Trump Alums Can’t Believe No One (Respectable) Will Hire Them After That Tiny Little Insurrection

After Donald Trump lost the 2020 election for the first time but before he incited a violent mob to lay siege on the Capitol, White House staffers and administration officials thought their job prospects looked pretty good. Oh sure, they weren’t going to be landing contributor gigs at MSNBC or working for Nancy Pelosi, but they figured they’d have just as good a chance as any Republican looking for employment, despite the four years of incompetence, corruption, and racism to which they’d attached their names. So confident they were in their abilities to segue working for one of the worst presidents in history to fresh opportunities that even as Trump refused to accept the results of the election and sent in a melting Rudy Giuliani and the lady who claimed Hugo Chavez stole the election for Joe Biden, they figured, No, this is all going to work out. Just gotta update the ole résumé and I’ll be juggling more offers than I can shake a stick at. Mental note: Call Brooks Brothers and ask them to set aside a couple pairs of their finest chinos. Gotta look sharp on day one. 

But then something crazy happened that no one could have seen coming in a million years: The guy who spent the last four years fomenting violence—the same one who back in September refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power—got a bunch of his followers so riled up that they tried to overturn the results of the election and left five people dead in the process. And as it turns out, would-be employers don’t love the idea of hiring people in any way associated with all that. It’s just one of those things that marketing and P.R. teams don’t like to have explain to customers and other interested parties, “it” being having someone on payroll who worked for a guy who tried to overthrow the U.S. government. Per Politico:

Tainted by Trump’s reputation, several Trump aides described an increasingly bleak job market with virtually no chance of landing jobs in corporate America and some even having seen promising leads disappear after the rampage at the U.S. Capitol. A second former White House official said they knew of “people who got jobs rescinded because of January 6.” A Republican strategist was blunter. “They are really fucked,” the strategist said, pointing to some top officials who stuck with Trump until the bitter end. “The Hill scramble, one of the few places where they’d be welcomed, already happened a month or so ago…They were told over and over to take their hand off the hot stove, and they didn’t want to listen.”

It’s a far different reality from where Trump and his aides had envisioned they would be. A month ago everything seemed crystal clear: He had lost the 2020 election but would soon launch a juggernaut campaign for the presidency in 2024, and his allies and inner circle would be there to help…. One former senior administration official noted that many inside the White House were waiting until after the Electoral College votes were counted to begin their job search in earnest, so as not to step on messaging about Trump’s efforts to challenge the election results. But then the riots on Capitol Hill upended their plans. “They looked to that [January 6] as the end of the limbo state people were operating in so they could start moving on to the next thing,” the former official said. “But the 6th put a shock to that.”

According to Politico, it’s not just lower- and middle-level employees seeing opportunities dry up; Trump’s fourth and final chief of staff, Mark Meadows, is reportedly “even considering a position at the Trump Organization because of a lack of options.” Which has gotta hurt! Not just because Meadows probably thought serving as White House chief of staff would lead to numerous opportunities, but because Trump is a notorious cheapskate whose opening salary offer would probably be “$30,000 and I’ll let you take home my doggie bags from the Mar-a-Lago dining room.”

Meanwhile, desperate ex-administration staffers also have the option of applying for a job at Trump’s new pretend Oval Office: