At The Washington Post, Phillip Bump and team set out to make a list of where the top three-dozenish of Donald Trump's many ex-administration officials have ended up, once Trump fired them or they otherwise exited his team.
Laid out all at once, it makes for an interesting list. And as Matt Ford points out, it so far doesn't seem that working for Donald Trump is much of a career builder.
If you don't have your old job waiting for you, the post-Trump career paths available once you've come and gone from Trump's good graces appear somewhat limited. Some get shunted off to the Trump and Republican campaigns, which may either be a signal that their loyalty to Trump remains intact despite being tossed aside or an effort to shove them into "wingnut welfare" sinecures that still provide steady paychecks but don't require dealing so directly with the Oval Office menace.
Bill Shine went from Fox News to the White House to Trump's reelection campaign; it's unclear what a man who accomplished approximately nothing during his administration tenure will bring to the Trump campaign, but the campaign is already flush with cash and the disgraced Shine isn't someone with a lot of other job offers on hand. Longtime Trump bodyguard turned Deputy Assistant Keith Schiller landed a Republican Party gig scouting 2020 convention locations. The disgraced Rob Porter was originally destined for a pro-Trump PAC, but even that offer fell through due to the disgraced part.
Others settle into academia or, if academia isn't willing to bear them, think tanks. Gary Cohn is a temporary fellow at Harvard's Institute of Politics, not nearly the staid and exclusive gig it is made to sound like. Former Secretary of Defense James Mattis has returned to Stanford's Hoover Institution. FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb went from government drug regulator back to his American Enterprise Institute writing papers on how government should regulate drugs.
And then there are the saddest of the hangers-on, like the ridiculous Sebastian Gorka. No longer welcome even on Fox, Gorka now does a bare-bones daily radio show for a much-diminished audience for fellow crackpots. Omarosa got a book deal out of her brief White House career, and very little else. And Steve Bannon, still kicking and still in the same three unwashed shirts, has been redirecting himself more aggressively toward white nationalist politics with a planned nationalist "training" compound in a European ex-monastary. (With that, Bannon retains his perch as ex-Trump team member most likely to be targeted by a future military drone strike. Might want to keep the blinds closed, buddy.)
The big-money gigs, however, are in being crooked, and the same administration members that made themselves a name as the crookedest and most investigated members of Trump's team have not been shy in cashing in immediately after being booted for said sketchiness. Former Interior Department Secretary Ryan Zinke landed a "consulting" job for mining company U.S. Gold, and is now—wait for it—the managing director of a new cryptocurrency company, so we'll likely be hearing "Zinke" and "investigation" again in the near future. EPA saboteur Scott Pruitt shifted seamlessly into a new coal lobbyist position, which absolutely everybody saw coming.
And then there's ex-Homeland Security head John Kelly, who has topped them all by going from one of the chief architects of Trump's system of refugee detention and child separation policies to ... the board of the company that operates privately run detention centers for migrant children. Kelly helped invent the child detention marketplace, and now is cashing in directly as board member of a for-profit company providing those detention services. Anyone still holding a torch for the notion that John Kelly was one of the "responsible" administration members might want to douse it right about now.
Others, like once-senator Jeff Sessions, seem to have dropped from the public eye and private industry both. It must especially hurt to have given up a prestigious Senate seat to become one of Trump’s many, many short-termers, but Jeff Sessions is a terrible person and there’s no need to feel the slightest bit sorry for him.
You may have noticed a pattern here. With the exception of a handful of grifters, few of Trump's cast-offs are making the sort of bigly cash one might expect from their turns inside the halls of power. Some went back to their old jobs. Some attempted the jump to media—but, like Sean Spicer, ended up in tenuous ancillary positions at best. Selling out to defend the likes of Trump is not, it seems, a career improving move.
There may be a caveat to comparing Trump's ex-team members to those that have departed past White Houses, however. Trump is largely unique in surrounding himself with b- and c-tier conservative minds to begin with, heavily weighted toward the ranks of those whose primary claim to fame was shouting at Fox News cameras, conservative "thinkers" who had worn out their welcome in more fact-based circles, and others whose careers were not exactly on an upward path before accepting the job of being a face for Donald Trump to belittle and yell about for six months or so. Sebastian Gorka's career options were already dwindling when he joined the team; newest members like Larry Kudlow and the gone-before-he-arrived Stephen Moore were not exactly fighting off lucrative job offers, when Trump pointed at them on his television set and said "get me that one."
Trump started with team B, quickly moved on to team C, and God help us all when team D arrives at team C's cleaned-out desks. Preliminary indications are that none of them will be moving up a rank, once they've added "ardent defender of Donald J. Trump" to their resumes.