ELECTION
A Trump job interview has only one right answer
Remarkable differences in hiring from four years ago
For much of the 2024 campaign, we regularly heard about then-candidate Donald Trump’s vision for government. Howard Lutnick, who was co-chair of this transition, said it was all about loyalty “to the man.”
We now know a bit more about what Lutnick meant.
The recent story — courtesey of David E. Sanger, Jonathan Swan, and Maggie Haberman — shows what it is like to go through a Trump job interview in West Palm Beach, FL. It’s not a difficult interview, if you know the right answers.
What they reveal isn’t exactly surprising, but it does show for the first time how the incoming administration is making good on its promise to use loyalty tests to staff its government.
The interviews — overseen by the transition’s personnel chief Sergio Gor — include specific policy questions, such as views on Pentagon reform, the use of technology to improve government performance, and whether or not to incorporate the military into immigration policy.
These questions are typical of the high-level interviews of any candidate and sub-cabinet officials. Job candidates in the past have typically answered questions like these, though the use of the military on US soil has always had a different correct answer.
It’s from there that the interviews depart greatly from the past. As reported in the New York Times, applicants are then asked questions about who they voted for in the last three elections as well as their view on January 6th. Importantly, they are routinely asked “whether they believed the 2020 election was stolen.”
Answer each of these questions the wrong way and you don’t get the job.
This itself is striking, given the apparent low priority the incoming administration is placing on knowledge, skills, or ability. It’s a type of meritocracy we haven’t seen before.
Just four years ago, the interview process worked much differently. For a book on the 2020–21 transition, I interviewed dozens of people involved in various aspects of personnel and staffing.
Those interviews were not from sunny Florida, but instead via Microsoft Teams, because the entire transition team was working from home offices during the pandemic.
The interview protocol include a series of standard questions. The first one routinely was:
“What is it about President-elect Biden’s agenda that inspires you to want to serve?”
The second was:
“Name a time when you had to execute on a project that you felt you weren’t prepared for”
From there, the interviewers could open it up and ask some additional questions about values and policy. The volunteers involved in the interview process would ask those same questions around 15 times a day, then submit a form online.
To be sure, what the New York Times didn’t indicate whether the process now used in Florida was for prospective members of the cabinet or for the hundreds of other relatively low-level positions in the administration. This does make a difference, and it may be that as the hiring process continued in 2020, loyalty to President-elect Biden entered into the conversation. Nobody told me that, but it’s possible.
Nevertheless, what Sanger, Swan, and Haberman demonstrate is what loyalty means today. And, importantly, they link this to the Schedule F policy almost surely to be signed as one of the first Day 1 executive orders. That’s the personnel procedure to reclassify senior civil servants as political appointees, thus making them vulnerable to immediate dismissal if they don’t show loyalty to the President.
If President Trump signs this order again, as he did in the fall of 2020, his personnel team will have the tool to enforce what the job interviews can only speculate about. Any political appointee’s fidelity to the wishes of the President may overwhelm their service to anything else, like the law or the best interests of the public. This is what makes these job interviews in Florida right now so telling and so worrisome.
