This Town After Trump: Nothing to See Here, Folks

This Town After Trump: Nothing to See Here, Folks

By Julia Ioffe,

June 27, 2021.

Hello and welcome back to Tomorrow Will Be Worse. I’ve spent the last two weeks traveling—my first time on a plane since March 2020!—and sending you my thoughts about the Biden-Putin meeting. Now, I’m back in the Swamp, whence I will be delivering dispatches about how this strange city works. (We all need a break from Putin, methinks.) This letter is the first in a series I’ve decided to do on how Washington has—and hasn’t—changed in the six months since January 6th.

I’ll be doing that as my colleagues and I continue building our new media company, which will be focused on telling you what’s really happening in America’s four centers of power: Hollywood, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Washington, D.C., known somewhat ironically by its residents as #thistown, after the eponymous (and gloriously merciless) Mark Leibovich book.

Also, this is a work in progress, so we’re going to try out a more interactive feature: one of my newsletters every week will be dedicated to answering your questions. So, please submit your questions to fritz@puck.news and I will answer the best ones in the next newsletter.

Thank you for signing up, thank you for reading. If you like what you’re seeing, pass it on. And subscribe to my colleagues here, here, and here.

#ThisTown After Trump: Nothing to See Here, Folks

Washington is a strange place. People who don’t live here love to beat up on us, to accuse us of being cynical and corrupt, and full of people who say one thing and do another, and Washington is undoubtedly all those things—though it is also full of some of the biggest idealists I’ve ever met. But what I find mind-boggling about this place is how and why Washington gets outraged.

Remember the time this city absolutely lost its mind when comedian Michelle Wolf was the keynote comedian at the 2018 White House Correspondents’ Dinner and went after then-press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders? If you don’t, let me remind you: Every year, the White House Correspondents Association throws a black tie dinner where an A-list comedian is brought in to roast the people in power. In 2018, at the height of Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy that tore children away from their parents at the southern U.S. border and just a few days before then-attorney general Jeff Sessions said “we need to take away the children,” Wolf joked that Sanders created the perfect smokey eye by dusting her lids with crushed lies. All press secretaries get creative with the truth but Sarah Huckabee Sanders was infamous for her gymnastic manipulations. But when Wolf tied Sanders’s Olympic feats with her make-up, lots of people felt this was not very nice.

Remember what I told you about the importance of being nice in Washington? It’s very, very important. Because this is a town that, like most towns, runs on personal connections and you never know whom you might need down the line in #thistown. And guess whom you’re probably going to need in the future? That’s right. The president’s press secretary and her off-the-record chats and her responding to your text messages at all hours. And it’s very easy to slam an outsider—a female comedian at that—to score points with the people in power by appealing to the very decorum that the people in power made a fetish of trampling.

Which is a big reason why Washington and Washington-adjacent people all along the Acela corridor were outraged. Wolf had insulted “a wife and a mother”! Others noted Sanders' incredible fortitude in weathering Wolf’s vicious attack. The White House Correspondents Association issued a statement saying that Wolf’s monologue was “not in the spirit” of the Association’s mission, which is strange, considering the fact that the only memorable part of these dinners has always been the A-list comedians invited to roast the people in power. Because they were so scandalized by Wolf’s monologue, though, the Association decided to do away with the tradition entirely. (They stuck to their guns and held a uniquely boring dinner in 2019 before the pandemic spared them of having to repeat the idiocy in 2020 and 2021.)

Sometimes, the city clutches its pearls so hard it risks choking itself. I’ve had run-ins with this, too, like when, in 2016, I tweeted about the news that president-elect Trump was reportedly planning on giving the First Lady’s quarters of the White House, normally reserved for a president’s wife, to his daughter Ivanka. This was more than a bit awkward, given all the sexual things he’s said about her. I won’t repeat the tweet here, but let’s just say I lost two jobs over it and was lectured by very powerful people in Washington, including those who helped start the Iraq War, that this was definitely a career-ender because it was worse than getting a story wrong.

That’s the strange thing about Washington: it has its own cancel culture, one that predates whatever it is conservatives have been banging on about recently. Washington has a different cancellation metric than the rest of the country, and it can be hard to divine from the outside—or, honestly, from the inside. Making fun of a Trump press secretary who lies without blushing by invoking her eye shadow technique? Never again! Alluding to Trump’s absolutely insane comments sexualizing his own child? Off with her head! Helping spread lies and cheer the start of a completely unnecessary war that kills hundreds of thousands of people and destabilizes an entire region? Well, hindsight is 20-20 and crafting American foreign policy is a tricky business…​

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I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently as we near the six-month anniversary of the insurrection of January 6. This week, the first of the insurrectionists was sentenced and there are hundreds more in line behind her. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was forced to create her own commission to investigate that day’s events because Republicans in the Senate killed the idea of a bipartisan one. Trump has been indefinitely banned from Twitter and Facebook. But has anyone else suffered any consequences for enabling the former president and his deranged supporters?

