The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021

by Peter Baker

Looks mattered as much as anything to Trump, who stocked his administration as if he were casting a new reality show. He had to be able to visualize the person in the role he was giving them. Mike Pence, he declared, was “out of central casting.”[29] David Shulkin, his new veterans affairs secretary, was “a good looking guy.”[30] After Judge Neil Gorsuch left a secret interview for a Supreme Court nomination at Trump Tower, Trump remarked, “This guy’s out of central casting.” When Trump first hosted Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain, he told her that her ambassador, Kim Darroch, was “from central casting.”[31] On the first day of his presidency, just after he took the oath, he introduced Jim Mattis as, yes, “from central casting.”[32] One result of this hiring process was that nobody had ever staffed a modern White House with so few people who knew how government worked.