Personnel is Policy

I'm hoping Trump 2.0 staffers have fewer squishes

Every month, for several years, I have had dinner with a dozen plus Ivy League educated conservatives (and libertarians) in a DC suburb.

This informal group started meeting when an older Yalie was at an event talking to two fresh out of school conservatives and they all realized they’d attended an elite college, and thought they should start what might have been almost a therapy group for people who spent 4 years being a small minority on campus constantly harassed and under threat, as if they were Jews at UCLA or Columbia.

I don’t actually fit this group but they let me in. I was a college student at the University of Chicago where we had a largely Friedmanite business school, economics department, and even law school, as well as a healthy dose of Straussians and neoconservatives in political science and the humanities, alongside the usual Marxists, socialist feminists etc. I was actually invited in by someone who graduated from Beijing University before getting a math PhD from Duke.

So the group (and I would recommend everyone everywhere starting some version of this group) already had some peeps who technically did not go to an Ivy League school: a Duke, a Chicago, a Stanford, even Wellesley College. But the overwhelming majority of them are Yale, Cornell, Dartmouth, Penn, Brown, and Harvard, usually undergrad at one Ivy followed by Wharton or some other Ivy for grad degrees. Lots of the regulars are in their 60s (the ones in their 20s tend to disappear to Boston or elsewhere for law and grad school), and a healthy percentage, maybe half, have served in either the current or the first Trump administration, a Bush administration, or state and local government, or have worked on state political campaigns or in state Republican organizations.

It’s a group shot through with squishes. I think way back in the beginning of the last presidential campaign the group had a number of Haley supporters, and there were only two of us who were for Trump. And we tended, when we’d go round and answer the question of who should be the GOP nominee after dinner, to say Trump would be the nominee more than we’d argue that he should be. There were also DeSantis supporters, who did come round rather easily to Trump, simply worrying way back in those early days that Trump could not win.

I remember back in the days of Trump 45 that many of the DC area libertarians I knew, or knew of, at the Cato Institute or the Charles Koch Institute, ended up in the Trump administration, even if on Pence’s staff or at some federal agency. At one point it seemed the only familiar names at the libertarian think tanks were the late David Boaz (trying to hold things together), immigration fabulist Alex Nowrasteh, and recently imported Eastern European and South African free market economists who might have been here on work Visas.

Trump may have not expected to win. He hadn’t picked a staff and appointees in advance. Many establishment GOP types would not take a job in that administration, cowed by the media onslaught or the hoax that Trump would be exposed as a Russian asset.

The people who ended up turning on Trump, writing books denouncing him or appearing before the Potemkin committee hearings run by Pelosi, Cheney etc. were usually not these liberatarians. Many were opportunists from Trump’s non-political careers that Trump had turned to when he could not find staff.

But now Trump can get staffers. He has a brilliant Cabinet, despite their falling for the Signal misstep that seems to have been planned by their deep state opponents and executed by a saboteur.

In my Ivy dinner group there are very, very low level Trump appointees, and I suspect more will join them. They are often nice people. I like most of them. But they are squishes. In our last dinner they were clutching their pearls over how DOGE was rolled out all wrong, and we should really only be doing cuts much smaller and much later. A current (47) low level Trump appointee opined that it was ridiculous to demand that federal workers report what 5 things they worked on the previous week. Everywhere this gentleman had gone people were up in arms about this.

I pointed out to him that he lived inside the Beltway. Outside the Beltway what America saw was fedcrats having a meltdown because someone asked them what 5 things they worked on last week. Optics that should make it much easier to fire them.

I hope the Trump administration can weed out the deep state saboteurs and stop appointing these wets. The Trump regime should NOT be hiring some Haley supporters who have served on some minor state agency or state GOP committee or in the Bush administration, just because they have law or business school credentials from an Ivy.

They should be combing through pro-Trump writers and hiring us!

This was published earlier this week at SpliceToday.