In the days after January 6, there was a raft of stories citing anonymous Trump staffers worried that the events of that terrible day would make them unemployable. It wasn’t an irrational fear. One could easily imagine professional repercussions for a line on your resume tying you to the man who tried to violently overturn a democratic election—or that there should be. Yet every day, #thistown’s political newsletters bring news that yet another Trump alumnus has landed a cushy new job. Here’s a representative sampling:

Former Louisiana Representative John Fleming served through the entirety of the Trump administration and ended his term as an assistant to the president, working on the COVID-19 task force and basically doing everything that Chief of Staff Mark Meadows wasn’t. Unlike some other Trump appointees, Fleming didn’t flee the ship when rioters stormed the Capitol, and left the White House only when Trump’s term was officially over. In April, Fleming joined the McKeon Group, a lobbying shop, as a principal.

William Crozer, who was a special assistant to the president, condemned the violence at the Capitol but still said it was “the honor of a lifetime” to work for Trump. He too landed on his feet. In April, he joined a large lobbying firm as a vice president.

Greg Jacob, who was chief counsel to Vice President Mike Pence and an advisor to President Trump, rejoined the massive international law firm O’Melveny as a partner, where he will go back to making millions. He had advised Pence on whether he could challenge the Electoral College vote—though, to be fair, he ultimately gave him the right advice—and was in the Capitol with the VP when the building was stormed by Trump supporters chanting “Hang Mike Pence!”

Morgan Ortagus, who served as Mike Pompeo’s press secretary, has joined the Atlantic Council, a prominent D.C. think tank. Pompeo himself joined another prominent think tank, the right-leaning Hudson Institute. (Think tanks, as a D.C. friend once joked, should all be renamed as “The Center for the Next Democratic Administration” or “The Institute Where Republicans Wait Out the Democratic President,” because often, that’s all think tanks are: holding pens for appointees of future administrations.)

Amy Swonger, a veteran Republican who served for most of the Trump administration in the legislative affairs office, returned to the lobbying firm of prominent D.C. lobbyist Heather Podesta, the ex-wife of D.C. lobbying titan Tony Podesta and former sister-in-law of John Podesta, Bill Clinton’s chief of staff and Hillary Clinton’s right hand man. (Oh, #thistown.)

Former Trump Chief of Staff Reince Preibus, fired by tweet and abandoned on the tarmac, is living the good life, making up to six figures per speech and getting cheeky write-ups in the Washington Post about his salt-water fish tank.

Another former Trump chief of staff, John Kelly, who, as head of the Department of Homeland Security, implemented Trump’s child-separation policy, has joined the board of Caliburn International, which, rather ironically, operates four shelters for unaccompanied minors crossing into the United States.

Oh, and the one Trump administration official that has apparently been struggling to find a job? Former D.H.S. secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who became the face of Trump’s child separation policy, even though she was pushed out for not being hardcore enough. She has reportedly sold her D.C. house and moved somewhere where she’s not as recognizable. Two sources told me that doors have been closed to her. (A representative for Nielsen told me "her plate is very full working with multiple companies on a consulting basis.")

Here’s how a Republican lobbyist explained it to me. He had heard of mid-level Trump people struggling to find jobs, but, he said, despite the way Trump went out, trying to take down the edifice of democracy on the way, this cycle of outgoing administration officials looking for jobs wasn’t all that different from past transfers of power. “Transitions are difficult. Any time an administration changes, there’s a scramble for jobs,” the lobbyist said. “That’s just the nature of town: when there’s a change, the party on the out struggles. Anybody leaving has a hard time, and the Trump thing didn’t help. It was going to be a challenge anyway.”

As a prospective employer and as someone who tried to help these people find jobs in corporate America, he didn’t see working for Trump as a mark of death—or even a particularly terrible stain—on a resume. “I wouldn’t say that having Trump on your resume is a great thing for a corporate gig,” the lobbyist said, “but you’re going to get hired based on your record over a period of time, not because you worked for some asshole for two years.” In the end, though, everyone he was helping look for a job, despite the asshole they worked for trying to stage a coup, seemed like they were going to be okay. “Everybody I’ve been trying to help is in a good spot, but it took a while. In corporate America, they all landed places,” he said with evident pride, before adding, “But I’m not helping the crazy ones.”

