Cushy job offers for discarded Trump staffers

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. And, perhaps, your potential leakers closer yet.

President Donald Trump’s political operation has made a regular practice of providing soft landingpads for discarded staffers, offering nebulous jobs at big salaries to aides who have been pushed out of his West Wing.

The revelation this week that former White House assistant Omarosa Manigault Newman was offered a high-paying job on Trump’s re-election campaign in return for signing a non-disclosure agreement was the clearest demonstration yet of how a slot in the Trump orbit is being used to take care of loyalists — and protect against potential liabilities.

Manigault Newman, who contends in her new book that she was offered a hush-money contract with the Trump campaign paying $15,000 a month, is hardly the first erstwhile staffer to find a lucrative off-ramp in the expanse of pro-Trump political organizations. The former staff members have found a wide range of rehabilitation within Trump’s orbit: his re-election campaign, the Republican National Committee, and outside groups that support both him and Vice President Mike Pence.

Keith Schiller, the president’s former bodyguard who served for eight months as director of Oval Office operations, has been paid the same $15,000 a month by the Republican National Committee as a security consultant for its national convention — in 2020 in Charlotte. John McEntee, Trump’s former personal aide and a former UConn quarterback, is paid $14,000 a month by the Trump re-election campaign. One-time Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski joined Pence’s Great America PAC in May, and former press secretary Sean Spicer was announced in June to replace him as the “senior advisor and spokesman” for pro-Trump super PAC America First Action.