Who will work for him?

You don’t need to listen carefully to hear the howls going up.

They follow a New York Times / Siena poll earlier this week which showed that if the presidential election were held today Donald Trump would beat Joe Biden by 48% to 43%.

Now that Nikki Haley has dropped out it’s clear that Donald Trump is going to be the Republican nominee for President.

And barring Dr Jill Biden stepping in and telling Joe that his best days really might be behind him, Joe Biden will be the Democrat nominee.

If Democrats and Never-Trumpers are still hoping one more indictment – perhaps the 140th – might finally bring down Trump they should probably abandon such hopes now.

But there is one thing which nobody is thinking about which they ought to be.

If Joe Biden (or any other Democrat) were to win in November we can pretty much predict how things will go. Unless it’s an alternative Democrat candidate of exceptional strong will it will be a fourth term of Barack Obama politics, domestically and internationally.

But Trump? Does anyone know what Trump will do? Well, we have some idea.

The bigger question is: who will work for him?

It was hard enough during his first term. Back in 2016/17 there was such shock that he had actually made it to the White House that the initial scramble for talent was shockingly inept. Remember Omarosa?

Trump literally surrounded himself with people he knew – not just from his family, but even just from “The Apprentice.” Most were then burned through in no seconds flat.

Ordinarily people hang around Washington desperate to get into office. But as the Trump years progressed two things happened.

The people at the lower ends of the administration started to realize that they might not be highly employable after leaving the administration. Usually having served in an administration is a top credit on a CV. Not for Trump’s staffers.

And then there were the higher-profile figures in the administration. How many did he burn through? How many people like Rex Tillerson came into the administration not all that vetted by Trump only to be dismissed as “dumb as a rock.”

Late in the administration he started to allow people in like John Bolton and Elliott Abrams. But these were people he had been hugely suspicious of, and in the case of Bolton, he burned through too.

It was hard to serve more than a year under Trump without him either making a demand that was too outrageous to accept, or to run out and publicly diss.

I always imagined that if he had won the 2020 election other Republicans would put aside any distaste for the top guy and, for the sake of the country, serve under him anyway. But that wasn’t to be.

After the fiasco of January 2021 most Republicans wanted to distance themselves as far as possible from the President. They ran for hills, scattering anti-Trump Tweets as they went.

So here’s the problem. As we know from Trump’s post 2016 refusal to take on never-Trumpers, if there is one thing DJ Trump doesn’t do, it is forgiveness. Reconciliation is not among his strong suits.

People like JD Vance who had been critical of the President had to swear fealty to him at Mar-a-Lago if they wanted to keep his key endorsement for Congressional and Senatorial races.

Now people exactly like Vance are demanding that the party all get behind Trump wholesale. As Vance said this week to donors and political professionals, “It’s time to unite behind our nominee.”

The question, however, is will the nominee unite behind them?

There are a few experienced members of the previous administration who may come back. The excellent Robert Lighthizer at Trade. Maybe Mike Pompeo – who hasn’t said a rude thing about his former boss.

But elsewhere? It is said that the Heritage Foundation is trying to line up staffers that could be appointed.

But what about the higher ups? Nevermind all the ambassadorial roles, will Trump even be able to fill a cabinet?

It’s not going to be easy. Because loyalty is a two-way street. People are loyal to people who are loyal to them.

And if the Republican party has not been entirely behind Trump, well Trump hasn’t been entirely behind them either. We’re going to see.

It’s just a shame that the stakes are America.

Now we’re in election year, let me make a prediction. This will be the worst yet. And not just because of the candidates but because of all the apparatus that now covers our society.

New York Post readers might remember how the media censorship complex intervened in the last election.

But I predict that the new tools that have come online in just the last four years are going to make this one even worse.

AI generated images, fake images and much more. All of this means that fact-checking and verification are going to matter more than ever.

And here’s one tiny example of how ridiculous this can get.

Earlier this week it was reported that the iconic Times Square Kiss photo following the end of World War II had been banned from display at the US Department of Veterans Affairs.

The reason given was that the woman being given a kiss by the US sailor had not necessarily given “informed consent.”

That happy image seems to be practically rape in the eyes of these prudes.

After a hullabaloo the Department said that the memo requesting the removal had been sent in error.

So the question arises. Did the withdrawal happen or not? The generally-wrong “fact-checking” site Snopes said that it was “false” to say that the department had removed the photo.

The reason? Because the memo requesting the policy had been subsequently reported to have been sent in error.

Did it happen or didn’t it?

This is the weird falsehoods our country is getting in over an uniformed memo about a non-informed consent kiss eight decades ago.

Now imagine what would happen if something happened yesterday with, oh I don’t know, Hunter Biden?