Trump White House job seekers have tough sell
WA SHINGTON» After announcing her departure from the Trump administration in the middle of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, Sarah Matthews, a deputy White House press secretary, kept running into the same question as she worked her contacts to find a new job: What was it like?
Matthews turned the answer to that question into a strategy to succeed in a job market not exactly clamoring for former Trump administration aides — presenting her experience in former President Donald
Trump’s press office as essentially a daily lesson in crisis communications, and a marketable asset.
“In general, you would think that working in the Trump White House would kind of show how battletested you are,” Matthews, who plans to stay in Republican politics, said in an interview. “It shows that you can survive one of the most high-pressure jobs.”
However they choose to spin their experience, the decision to stay in the Trump White House to the very end will create headwinds for some former officials, especially those who lasted until a presidency defined by grievance went out in violence. Trump jetted off to Florida urging those he left behind to “have a nice life,” but the stigma of his political brand will not be so easy for his former aides to escape.
“The longer they stayed, the more vocally they defended the president’s policies, the harder it will be to find work after this,” Miles Taylor, the former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, who anonymously wrote a book condemning the Trump administration, said in an interview.
“There were people toward very the few end whose intent was to hold the president accountable.”
Even famously friendly landing spots are at least temporarily closing their gates: Kayleigh McEnany, Trump’s last press secretary, was negotiating a job at Fox News when those talks were put on pause in the weeks after the election.
“Kayleigh McEnany is not currently an employee or contributor at Fox News,” a spokesperson wrote in an email.
So McEnany has moved to Florida.
The post-Trump job search looks a little more like “Hunger Games” than “Wall Street,” and that is not typical. Working in the White House usually has meant punching a golden ticket to lucrative positions at lobbying firms, in business or at a college or university.
But finding a job after working for Trump is different.
“It’s going to be difficult transitioning out of that administration into the private sector,” Brian McCormick, an executive vice president of the McCormick Group, an executive staffing agency, said.
But he said that aides to any departing White House generally have a tough time finding their next role if another party assumes power. “Republicans aren’t going to be high on the list when someone’s looking to hire a lobbyist as part of their staff,” he said.
According to a dozen former officials, the choices are now roughly these: Stay in Trump’s direct orbit, as a cluster of advisers have done, or try to find a job in a corner of the political ecosystem that is sympathetic to him.