One Republican staffer on the Hill put it more succinctly. “I think in some ways, there will always be a stigma. But people are pretty self-interested in D.C., so if you can hire someone who worked for Trump and it benefits you, you’re going to do it.” A Democratic Hill staffer agreed. “At the end of the day,” he said, “firms who think they would make money off hiring them are gonna hire them.”

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America, which historically prefers compromise and consensus over righteous conflict, has never done lustration particularly well. Lustration is the concept, implemented in some Eastern European countries after the fall of Communism, that people who participated in a country’s monstrous past should be banned from government positions where they can influence the country’s future. It’s the idea that certain acts should be disqualifying from holding positions of state power. In dealing with Confederate traitors after the Civil War, the U.S. government chose reconciliation over lustration, which is one reason we got Jim Crow laws and Confederate monuments and a huge contingent of people who think they’re a good and important part of our scenery. (If you want to read an absolutely remarkable book on the subject, look no further.) Lustration is hard to implement and, depending on who you are, can be very uncomfortable. D.C. doesn’t like uncomfortable.

D.C. insiders insist that there’s a difference between the technocrats who helped Trump implement his agenda and the political operators that helped Trump get elected—and poured gasoline on every single fire. Most of the worst actors—Mark Meadows, Stephen Miller, and the other political hacks—have started their own Trump-adjacent ventures or have joined far-right “think tanks.” (NPR’s Domenico Montanaro has a good rundown here.) Some, like Trump whisperer Kellyanne Conway, MAGA digital guru Brad Parscale, and campaign manager Bill Stepien, are helping Trump acolytes run for office across the country, though one D.C. Republican told me that Parscale “made so much money [working for Trump], he may never have to work again.”

Trump son-in-law and messiah of Middle East Peace Jared Kushner and first daughter Ivanka Trump, meanwhile, are busy laundering their reputations as Trump’s biggest enablers. They’re planting stories with a credulous press going through Trump withdrawal, telegraphing to the world that they’ve distanced themselves from Trump because they’re sane people and not as bad as you think they are. (More on that in our next episode.)

Even if they’re shunned by mainstream society or corporate America—or even Fox News—there’s a growing far-right ecosystem where they can make a comfortable home for themselves. Former Trump press staffers Sean Spicer and Hogan Gidley may not have gotten contracts at Fox News, but they’ve landed gigs at Newsmax, where Spicer hosts a prime-time show every weeknight. “Outside of Fox, there’s a whole world of options for them,” says Republican strategist and former R.N.C. spokesman Doug Heye. “Sean Spicer hosts a show five nights a week on a channel that I don’t know the number of, but that’s not insignificant. It’s very easy for people to dismiss Newsmax, but there are people who watch. There’s money to be made there. If you live in New York or D.C., it’s very easy to forget that. These are very powerful outlets. And that’s also true of the political consultancy firms, issue advocacy firms—there’s an ecosphere for these people that’s not the mainstream.”

And I guess that’s the crux of the issue. Can there really be consequences—outside of the law or, say, not getting reelected—if there’s always a place you can fall back on? Can you ever really be “canceled,” even for undermining the very foundation of America’s (imperfect) democracy, if your tribe will always have your back because anything the other tribe says is bad must be good? What is to be done with these people if, instead of suffering meaningful consequences, their tribe crowns them with glory? It’s easy enough to score points with the people you need, like the White House press secretary, by ragging on an outsider like Michelle Wolf. You can make something small, like a joke, into a big deal and an even bigger opportunity to virtue signal to the right people, especially when so many people in the very strait-laced #thistown are really and genuinely offended by such things.

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Remember all those corporations who said they wouldn’t donate to any members of Congress who had in any way tried to overturn a free and fair election? Well, many of them have kept their promise in the first quarter of 2021—at least technically. Some, however, have gotten around their own pledge by donating to the umbrella committees that help Republicans get elected and reelected to Congress, like the National Republican Campaign Committee, the NRCC. Others were careful in how they defined who was worth giving to and who wasn’t. “The only thing I ever saw was that they were stopping their giving to people who voted against certifying the election,” says the Democratic staffer. “That’s a really clear line. And if you’re giving to senators, it’s a much smaller group, so you don’t have to stop giving to [Senate Minority Leader Mitch] McConnell. But is he one of the good guys?”

