I foresee a mirror of this chaos when his term is over. There's going to be a great ruckus in the campaigning as to "who has the best / fastest plan to fix all the damage that happened over the last four years". Expect to hear a lot of that in 2019. On a normal election year, for the most part, partisan swap-outs don't go TOO overboard on a new administration. You'll see some of it of course, but the new head honcho is usually smart enough to realize "I don't like that guy and we don't see eye to eye, but he's doing a really good job and I'd be a fool to replace him", and so at least some measure of continuity remains between terms. BUT.... with Trump flushing/chasing so many people out the door, the backwash that results in 2020 is bound to be strongly partisan, and that's REALLY going to raise the stakes. It's not a matter of "Do I really want to replace this jerk that's doing a good job?", it's more like "I need to find bodies to replace all the incompetent morons surrounding me!" Expect to see a very conservative or moderate government emerge from the chaos, something that will have the usual back-and-forth oscillation for years (or decades?) to come before the waters finally calm back down a bit.
It may take several presidential terms to undo the damage to the State Department and international relations Trump has done in six months by effectively neutering and dismantling the cadre of career diplomats that had evolved over generations. Rebuilding the many other federal agencies will be difficult, but nothing except long years of experience can replace the diplomatic corps.
If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?
