POLLS/TRUMP PEOPLE: “President Donald Trump repeatedly said during the 2016 election that he would ‘hire the best people’ for his administration, but a new poll Monday [8-20-18] shows that most Americans don’t think he delivered on that promise. The new Monmouth University Poll found that only 30 percent of respondents believe that Trump has hired the “best people,” with 58 percent saying he has not. Twelve percent of those polled responded either that the president’s hiring record was mixed or that they didn’t know about his hiring record. Trump’s White House has experienced higher-than-usual turnover. And several of his hires for his 2016 campaign and White House have made news in recent weeks. Paul Manafort, who ran Trump’s presidential campaign in the summer of 2016, is awaiting a jury verdict on tax evasion and bank fraud charges as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian election interference. The president has distanced himself from his former campaign chairman but on Friday [8-17-18] said that he was a ‘very good person’ and that his trial was a ‘very sad day.’ Respondents held a dim view of how the Trump White House operates in general — just 19 percent said that they were ‘very confident’ in the way that the president’s advisers and staff are handling their jobs, with 23 percent saying they were ‘somewhat confident’ in White House personnel. More than half said they were ‘not too confident’ or ‘not at all confident.'”
–Caitlin Oprysko, “Poll: Most Americans think Trump doesn’t ‘hire the best people’,” Politico, August 20, 2018 1:00 pm