Jonathan Ernst/Pool via AP
Former Defense Secretary James Mattis and former Deputy National Security Advisor Dina Powell, seen here in a 2017 meeting with a Saudi delegation, have both returned to the private sector.
The Trump administration is no more, which means, as terrified anonymous Trump staffers have been telling eager reporters, the moment of reckoning is here. Enablers at all levels of the Trump organization, who tarred their reputations by hitching their professional ambitions to a twice-impeached president who left office with an approval rating of 29 percent, find themselves back on the job market.
According to them, the timing couldn’t be worse. Deutsche Bank and New York City have already severed ties with all things Trump, and unemployment figures are on the rise amidst a pesky recession. Former staffers are now worried that assisting the guy who fomented an attack on the Capitol will play poorly on LinkedIn, and overshadow the work they did cutting corporate taxes and slashing regulations.
They’re not the only ones wracked by professional dread. After Ted Cruz tried to do Trump a solid by voting to overturn the election result, former Cruz staffers groused to New York magazine that their old boss, for many years the most loathed man in the Senate, was unrecognizable to them. They were trying to get out ahead of the blowback. Nothing strikes fear in the hearts of conservative ladder-climbers like the threat of personal and professional accountability. “Some junior staffers are incensed with the president and view themselves as being punished for sticking it out until the end of his term, according to people familiar with the matter,” Bloomberg reported.
If that’s indeed the case, someone is going to have to alert corporate America. So far, former Trump staffers have had little trouble finding work among America’s largest, most profitable and morally dubious firms. Discomfort with the Trump brand has not stopped dozens of Trump enablers from spinning back out into the warm embrace of corporate titans for high-paying appointments. Already, at least 30 ex–Trump officials find themselves gainfully employed. More, certainly, will follow.
The figures come from public-accountability research group LittleSis, which is compiling a database of former Trumpworlders, monitoring where they go and who takes them in. The project, called Swamped, is being run Wiki-style, crowdsourced with tips and submissions.
“We’re seeing all these stories about people being passed over for interviews and being snubbed and the ‘scarlet T’ and all this anticipation of them having a hard time getting a job,” said Gin Armstrong, senior research analyst at Little Sis. “The number of officials who have already gone through the revolving door and landed cushy jobs at major corporations really contradicts that narrative. If you have something you can offer these corporations, they do not care about you having worked in the administration.”
So while the Trump administration has been known for bucking norms, the revolving door doesn’t seem to be one of them. And that transition back into private-sector spoils was made even easier by Trump’s eleventh-hour repeal of a “drain the swamp” rule he signed early in his term that instated a five-year lobbying ban for administration officials and a lifetime ban on lobbying for foreign governments. That ban has now evaporated, and any staffer who stuck it out to the bitter end can now immediately go back into lobbying for anyone willing to pay them.
Some of those names who have re-entered the private sector are high-profile and well-known, people who wielded considerable power throughout Trump’s four long years of shameless criminality and self-dealing, multiple impeachments, and failed attempts to do even worse. Former Trump Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis is already back to banking hundreds of thousands a year on the board of defense contractor General Dynamics. Former Under Secretary of State Andrea Thompson is on the payroll at weapons manufacturer Northrop Grumman. Former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster sits on the board of Zoom.
Outside of the defense industry, it’s the same story. Some of the most flagrantly corrupt members of the administration have landed firmly on their feet. Former Secretary of Energy Rick Perry returned straightaway to the board of the company that controls pipeline company Energy Transfer LP, where he worked before joining the Trump administration. Former Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke works for a fintech consulting firm called Artillery One. The president’s former counsel, Donald McGahn, toils at Jones Day, one of the largest and most respected law firms in the country. Dina Powell, assistant to the president and senior counselor for economic initiatives, went right back to Goldman Sachs, where she previously served. Fiona Hill, senior director for Europe and Russia at the National Security Council, who is familiar from Trump’s 2019 impeachment, went to Brookings. Even less recognizable, more junior staffers, have done similarly well. The list goes on, as you can see here.
So far, former Trump staffers have had little trouble finding work among America’s largest, most profitable and morally dubious firms.
Whether that generosity will indeed extend to low-ranking officials after the Capitol Riot remains to be seen. But hires of junior staffers don’t generate headlines or PR blowback, and there’s little reason to believe those lowly henchmen will be seen as more onerous than their higher-ranking superiors. And those aforementioned hires took place in broad daylight while Trump was still in office, and outrage at his actions and disposition was at an all-time high. In the days and weeks to come, that outrage will almost certainly fade.
What’s already abundantly clear is that the corporate sector feels basically no compunction in bringing on former Trump people, and that trusting the process of accountability to the conscience of the country’s corporate hiring committees is not a workable solution. Just because a handful of universities and large corporations are momentarily uncomfortable with their prominent affiliations with the Trump brand, their commitment does not necessarily run any deeper than that. Once focus shifts to President Biden, they will be more unencumbered than ever.
Unless, of course, Democrats refuse to let these people off the hook and out of the public eye. If the perniciousness of Trumpism is to be excised from civil society, it will have to be done via courts, investigations, and old-fashioned accountability. Those who abetted criminal acts will need to be held accountable for their contributions to eroding civic life to the point of collapse.
The corporate sector, like “history,” is not a capable prosecutor. But there are plenty of actual prosecutors who are. And now that Trump is out of office, with his questionable executive-conferred immunity removed, it’s time for those investigations to begin.
