While Donald Trump has left Washington, D.C., for Palm Beach’s calmer waters, many of the parasitic organisms who affixed themselves to the former president remain. Unlike many of the big-name alumni of previous administrations who landed cushy gigs at well-established organizations, the figures who got famous working for Trump are seemingly having trouble acquiring such work. Instead, many have remained in Washington’s explicitly conservative spaces, riding out the next segment of their careers.
Stephen Miller, Trump’s anti-immigration czar, is launching America First Legal. His ostensible goal in creating the policy group is to continue to push the same vicious, nationalistic measures he enacted for the previous administration––though in his new life, Miller is now looking to fight with the White House. Namely, the organization’s aim is to file lawsuits against the Biden administration alongside red-state attorneys general. “During the Trump administration, we had the ACLU and three or four other advocacy groups consistently working with Democrats to coordinate against our policies. Miller is taking a page out of their book,” a senior Trump official told Politico regarding Miller’s plans. Rather than focusing solely on Joe Biden’s immigration policies, Miller’s group will target executive overreach––not unlike how blue states sued Trump in 2017 for enacting his Miller-backed travel ban against several Muslim-majority countries.
As for Trump’s former communications staff, the most notable members have jumped into the welcoming arms of right-wing TV networks. For the first time on Tuesday, Kayleigh McEnany appeared on Fox News as a cohost on Outnumbered, a daytime talk show with an all-female cast that serves as a quasi right-wing version of The View. McEnany also appeared on air on Monday for another network debut: Greg Gutfeld’s new program, Gutfeld!, which is positioned as yet another conservative competitor to the Big Three’s late-night comedy mainstays but is already one of the most tragic shows Fox has aired in some time. And of course Sarah Huckabee Sanders received a Fox News contributor deal, a role she has since left in favor of the Arkansas gubernatorial race.
Instead of commentating on the present, some Trumpworld exiles are getting paid to open up about their past personal experiences. Kellyanne Conway is writing a tell-all about her time in the White House under the Trump administration, complete with hot goss and behind-the-scenes drama, that reportedly landed the former White House counselor a multimillion-dollar deal. “Of all the White House insiders, Kellyanne is going to write the most unvarnished, eye-popping account of her time working for the president,” one insider remarked to the Daily Mail. “She’s got some of us quaking in our boots.”
On the cabinet side, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo is reportedly taking a job at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank situated near the White House. While his official title is “distinguished fellow,” the gig is presumably a prime opportunity to continue glad-handing with the D.C. elite ahead of his rumored plans for a presidential run in 2024. On Tuesday, The Washington Post reported that Ben Carson’s next move involves launching a “do tank”––i.e. a think tank for actions, as the former HUD secretary describes it. The focus of Carson’s American Cornerstone Institute is vague, but it seems to be another generic pro-conservative-values initiative. Carson seems significantly more passionate about another project: a right-wing youth organization called Little Patriots, a dream that he described to the Post as “something like the Boy Scouts, but heavily exposed to the real history of America.”
And it wouldn’t be a proper “where are they now?” without a good rehabilitation story. In that vein, despite Brad Parscale’s wild nosedive in the final days of the Trump era––a saga that included Fort Lauderdale police detaining him after his wife warned that he was armed and had threatened to harm himself––the former Trump campaign manager is not giving up his career in politics. Parscale has launched two new organizations, the American Greatness super PAC and the American Greatness Fund, the latter of which is a nonprofit advocacy group. Both are designed to carry on Trump’s presence into the 2022 midterms by throwing support behind candidates who align with the former president. According to Axios, which first reported on Parscale’s new gigs, the organizations mark his official return to Trump’s inner circle.
And then, as the Post detailed, there are those unlucky ones who can’t seem to land anywhere at all:
If only they had been able to see this coming.
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