If you want to land a cushy gig in corporate America in 2018, then it appears all you have to do is be part of the anti-Trump resistance. Over the past several years, hordes of former Obama and Hillary Clinton staffers have landed top flight gigs at America’s largest corporations.
One of the most noteworthy examples is United Airlines, which on May 3rd announced the hiring of President Obama’s former Press Secretary Josh Earnest as the company’s new spokesman. However, United isn’t alone among its big airline brethren when it comes to doling out big bucks to Obama and Clinton alums. Since 2015, the United, Delta and American Airlines backed, Partnership for Open Skies, has paid millions to the firms of Democrat heavyweights, Jim Messina, Hillary Rosen, and Philippe Reines to lobby the Trump Administration.
Last year, Earnest accused Trump of “intentionally sowing fear and chaos.” Messina regular skewers President Trump on Twitter. Reines uses his social media platforms to launch some of the most personal, dishonest, and vicious attacks on the President and his family, having most recently launched such a repugnant attack on Donald Trump Jr., that even Chelsea Clinton called it “vile.”
This all shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, since these of course are some of the same airlines that earlier this year slapped Trump supporters in the face by doing away with discount programs for NRA members, following a public outcry from a small, but very organized group of radical liberal activists.
While United was all too happy to kowtow to liberal activists by throwing the NRA under the bus, they still today continue to donate money to America’s largest provider of abortions, Planned Parenthood.
Sadly, Corporate America’s love affair with former Democratic aides who attack the President and his supporters doesn’t end with America’s biggest airlines.
Jay Carney, another former Obama press secretary, heads corporate affairs for Amazon, which has billions in contracts with the Trump administration.
Carney, who regularly mocked Donald Trump from the White House podium recently implied that Trump tells current White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders to lie for him.
The list goes on from there. In 2014, Uber hired David Plouffe, Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, who vowed the ride-share company was his next candidate. Apparently, that didn’t work out so well, since Uber hired his replacement a year later, while awkwardly pushing Plouffe off to the side. Don’t feel bad for Plouffe though. He was recently hired to spend Mark Zuckerberg’s money pushing amnesty in Washington, which is about as sinecure of a job as one gets.
Then there’s the National Football League.
If you were wondering why the NFL, a league so obsessed with unquestioned uniformity that it specifies the color of players’ helmet chinstraps (white), maximum radius of facemask bars (5/8 inch), and prohibits “personal messages, logos, names, symbols or illustrations” from appearing on towels in its 92-page rulebook had nothing to say about players kneeling during the national anthem, you might consider the role of Joe Lockhart, the former Clinton press secretary who was running the league’s communications at the time.
Other Clinton alumni also landed on their feet, to put it mildly. Jake Siewert is head of corporate communications for Goldman Sachs. Dee Dee Myers is the top communications officer for Warner Brothers.
While it seems as though corporate America can’t get enough of Obama and Clinton alumni, what about the numerous former members of the Trump Administration who have moved on, looking to follow the Earnest/Carney/Plouffe path to big corporate jobs?
Well, earlier this month the Boston Globe and Buzzfeed both reported that former Trump Administration members are having trouble even being considered for high-profile roles with major corporations.
Now you might be asking: life’s not fair, so what? But is it really a prudent business decision for America’s largest companies to exhibit a marked partisan preference in their most visible hiring decisions? And what does it say about corporate America as a whole, that in many cases they have become so unabashedly left-wing, that they have no problem alienating 50% of their customer base for ideological reasons?
Too many of America’s largest corporations have reached the point that when left-wing activists even lift a finger, they make Neville Chamberlain look like William Wallace.
In Tom Wolfe’s classic Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, left-wing activists at least had to physically show up somewhere and look temporarily threatening. These days, an anonymous liberal activist tweets a moderately catchy hashtag and ten minutes later a company with $20 billion in revenue and 200,000 employees is ready to surrender.
This all leads to the biggest question of all: These companies do know that Trump won the election, right?
Andy Surabian is a Republican Strategist and former Special Assistant to President Trump and Deputy WH Strategist. He also served as War Room Director on Trump’s 2016 Presidential campaign.
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