A number of former Trump staffers told NR they haven’t had trouble lining up new jobs.
After four years in the White House, Mallory Blount was ready to move back to Georgia. She wanted to be home, and she wanted to be closer to family, so she started networking.
She ended up with three job offers. One potential employer told her that her four years working in communications with the Donald Trump administration was the equivalent of ten or more years in the private sector, Blount said in a written interview.
“Most of the people I talked to were incredibly receptive to my job experience,” said Blount, who began a job hunt in November and is now Georgia governor Brian Kemp’s press secretary.
Over the last few weeks, media outlets like the New York Times, The Hill and Politico have published stories reporting on the struggles Trump White House staffers are having finding new work. A Politico piece from mid-January quoted an anonymous Trump White House official who described his former colleagues as “toxic.” After the January 6 riot at the Capitol, another Trump White House aide elegantly said of Trump staffers, “They’re f—ed.”
On Friday, the Times reported that Trump alumni are facing a “cold reality” that their White House jobs likely are not paths to lucrative futures.
But former Trump administration staff members who spoke to National Review, including Blount, said they are proud of their work in the White House and believe the stories about their diminished job prospects are overblown. They said they haven’t had trouble lining up new jobs, and they haven’t heard that their former colleagues are being blacklisted.
“Most of my former colleagues have landed jobs on the Hill and in the private sector. Others are in the final stages of interviews at private companies, PR firms, and in media,” said Blount, who worked as director of specialty media at the White House. “At the end of the day, you have to be smart, hardworking, and quick on your feet to work in any administration – the Trump administration included. Reasonable employers recognize that.”
And communications staffers, whose experience mopping up after Trump is understandably valued, aren’t the only administration alumni managing to land on their feet.
Elizabeth Neumann, a former assistant secretary of counterterrorism in Trump’s Department of Homeland Security, told Politico in January that she did not directly face any challenges to finding a new job after she resigned in April, primarily because she had become an outspoken critic of Trump’s policies.
The story she was quoted in was focused on the particular struggles national security staffers were having finding new jobs. National security employees under Trump were particularly “tainted” by scandals, including family separations and the politicization of the military, according to the story. One senior defense official who spoke to Politico without being named recalled a conversation with an employer who compared Trump staffers to the “Hitler Youth.”
In an email to National Review in late January, Neumann acknowledged that “most of the people that I worked closely with, those who saw their work as a service to the country (the adults in the room, so to speak) have jobs or contractual work.”
Neumann is now the co-director of the Republican Accountability Project, a group aimed at defending Republican lawmakers who stood up to Trump and voted to impeach him. She said the biggest challenge to finding a job last year and now is the coronavirus pandemic, a point the Politico story did not address.
“It caused many employers to pause hiring and expansion plans,” she said, adding that anecdotally she’s “seeing more job postings now than I have seen in months.”
A former White House policy adviser who did not want his name released said he was able to parlay his policy experience and security clearance into a job at a consulting firm in December.
“Most of my colleagues and friends have landed jobs and some are still interviewing, but I haven’t heard from anyone that they have been denied a job because of their resume,” he said in a written interview, adding that believes the “narrative of widespread blacklisting is just left-wing media propaganda.”
“It’s a tough job market out there, generally during a pandemic – particularly if you’re a Republican working in politics with the shift in administration and the Senate,” he said. “But that’s not new. It happens with every swing of power in D.C.”
Some high-profile Trump staffers already have new gigs, but they tend to be landing jobs at conservative-friendly media outlets or at right-wing think tanks and firms.
Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows is joining the Conservative Partnership Institute, which trains conservatives to work on Capitol Hill. Both former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao have taken jobs at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank. And former Trump economic adviser Larry Kudlow has a new job at Fox News Media.
Another former Trump policy staffer, who declined to be named for this story, said he came to the White House from the conservative intellectual and policy community. He plans to return there.
“I haven’t had any difficulties looking for new work,” he said in a written interview. “Multiple potential employers have expressed interest in my working with them. Several of those employers proactively reached out to me. I plan on taking some time off to decompress and haven’t decided which offer to accept yet.”
The unnamed staffer said he believes Politico presented a skewed version of the job search environment based on the claims of disgruntled former staffers whose experience is not representative.
“I expect that there is a sort of selection bias whereby people who are willing to leak to Politico, etc. are less ‘on the team’ than other members of the administration and their experiences/viewpoints may not be representative of the administration as a whole,” he said.
