When Marc Short announced his resignation earlier this year, the news felt somewhat inevitable. Donald Trump’s legislative director, after all, had spent months grinding out the impossible and thankless task of pushing the president’s incoherent agenda through Congress, past both #resistance Democrats and fractious Republicans. Still, the timing of his imminent departure throws another wrench into the White House. His final day will be July 20, smack in the middle of the battle to confirm Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, and less than four months before midterm elections, which threaten to decimate the Republican ranks in Congress. The smart move, as any business owner would say, is to promote from within, which the administration soon did—shortly after news of Short’s departure broke, the Trump administration announced that Shahira Knight, the deputy director of the National Economic Council, will replace him. On paper, she’s the ideal candidate: a former House Ways and Means Committee staffer, Knight was instrumental in pushing Trump’s tax bill through Congress. But in practice, her elevation highlights an even more severe problem than the White House’s failure to retain top talent: its penchant for snuffing out the brightest stars in its orbit, mangling them past recognition.

Back in June, when Short reportedly informed staff he would be stepping down, Knight was on the cusp of fleeing the coop as well—she had already announced that she’d be leaving to take up a private-sector gig, but stayed on after N.E.C. Director Larry Kudlow suffered a heart attack. The delay in her departure was supposed to be temporary, but according to Politico, the White House began campaigning for her to stay shortly after Short decided to bow out. With Knight’s promotion, Trump has narrowly avoided the chronic problem of losing his administration’s key players just when they’re most sorely needed. But he’s steered straight into another one, wherein an otherwise competent, experienced, and respected staffer may become permanently stained by working at his side. That problem disproportionately plagues those he’s promoted into senior positions, such as John Kelly, a respected general whose promotion to chief of staff turned him into an impotent babysitter; Hope Hicks, an otherwise bright 29-year-old who burned out when promoted to communications director; industry titans such as Gary Cohn and Rex Tillerson, who torched their legacies by floundering in the Trump Cabinet, and a raft of countless others who could not survive the inevitable and often irreversible side effects of working for the president.

Moreover, it’s a problem inherent to working with Trump in almost any capacity. The president routinely undermines those who serve him, undercutting his own secretary of state on matters of foreign policy; circumventing his own communications shop through his Twitter feed, and finding delight in keeping his staffers on their toes, taking them under his wing one moment and turning against them the next. In a White House where the president sees himself as the foremost authority—“I alone can fix it”—all other staffers are at once superfluous and subject to his whims. Short’s role has been particularly challenging, as he’s struggled to liaise between Congress and the mercurial president, who often sends conflicting messages about the kind of legislation he’ll support. By way of example, look no further than the immigration clusterfuck of late June, wherein Trump said he “certainly wouldn’t sign” a more moderate immigration bill, then reversed course hours later, suddenly throwing his support behind the measure. At another point, the president tweeted that Republicans should “stop wasting their time” on an immigration bill altogether, and should instead wait until after midterms, a.k.a. the “Red Wave,” to pass a complete reform package.

Short, for his part, has managed to hold on to his dignity, building a reputation on Capitol Hill as a facilitator of deals between Congress and a whims-driven White House, and an even-keeled presence on television. But, occasionally, even he was cornered by the bizarre statements issuing from more extreme members of the administration—in early June, he gently disavowed Peter Navarro’s statement that there was a “special place in hell” for Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, telling CNN, “Those are words that I would not have chosen.” But Knight, who was sucked back into the Trump vortex just when she believed herself to be free, faces an even more daunting task than her predecessor: not only does she now have to cram the Kavanaugh confirmation through Congress, she must maintain some pretense of Republican legislative accomplishments through the end of the midterms, after a year of high-profile failures and prominent resignations. And as the past several hundred days have proven, any Trump official faced with an impossible job tends to have a short shelf life.