It’s no secret that President Donald Trump likes to be surrounded by loyalists — not advisers who offer him constructive criticism. That’s why Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Attorney General Bill Barr and White House adviser Kellyanne Conway are still in the White House and why former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and former National Security Adviser John Bolton are long gone. And according to Politico reporters Dan Diamond, Daniel Lippman and Nancy Cook, Trump’s need for loyalists is so extreme that some members of his team have even devised a series of “loyalty tests” to make sure that people in his administration are unwavering in their devotion to the president.
Diamond, Lippman and Cook explain, “The White House’s presidential personnel office is conducting one-on-one interviews with health officials and hundreds of other political appointees across federal agencies — an exercise some of the subjects have called ‘loyalty tests’ — to root out threats of leaks and other potentially subversive acts just months before the presidential election, according to interviews with 15 current and former senior administration officials. The interviews are being arranged with officials across a wide range of departments — including Health and Human Services, Defense, Treasury, Labor and Commerce — and include the top tier of Trump aides: Senate-confirmed appointees. Officials are expected to detail their career goals and thoughts on current policies, said more than a dozen people across the (Trump) Administration with knowledge of the meetings.”
White House officials have said that the interviews are meant to determine who would be willing to serve in the Trump administration if Trump is reelected in November and defeats former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. But according to Diamond, Lippman and Cook, “officials summoned for the interviews say the exercise is distracting from numerous policy priorities, like working to fight the pandemic, revitalizing the economy or overhauling regulation — and instead, reflect the White House’s conviction that a ‘Deep State’ is working to undermine the president.”
One of Politico’s sources, presumably interviewed on condition of anonymity, described the interviews as “an exercise in ferreting out people who are perceived as not Trump enough.” And another source told Politico, “If they’re spending time trying to hunt down leakers, that’s time they’re taking away from advancing an agenda — and that’s irresponsible.”
In the past, some U.S. presidents were criticized for being too quick to heed the words of advisers. Some conservatives argued that President George W. Bush was too quick to follow neocon war hawks on foreign policy; some liberals and progressives argued that President Barack Obama was too quick to be influenced by Wall Street insiders on economic policy. But Trump’s mentality has been: my way or the highway — much to the frustration of everyone from Tillerson to former Defense Secretary James Mattis.
A senior Trump Administration official familiar with the interviews/loyalty tests told Politico, “It just seems like you could be a rocket scientist, but all they care about is whether you are MAGA. It is fair to do something to prepare to fill jobs in a second term, but right now, it is hard to know what the metrics are with this personnel office for being successful. There is no set criteria for what makes a good political appointee.”
