Trump’s 'battle-hardened group' of loyalists are 'just doing what he says': insiders

17 March

During his first term as president, Donald Trump received a great deal of pushback from non-MAGA conservatives who served in his administration — including those hired as White House chief of staff (John F. Kelly), secretary of state (Rex Tillerson) and national security director (John Bolton).

Trump fired Jeff Sessions as U.S. attorney general in 2018 — only to have a bitter falling out with someone who later held by that position: Bill Barr. And Stephanie Grisham, Trump's third White House press secretary, ended up giving Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris an enthusiastic endorsement at the 2024 Democratic National Convention.

But after narrowly defeating Harris in 2024, Trump made a concerted effort to fill his second administration with unquestioning MAGA loyalists.

In an article published by the conservative National Review on March 17, reporter Audrey Fahlberg lays out some ways in which the second Trump Administration differs radically from the first.

"Many Trump 1.0 White House officials came in with the moral imperative to serve as a check on Trump, believing they could steer the ship in the right direction despite their own personal misgivings about his character and policy aims," Fahlberg explains. "For some administration officials, that meant taking papers off the president's desk and leaking to the press. For others, that meant resigning from their posts in protest."

In 2024, according to Fahlberg, Trump and his team wanted to avoid hiring someone who, like Miles Taylor, wasn't committed to the MAGA cause.

Taylor was serving as chief of staff of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) when, in 2018, he wrote an anonymous op-ed for the New York Times that described his efforts to push back against Trump policies he considered harmful. The op-ed was famously headlined " I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration."

After coming out as the person who wrote that op-ed, Taylor endorsed Joe Biden for president in 2020 and Harris in 2024. Taylor hasn't been shy about attacking Trump as anti-democracy.

James Blair, Trump's deputy White House chief of staff, described Trump's second administration as a "pretty battle-hardened" group of loyalists.

According to GOP lobbyist and former Trump campaign official David Urban, the president's second administration is much more compliant than the first.

Urban told the National Review, "(In 2016), a lot of people had, I would say, potentially different views on how things should be executed, right? And they were trying to get things done the way they thought the president wanted…. Donald Trump doesn't need an interpreter….This time, they're just doing what he says."

Similarly, Trump pollster John McLaughlin told the Review, "There was turnover within his first administration. This time around, he clearly is picking people that he's had longer relationships with. There's more recognition of who's really out to achieve the goals of what the president said his movement is about, rather than people who are about themselves."

Read Audrey Fahlberg's full National Review article at this link.

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