WASHINGTON – Unemployment is at a record low, and there are other possible presidential candidates, but dozens of Republican operatives – some respected stars among them – have chosen, despite all the salary options available, to help the man who is trying to crush American democracy return to the White House.
“Defending the impossible,” said Al Cardenas, former chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, from where former President Donald Trump ran his 2024 campaign.
And while most of those who work for the Trump campaign, the political committee Save America or the super PAC that supports him are new to politics or have been personally loyal to Trump and lied about his defeat in the 2020 election, some names are highly regarded. Republican politics.
Chris LaCivita, for example, served two jobs on the National Republican Senatorial Committee and designed the infamous “Swift Boat” ad that disparaged 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry’s service in the Vietnam War. Tony Fabrizio was a pollster for GOP presidential candidate Bob Dole in 1996 and has run numerous Republican statewide races since then. And perhaps the most puzzling of all the women running Trump’s operation: Susie Wiles, considered one of the top Republican consultants in Florida, whose work gives now-Sen. Rick Scott two terms in the governor’s mansion, and who in the fall of 2018 saved the campaign of founder Ron DeSantis and helped people win the arrow of victory, as well.
“These are old hands who should know better,” said Sarah Longwell, a Republican consultant who has worked for years to defeat Trump and said her ability to find staff sheds light on the “amoral universe” in which businesses live.
“I think it’s amazing,” he says, and he doesn’t know how someone who, after January 6, 2021, can work for him and still face the mirror every morning. “If according to your opinion, he should take control of the country again, I think your decision is terrible. And I think it’s rude.
LaCivita, Fabrizio and Wiles did not respond to HuffPost’s multiple inquiries and requests for comment. Nor did the majority of the dozens of Trump campaign employees and vendors contacted by HuffPost.
Campaign spokesman Steven Cheung defended Trump and the staff who, like himself, work for him. “Everyone in the campaign is loyal to President Trump and the movement he has built,” he said, adding, “If you refer to January 6, President Trump said ‘peace and patriotism’ in his speech, but the media and the media. Jan. 6.” an unelected committee’ has unceremoniously omitted that part of its footage.
While ‘peace’ was in Trump’s speech that day, when Congress certified the Electoral College count, he also called on his followers to “fight like hell” and warned that they would lose their country if they didn’t. He further inflamed the crowd in the evening by attacking the vice president himself for not having the “courage” to join the coup attempt to stay in power despite losing the election. Four of his own supporters were killed that day, while 140 police officers were injured and five were killed in the following days and weeks.
Trump is currently under criminal investigation for his actions leading up to and on January 6, both by the US Department of Justice as well as the Fulton County prosecutor in Georgia.
Mac Stipanovich, who with Cardenas helped the Republican Party become the dominant party in Florida during the 1980s and 90s, said Trump’s repeated lies about the “stolen” election that led to the January 6 attack on the Capitol on his behalf should be the last straw. for anyone thinking of working for Trump.
“He is a despicable human being. He is dishonest. He lied. If he were my boss, I would quit. If he were my employee, I would be fired. If you become a son-in-law, you don’t need a horse whip,” he said. “One, he’s a bad guy. And two, he’s a danger to representative democracy in this country.
Works at Insurrectionist In Chief
HuffPost contacted dozens of employees and vendors for the campaign, Save America’s “leadership PAC” and its supporting super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., for this story.
Among the only ones to explain her choice to continue working for Trump, despite her last act in the January 6 riots, was campaign spokeswoman Liz Harrington, until now a purveyor of Trump’s lies about election fraud.
“The 2020 election was stolen, and there is only more evidence to prove that it is true,” said Harrington, who in the past two years has made $126,431 from Save America and, since Trump’s announcement in November that he will run in 2024, $16,875. of the campaign, according to a HuffPost analysis of Federal Election Commission filings. Both amounts represent payments made until the end of 2022.
Whether those who claim to believe Trump’s falsehoods about the 2020 election are a job requirement is unclear, though the campaign roster is filled with some longtime Trump staffers who have repeated at least some of them.
Margo Martin, for example, is Trump’s White House press aide who immediately went to work for him at the Palm Beach country club after he left office. He has been paid $159,773 by Save America and $17,110 by the campaign.
Dan Scavino, whose service to Trump began as a caddy decades ago, remains a key aide in helping him rig the election. He has been paid $160,651 by Save America and $23,125 by the campaign.
