pronouncements while largely eschewing formal addresses on TV to explain recent events.

President Trump has been said to “thrive on chaos,” but little in the past week would indicate as much. The executive orders have slowed and the president only signed his first bill yesterday. A meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in the unsecured confines of Mar-a-Lago became a diplomatic incident after Trump and the Prime Minister had to strategize on cell phones about how to respond to North Korea testing an intermediate-range ballistic missile.

If there has been a consistent talking point from President Trump in the past week, it’s been more about the leakers and the leaks happening than it has been about what the leaks reveal.

The real story here is why are there so many illegal leaks coming out of Washington? Will these leaks be happening as I deal on N.Korea etc?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 14, 2017

Information is being illegally given to the failing @nytimes & @washingtonpost by the intelligence community (NSA and FBI?).Just like Russia

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 15, 2017

The real scandal here is that classified information is illegally given out by “intelligence” like candy. Very un-American!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 15, 2017

If playing trick-or-treat with intelligence info is something that’s irking the President enough to issue a barrage of tweets about it, White House staff dismissals might not be far behind. In a week that’s already stuffed to the gills with stories, it might well be par for the course.