Trump's first term saw unusually high turnover among senior officials. By the end of the term, 60 of the 65 most influential positions in the executive office of the president (92%) had turned over, according to Brookings scholar Kathryn Dunn Tenpas's tracker of what she calls the president's “A Team,” and 45% of those departures were followed by further turnover in the same job. The White House had four chiefs of staff (Reince Priebus, John Kelly, Mick Mulvaney as acting chief, and Mark Meadows) and four national security advisers (Michael Flynn, H.R. McMaster, John Bolton and Robert O'Brien).
Flynn resigned on February 13, 2017 after admitting he had misled Vice President Mike Pence about his contacts with the Russian ambassador. His 24-day tenure set a record as the shortest of any national security adviser, Time and the Los Angeles Times reported. The Cabinet churned early too: NPR found in March 2018 that “No elected first-term president in the past 100 years has had this much Cabinet turnover this early in his presidency,” after the departures of Tom Price, John Kelly, Rex Tillerson and David Shulkin.
Correction (October 2, 2026): this entry said NPR reported Cabinet turnover “at record levels compared with prior administrations.” NPR's March 2018 finding was narrower: a record for that point in a presidency among elected first-term presidents over the past 100 years. The entry now says so and adds Brookings's end-of-term figures; its title has been changed from “Historic Cabinet Turnover & Chaos” to describe the record without the characterization.