While conservative media outlets, right-wing think tanks, and the offices of elected Republicans generally are safe landing spots for former Trump White House officials, there does appear to be reluctance to hire them among some Washington, D.C.-based corporations, and K-Street law firms and lobbying firms, according to executive headhunters who spoke with National Review.
Ivan Adler, a D.C.-based executive recruiter specializing in government relations, said job hunting is turning out to be more difficult for former Trump staffers than it was for staffers from previous presidential administrations. He said he’s had employers tell him they’re not interested in hiring anyone associated with the Trump administration. They’re worried about the reaction from other employees and their clients, he said.
“I feel for these people,” Adler said of the former Trump staffers. “They have husbands and wives, and houses and cars, and they got into this for the right reasons. And the situation is very challenging for them at the moment.”
It’s not every employer that is unwilling to hire former Trump staffers, and not all Trump staffers are struggling, he said. People who were primarily involved in policy and less involved in politics will likely fare better in the job market.
For former Trump staffers, finding a new job is likely harder in D.C. than in other parts of the country, in part because Democrats now control all the elected levers of power, Adler said.
He is recommending that former Trump White House staffers network with friends and family, consider heading back to school for an advanced degree, and maybe think about leaving D.C.
“D.C. is more of a ‘payback is a bitch’ kind of place than other places in the country,” he said.
Adler said he suspects the reluctance to hire former Trump staffers will lessen over time.
“I don’t see this as a forever thing,” he said.
Steve Nelson, who is part of the legal recruiting team for D.C.-based search firm The McCormick Group, said he hasn’t had any employers tell him that they’re not interested in hiring former Trump staffers. His firm has placed former Trump administration staffers in new jobs, and he said he only has one job candidate so far that he’s “not going to advocate for.”
Nelson suspects “the vast majority of candidates, the vast majority of political appointees are not going to face any major impact” because of their association with Trump.
The people who may, he said, are the ones who were directly responsible for the legal underpinnings of highly controversial Trump-era measures, including separating families at the border, attempting to overturn the 2020 election, and rolling back federal diversity training.
He said law firms may take a closer look at potential hires to ensure they weren’t involved in anything particularly controversial.
“The firms are worried about the law student reaction to these hirings,” Nelson said. “You don’t want to be put in a position where students are going to rally against your firm. Because you still want the top students from the top law schools.”
David Ris, another executive recruiter at The McCormick Group, agreed that Trump White House staffers who weren’t involved in anything too controversial will be fine, eventually.
“I think it depends on how close they were to the fire,” he said. “The vast majority of people in any administration end up in good roles. It may take a while. However, Washington traditionally is a town that forgives sins reasonably quickly.”
Another reason Trump White House staffers may have a harder time finding new work: “the overall quality of the top-level Obama people was significantly higher than the overall quality of the high-level Trump people,” said one recruiter, who declined to be named for this story.
While some firms may privately be reluctant or more cautious about hiring former Trump staffers, efforts to create public blacklists have not gone over well.
In November, a website called the Trump Accountability Project launched, with a list of more than 4,000 Trump White House staff members, cabinet members and political appointees.
“We should never forget those who helped further the Trump agenda,” the site read.
Hari Sevugan, a former Democratic National Committee press secretary, promoted the site on Twitter, writing that employers considering hiring former Trump staffers “should know there are consequences for hiring anyone who helped Trump attack American values.”
https://twitter.com/HariSevugan/status/1324781491214340097?s=20
The effort was quickly halted, however, when commentators pointed out it flew in the face of then-President-elect Joe Biden’s calls for unity.
In January, Randall Lane, the editor of Forbes Magazine, wrote a column calling for a “truth reckoning” and promising to hold Trump’s press secretaries – “Trump’s liars” – accountable.
“Let it be known to the business world: Hire any of Trump’s fellow fabulists above, and Forbes will assume that everything your company or firm talks about is a lie. We’re going to scrutinize, double-check, investigate with the same skepticism we’d approach a Trump tweet. Want to ensure the world’s biggest business media brand approaches you as a potential funnel of disinformation? Then hire away,” he wrote.
Steve Forbes, CEO of Forbes Media, defended the decision to run the piece, telling Fox News “we believe in diversity of opinion,” but he denounced the idea of blacklisting Trump administration officials.
“Here’s my opinion, this is reminiscent of what we had in the 1950s during the McCarthy era, where there were blacklists, Hollywood Ten, people were denied work because of their political beliefs,” Forbes told Fox News. “We’re not going to have blacklists and the like. People can express opinions. Unlike other organizations, we do have diverse opinions at Forbes, and we value those diverse opinions.”