The Short but Indelible Tenure of Mark Meadows as Trump’s Last Chief of Staff

• In Event: Managing the White House and Federal Agencies

Abstract

This paper is part of a long-term project and extends previous published works by the authors that have focused on White House organization and staffing in general, and on the Office of the Chief of Staff in particular (see, e.g., Cohen 1997, 2002, 2003; Cohen, Dolan, & Rosati 2002; Cohen & Hult 2020; Cohen, Hult, & Walcott 2012, 2016; Cohen & Krause 2000; Cohen, Vaughn, & Villalobos 2012; Cohen & Walcott 2012; Hult & Walcott 2004; Hult, Walcott, & Cohen 2009; Villalobos, Vaughn, & Cohen 2014; Walcott & Hult 1987, 1995, 1999) We examine four major roles performed by the chief of staff and others in the Office of the Chief of Staff (administrator, adviser, guardian, proxy). We also explore the chief’s participation in domestic, economic, and national security policy processes and the differing White House structuring over the course of the Trump administration.

Data are drawn from original interviews and surveys conducted by the authors with former staff of the Trump White House and executive branch, government documents, media resources, and other scholarly work. The Trump presidency permits a natural experiment of sorts: while holding POTUS constant, we compare the activities, approaches, and impact of Trump’s last chief of staff, Mark Meadows, with his first three chiefs (Reince Priebus, John Kelly, and Mick Mulvaney), each with differing personalities, temperaments, and relationships with the President and other members of the administration. All of Trump’s chiefs managed the White House in distinct ways and had varying degrees of success. Meadows was particularly challenged in his job as he began his tenure as the United States was being thrust into the uncertainty, chaos, and panic of a global public health pandemic caused by a novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) and ensuing COVID-19 disease—a disease in which a number of White House staff (including Meadows), as well as President Trump himself, were sickened. Under Meadows’s tenure, the United States witnessed hundreds of thousands of American lives lost, a sharp and brutal recession with record numbers of job losses and business bankruptcies, mass civil unrest in the wake of the police killing of a Black motorist in Minneapolis, the death and replacement of a Supreme Court justice in the midst of presidential election, a bitter presidential campaign and rare loss by an incumbent president, and a lame-duck period in which the POTUS attempted to undermine the legitimacy of the national election, refused to concede, and delayed the presidential transition. Even though Meadows was chief for only ten months, no modern chief of staff has had to cope with such challenges during their tenure.

Authors

• David B. Cohen, The University of Akron

• Karen M. Hult, Virginia Tech