Meanwhile, some members of Congress, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Josh Hawley, and Ted Cruz have realized they can raise far more money without the corporate world by portraying themselves as victims of “woke corporporations” and monetizing the resultant tribal rage. And, as Bernie Sanders has shown, there’s nothing like a flood of small-dollar donations to raise your authenticity quotient. “Cruz and Hawley, they don’t care about that,” says the Republican Hill staffer about corporations shutting off the spigot of political cash. “It’s all about small donations. A corporation can give you $5,000, but you’d much rather have 500 people giving you $10 every month.” Both senators, who acted as the bellows of the insurrection, raised record sums despite the corporate punishment.

Here’s the other problem: no one thinks the corporate ban is going to be permanent. The Republican lobbyist I spoke to is counting on it. “Our counsel was to calm down, keep your head down, and do what you need to do when the time is right,” he said he told his corporate clients about political giving. “Everybody knew that at some point they’re going to resume” writing checks.

They have to, just because of how Washington is built. You give money to congresspeople and senators who, say, represent a district where you have a facility or sit on the committee that oversees your industry. Are you going to stay out of the conversation entirely while competitors are donating money to get face time with Senator X or Representative Y so that maybe they’ll remember what they told them next time they’re drafting legislation or voting on a bill? “If you’re not going to give to any Republicans that said dumb shit about the election, you wouldn’t find any Republicans to give to and you’d be opting out of the game,” says the Democratic staffer. Plus, says the Republican lobbyist, companies haven’t forgotten who’s been friendlier to their interests. “Republicans were typically the helpful ones,” he said. “The Democrats want to kick them in the ass.”

Such is the tension between civic and fiduciary duty. “If you’re a defense contractor that employs a lot of people nationally but also in Washington State and your congresspeople voted not to certify election results in Pennsylvania, I don’t know what you do,” says Heye. “That’s a very difficult question. It’s easy to say from the outside. If they’re a member who supports your agenda, that is a key member of a subcommittee, you have to look at that and balance that with what are your responsibilities to your employees, your agenda, your shareholders. By freezing them out for a few months, maybe that sends a signal that gets forgotten, but you have a responsibility to your employees and your shareholders. It might be slightly cynical, but I think that’s where things are. ”

I asked Heye what I knew was a comically naive question: Wasn’t it important for businesses to have a stable and predictable political system with strong courts and the rule of law? Wouldn’t donating to people who introduced so much instability—and potentially fatal rot—into the system not be in their business interests? “There aren’t necessarily easy answers,” he sighed. “These aren’t easy conversations. Welcome to Washington, where we’re much better at short-term decisions than long-term decisions.”

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So much of it, though, is #thistown’s palpable, desperate desire to get back to “normal.” Even among Republicans, I hear a kind of delight in the partisan battle over how to pay for infrastructure. It’s boring. It’s normal. No one is waking up with the dread of knowing that a President Trump has tweeted something batshit crazy while they were asleep. And there’s a hope, expressed through a painful grimace and crossed fingers, that this boring normal will stick. People were outraged, and now they’d really like to move on.

In November 2012, Heye was working for Eric Cantor, then the Republican House Majority Leader, and was with him the day after Mitt Romney lost the election to Barack Obama in 2012. Cantor started calling his members and gathering string for what would become the party’s famous post mortem. Honored more in the breach than the observance, it recommended the G.O.P. get serious about immigration reform and outreach to Latino voters. “We underestimate what an important factor time is,” Heye said. “If we were having drinks the Friday after the [2012] election, I would tell you Republicans are going to move immigration legislation. Every day that we moved past that, it became less and less likely, and less immediate.” By February, when G.O.P. legislators gathered at a retreat and pushed back on Cantor’s immigration proposals, the idea was dead. “Once that meeting was over, immigration was done,” Heye remembered. “The key issue there was time. If there had been a vote on the commission [to investigate the insurrection of January 6] on January 7, it would have passed overwhelmingly and even [House Minority Leader] Kevin McCarthy would’ve voted for it. But every day that passes, it becomes less and less immediate. That’s informed by Trump, by conservative media, but it’s also time.”

It’s typical #thistown, but it's also typically human. “Everyone just settles back into their corners,” says the Democratic staffer. “Every Republican that was scandalized stopped being scandalized, except [Wyoming Republican] Liz Cheney.” Or, to quote the Republican staffer: “People are outraged and then people move on.”

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That’s all for now. Tune in next week for the second installment of my series #ThisTown after Trump, examining how Washington has—and hasn’t—changed in the six months after the January 6 insurrection and coup attempt. In the meantime, you can support my work by sharing this email with a friend or inviting them to sign up here.

Good night. Tomorrow will be worse,

Julia

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