Before Inauguration Day, the White House residence staff were already exhausted. For several weeks, many of them had worked sixteen-hour days preparing for the transition—the approximately six-hour-long window between when the Trumps would depart and the Bidens arrive. White House transitions typically demand superhuman effort, but this year’s was among the most physically demanding in recent memory.
The full story of the residence staffers’ ecosystem is rarely told. Many of the workers have served multiple Presidents, and for that reason they call themselves lifers. Their binding ethos is discretion and loyalty to the White House itself—and, by extension, to whoever is President. They are perpetually insecure in their jobs. Although their employment continues across a transition, it is never guaranteed—they serve at the pleasure of the President.
According to Daniel Shanks, who was an usher for twenty-two years, a shift in relations between First Families and lifers has changed the feeling of the White House.When I worked at the White House, I walked through the lifers’ corridor in the mornings, past a Secret Service officer seated by a telephone, head drooping at the end of a sixteen-hour double shift.
For decades, many department heads were white. George W. Bush hired the first Black chief usher, Stephen Rochon. Rochon came from outside the White House, breaking a long tradition of hiring the chief usher from the residence staff. Previously a rear admiral in the Coast Guard, Rochon attempted to bring military efficiency to the staff, but he never gained their full trust, according to those I spoke with.
A little over four years ago, the lifers awaited the Trumps with nervous anticipation. They knew little about the new President, beyond that he owned hotels and fired people on television. He lived in a gilded penthouse apartment on Fifth Avenue modelled after the Palace of Versailles, the very building that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson deemed the anti-White House.
The former Trump Hotel colleagues whom Harleth hired included Arvind Chadha, who was charged with new authority to oversee the butlers. But the butlers, the consummate lifers and innermost layer of the residence staff, were not easily managed—their proximity to the President gives them independent power that other residence staffers lack. “The butlers don’t like anybody and nobody likes the butlers,” Dennis Hawk, who worked as the head of operations until June of 2020, told me.
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