I’ve heard a lot of heated rhetoric over the last two and a half years. Much of it has been targeted toward Republicans in general. I’m hopeful that the election on Tuesday will be the impetus for people on all sides to recognize that mere association with an opposing party does not transmogrify their neighbors, family and friends into enemy alien creatures.
That said, I intend to do what I can to aid the Republicans with purging Trumpism from their ranks. That, obviously, includes refusing to vote for any Republican congresspeople who refused to vote toward Trump’s removal during the impeachment hearings. It also means working toward jettisoning any of the talking heads and columnists who pushed and covered for Trump’s many offenses. I’ve been an advocate for reconciliation with those who come to their senses after Trumpism implodes, but that allowance should be made for people who weren’t using influential venues to foster ignorance. The duped, not the deceivers.
Still, focusing on those people leaves a large and important crowd out of the equation. Those are the support staff. While it’s inappropriate to attack a career civil servant for doing a job for which they’ve steadily risen through the ranks, that is not the case for many of the people who have been most critical in promoting Trump and attempting to get him re-elected.
That brings to the fore another problem: while these people may be instrumental in the smooth operation of a political operation, most of them are virtually unknown to the general public. Even people who pay attention to politics tend to ignore the actual role played by guests on talk shows who pontificate under the label of “expert”. These are the hired guns, though, the people who took hundreds of thousands of dollars from the RNC for the sole purpose of whitewashing Trump’s misdeeds and dragging him across the finish line ahead of Biden. They take the money, they assess the situation, and they move forward. There is no ignorance of the fact that Trump has, through ineptitude, caused the deaths of at least 200,000 of their fellow Americans; they simply don’t care enough to let it interfere with their financial gain.
Every one of these people can expect to be hired by future campaigns, and not merely by Trumpist campaigns, either. They tend to be only loosely bound to ideology and are sometimes independent of party affiliation. They will work for anyone with money and they tend to be fairly good at their jobs.
The only way to keep these people from supporting future populists – and to create a sense of caution in other strategists who might consider doing to – is to make them pay a price for backing Trump. To that end, I urge people to watch the campaigns of any future candidate they might support, and if they see any of the Trump enablers hired, to pressure the candidates to drop them.
Recognizing that the people involved are far from household names, here is a link to a list of the key independent staffers who are currently working for Trump’s re-election.
You’ll see that there are a few dozen names on there, and many are people you’ve likely never heard of, or at least never given much thought to: Max Miller, Zach Parkinson, Matt Wolking, Ali Pardo, Charli Huddleston, Gary Coby, Laura Nasim, David Huguenel and many others. All of them need to be “made famous”, in the terminology popularly used by The Lincoln Project, at least among those who are casually politically active. Not a person in that link provided should be afforded a position in a reputable campaign in the future.