Natalie Harp and Christina Bobb, meanwhile, began spreading Trump election conspiracy theories as One America News reporters. He is now a Trump campaign staffer. Harp has been paid $69,955 by Save America and $13,125 by the campaign, while Bobb has $95,561 from Save America and $25,000 from the campaign.
“He is a despicable human being. He is dishonest. He lied. If he were my boss, I would quit. If he were my employee, I would be fired. If he’s a son-in-law, I’ll whip the horse. One, he’s a bad guy. And two, they are a danger to representative democracy in this country.
– Mac Stipanovich, Republican political strategist
Also on the staff is Stephen Miller, a former top Trump aide in the White House who, on the day the Electoral College met on December 14, boasted in a televised interview that the Trump campaign was working to generate “alternative” polling places for use on January 6. White House speechwriting office: Ross Worthington and Vincent Haley. All three were involved in the fraudulent election scheme that was key to the January 6 coup attempt and are currently under criminal investigation.
Miller has been paid $137,092 by Save America and $14,750 by the campaign. Worthington and Haley have been paid $26,250 and $28,375 respectively by the campaigns.
However, others on Trump’s global payroll, in public statements or as testimony before the committee on January 6, admitted that Trump lost the 2020 election.
Pollster Fabrizio, a company paid $252,875 by Save America, published a report in December 2020 that explained why Trump lost and said he communicated directly with Trump. But he continues to work for Trump.
And Jason Miller, a longtime Trump adviser now working for the campaign, admitted under oath to the committee on January 6 that there were not enough “frauds and irregularities … to invalidate the election.” He has been paid $97,500 by Save America through his SHW Partners business.
Several consultants, meanwhile, have created corporate fronts in the past two years that allow them to receive money from Trump anonymously.
A company that calls itself 305Sunnshine Strategies, for example, was created in December. There is no website, and corporate records in Florida provide no information about its owner. It has received $60,000 from Save America and $15,000 from the Trump super PAC.
Redshift Strategies is registered to the same firm that handles company registration in St. Petersburg, Florida, as 305Sunnshine Strategies. It has received $22,398 from super PACs.
We are not the ‘Morality Police’
A Republican consultant who opposes Trump said he is not surprised that some of his colleagues are willing to take money from Trump’s operations as long as they can do so without being tied to the public.
“The thing that really makes my blood boil is the class of consultants who will tell me that they and their companies are doing line work for Trump, but they are happy with contracts from the Republican National Committee, 501(c)(4) vehicles, PACs doing independent expenditures around turnout that will drive votes at the presidential level, and any and all committees,” said Lucy Caldwell, who ran the quixotic primary challenge of former Illinois Congressman Joe Walsh for Trump in 2020. “But somehow they have been deluded. We think that they have principles because not literally contracted with the Trump campaign committee.
Fabrizio, while he would not respond to HuffPost’s questions, addressed questions about working for Trump after Jan. 6 during a podcast interview with Democratic consultant David Axelrod.
He said in an episode that aired a year ago that he was “in a state of shock” watching the violence in the Capitol on January 6 and believed that Trump had to do something to stop it. However, she defended her decision to work for him.
“If people expect us to be the moral police, I expect a lot from our profession because our profession will not do that,” Fabrizio said. “We’re not going to be the moral police.”
That attitude is all too common in his business, Longwell said, with Trump supporters saying what he’s doing isn’t bad, and that Democrats are even worse. “So much of your normative value is shaped by what people around you do,” he says. “I can’t imagine a moral calculus that allows you to come back and work for Trump after January 6.”
However, he stressed that several experienced and respected Republican consultants have turned away from working for Trump, leaving his staff with even fewer chances than the former president to win the nomination. “There are always ‘C’ players,” he said.
Stipanovich says he can understand young operators, early in their careers, making moral tradeoffs. “They have mortgages, they have kids who need to go to college,” he said, adding that it’s easier for people like himself who have made a lot of money. “I can apply principles. Some of my colleagues can’t.
Stuart Stevens, a consultant in the campaign of former President George W. Bush and 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney, refused to cut that level of slack, at least when it comes to people who receive help from the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. won the 2016 election, supported Putin every time he was in office, tried to extort Ukraine to win reelection and then last year called Putin’s invasion of Ukraine “genius”.
“So you support someone who you know is supported by Putin?” Stevens said. “Who introduced pro-Putin elements into American politics and who then tried to overthrow the government?”