Personnel is policy, it’s often said. It’s also revealing of character, and on that measure, President Donald Trump continued to show his true colors with a pair of moves this past week. He once promised to appoint “only the best and most serious people” to government. He has made a mockery of that pledge, though perhaps to no one’s surprise.
Trump said ‘only the best’ would serve. That’s not how it’s worked out.
The appointment of Jeanine Pirro as interim U.S. attorney for D.C. and the dismissal of Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden encapsulate how Trump’s personnel pledge has played out in practice.
May 11, 2025 The Washington Post
Analysis by Dan Balz
The first move came Thursday evening with the announcement that he was nominating Jeanine Pirro, a Fox News host, as the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. She was the replacement for the controversial Ed Martin, whose nomination was cratering in the Senate. Trump called Pirro “incredibly well qualified.”
Pirro is a longtime friend of the president. She was a judge and prosecutor in New York’s Westchester County, but that was three decades ago. She tried unsuccessfully to run for statewide office. Later she turned to television, where she became, among other things, an outspoken defender of the president.
After the 2020 election, she promoted falsehoods and conspiracy theories about hacked voting machines. She was not the only one pushing these lies on Fox, which prompted legal action against the network. Fox News settled one lawsuit for nearly $800 million.
The second personnel move was revealed later Thursday. This was the shocking decision to fire Carla Hayden, the well-respected librarian of Congress. Her termination notice came in the form of a curt email from the deputy director of presidential personnel that ended with, “Thank you for your service.” This apparently passes for courteousness by the president and his team.
Hayden was the first African American and the first woman to hold the post. She was also a professional librarian in a position often held by scholars or historians. She had come from one of the nation’s most notable big-city public library systems, the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore. When she was appointed by President Barack Obama, who knew her from her time working in Chicago, she was described as a “rock star” librarian.
Hayden’s term was due to expire in 2026. Trump short-circuited it for no apparent reason.
The decision also was an encroachment on an institution that is technically a creature of Congress, one more example of Trump’s determination to stretch the powers of the presidency and diminish what the founders intended as an independent and coequal branch of government.
Rep. Rosa DeLauro (Connecticut), ranking Democrat of the House Appropriations Committee, issued a statement condemning the move as a direct attack on the independence of the library.
“The Trump Administration must provide a transparent explanation for this decision,” she wrote. “I urge my colleagues in Congress — especially the Republicans who benefited from Dr. Hayden’s work — to stand united in defending the integrity of the Library of Congress.”
Hayden has been targeted on social media by a group called the American Accountability Foundation, which describes itself as “a team of professional investigators working nonstop to expose the left’s efforts to obstruct, subvert, and sabotage the America First conservative agenda.”
Hayden’s firing continues the president’s pattern of dismissing women or people of color from some of the most senior administration positions. He fired Air Force Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., who was serving as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the second African American to hold the position. (Colin Powell was the first.) At the same time, Trump jettisoned Adm. Lisa Franchetti, chief of naval operations and the first woman in that post.
In early February, Trump also dismissed Colleen J. Shogan, who was the first woman to serve as archivist of the United States. Trump presumably holds a grudge against the National Archives over his retention of classified documents, an FBI search of Mar-a-Lago and the subsequent indictment against him that was eventually dismissed.
Shogan’s nomination was confirmed by the Senate a month before Trump’s indictment. Trump targeted her for dismissal even before he was sworn in. Today, Secretary of State Marco Rubio is the acting archivist, part of a growing portfolio that also includes that of national security adviser after yet another personnel shake-up Trump made.
There is another pattern to the widespread dismissals that have taken place since Trump was sworn in: an insensitivity bordering on cruelty toward those whose lives have been upended, whether senior officials or rank-and-file government workers. Whatever one thinks of the effectiveness of government, it is run by human beings committed to trying to make it work. The chainsaw of disruption unleashed by the president leaves no room for compassion.
Some of the turmoil has been caused by the work of the U.S. DOGE Service under the direction of Elon Musk and his team. Some of it has been at the direction of senior officials in the administration.
When people are summarily dismissed, locked out of offices or email accounts, or given 15 minutes to return to clean out offices, there is a level of meanness on top of the shock of abruptly losing a job that is unworthy of the leaders of the country.
As for only the best people, Trump’s definition of that phrase is often simply the visibility of a television host rather than the credentials to do the job. He has plucked numerous people from Fox News to populate his administration, the most prominent being Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who was nominated for one of the most important jobs in the federal government despite lacking the credentials as a manager or a defense thinker.
Trump expended considerable political capital to push Hegseth’s nomination through the Senate. The secretary has been a rolling controversy throughout his brief tenure, from the Signalgate mess, including the revelation that his wife was among a group of people with whom he shared advance notice of a U.S. military operation in Yemen. He has also fired several close advisers and made the arbitrary decision to reduce the ranks of four-star generals and admirals by 20 percent and general officers overall by 10 percent.
One former senior official, John Ullyot, professed himself “a longtime backer” of Hegseth but nonetheless wrote a piece for Politico decrying the “total chaos” and “dysfunction” at the Pentagon. “The last month has been a full-blown meltdown at the Pentagon,” he wrote in April.
The list of others whose credentials for high office were suspect include Tulsi Gabbard, director of national intelligence, and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has used his position to bring into the ranks others whose views about health and medicine range from questionable to debunked.
Only this past week, a new nominee for surgeon general, Casey Means, was put forward after Trump’s initial nominee, Janette Nesheiwat, was suddenly yanked just before she was to go before the Senate for her confirmation hearing.
Means attended Stanford’s medical school but dropped out of her residency program. She is a close ally of Kennedy and a prominent advocate in the Make America Healthy Again movement. She will occupy one of the most outward-facing health jobs in government.
When asked by a reporter why he had nominated her to be the nation’s top doctor even though she is not a practicing physician, Trump said, “Bobby thought she was fantastic.” He went on to offer praise for Means but admitted, “I don’t know her.”
Presidents have the prerogative to select the people they want to serve in their administrations, subject to some checks and balances from Congress. The pattern of this administration goes well beyond traditional practice. It reflects a disrespect for many who have served ably from one administration to the next, and a similar disrespect for the standards that other presidents have sought to uphold in their choices for senior positions.