Rachel Maddow used Trump’s attacks on Omarosa and the Manafort trial to expose the dangerous problem of how the Trump administration hires people for the White House.
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Rachel Maddow used Trump’s attacks on Omarosa and the Manafort trial to expose the dangerous problem of how the Trump administration hires people for the White House. https://t.co/QgYO1BaSAs pic.twitter.com/ro7KnMWdZi
— PoliticusUSA (@politicususa) August 15, 2018
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Maddow said:
I think one last big consequence for us as Americans watching this trial unfold involving the president’s campaign chair while that president is still in office. It’s not necessarily about the exact charges that Manafort might face. It’s not about the tactics that Manafort’s defense team might try in court. It’s this bigger question about us as a country and us as citizens in our government. This weird turn in the Manafort trial has shone this interesting light on what grounds the administration considered people for high ranking positions in the federal government when they were setting up the new administration.
This is a live issue for us as a country in a lot of different ways. The president literally started publicly deriding as a dog and as a crazed low life, his former white house senior adviser, Omarosa. And you know, it’s this interesting tabloidy spectacle for the president to be calling a White House official those kinds of names, for him to be attacking her the way he is. In those attacks, the president implicitly raises some very serious concerns about who gets into the White House. About his own administration’s ability to hire people for senior jobs. When the president calls his adviser a crazed low life today, it’s as if he has no idea how the crazed low life got hired into the White House to be his senior adviser in the first place. Who hired her, big guy? To that same point, how exactly did this bank CEO from this little bank in Chicago get to the point where Jared Kushner was “on it” to see he was considered to be secretary of the U.S. Army?
The way that the Trump administration has brought people into the White House is the worst hiring process of any administration in the last one hundred years. There is no vetting. There is no regard for qualifications or competency. Trump has staffed his administration with grifters and people like Omarosa who are unqualified and only out to make a buck for themselves.
As Paul Manafort’s trial has revealed, Trump is very comfortable surrounding himself with fellow con artists and criminals.
Trump’s hiring practices have created a real public policy problem. Good governance is impossible, and corruption is rampant. Trump lack of concern or care for public service is how Omarosa got to be a senior White House adviser, and a small banker in Chicago tried to buy his way into a high ranking administration job with loans to Manafort.
The Omarosa story may seem like a distraction, but it is really a symptom of the threat that Trump corruption presents to the government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
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Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
