Milbank: The White House can’t take your call; try again later

Across the federal government, nobody is minding the store.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has quit in protest, to be replaced by an acting secretary who until last year had no military or government experience.

Trump’s special envoy coordinating the fight against the Islamic State, Brett McGurk, has quit in protest, and Trump says he doesn’t know him.

Trump’s treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, responded to the government shutdown and market chaos by flying to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, for a resort vacation. From there, Mnuchin tried to calm markets by convening his crisis “Plunge Protection Team” and calling U.S. bankers to gain assurances that they have “ample liquidity” — which only caused more market panic and another 650-point drop in the Dow Jones industrial average on Christmas Eve.

Not a creature is stirring in the rest of the Trump administration, either.

The attorney general was fired, and his acting replacement pitched hot tubs before joining the administration.

The secretary of the interior submitted his resignation this month.

The chief of staff at the White House is leaving, and the incoming acting chief, Mick Mulvaney, is also the budget director and former acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Making matters worse

The president, for his part, put off a planned trip to Mar-a-Lago so that he can spend uninterrupted time in the White House blaming his few remaining appointees for his troubles. But this only seems to make things worse.

Denied the fairways, Trump on Monday used a golf simile in a tweeted attack on Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome H. Powell, a Trump appointee: “The Fed is like a powerful golfer who can’t score because he has no touch — he can’t putt!”

And Trump’s blaming of Mnuchin for the market turmoil reportedly prompted Mnuchin’s panic-inducing statement Sunday attempting to restore calm. At a time when investors had no reason to doubt the stability of U.S. banks, Mnuchin’s liquidity reassurance was the equivalent of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention saying it is confident it can contain a previously unreported Ebola pandemic in the United States.

In the New York Times, Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman portray Trump descending into paranoia, suspicious his staff is secretly undermining him, and giving the “impression of a presidency at risk of spinning out of control.” (Fake News! This presidency was never under control.)

In the quiet old house, the president, with no advisers to turn to, calls the White House switchboard operator:

Would Laura Ingraham make a good chief of staff?

Who were successful one-term presidents?

Is impeachment bad?

Who is the fairest of them all?

The reply: “We apologize, but due to the lapse in federal funding, we are unable to take your call.”