It’s no secret that Donald Trump is a colossal deadbeat. He has a bad habit of not paying people who do work for him–including small businessmen and even kids. Well, we recently learned that the latest people to learn this sad fact are the members of his now-former Washington policy shop.
According to The Washington Post, back in April the Trump campaign set up a policy office in Alexandria, Virginia–across the Potomac from Washington. It was helmed by Rick Dearborn, chief of staff for Senator Jeff Sessions, and John Mashburn, former chief of staff for Senator Thom Tillis. Sessions and Tillis were among the earliest Senators to endorse Trump. Over the next four months, the staffers put in long hours to make Trump’s rapidly rising campaign look somewhat professional–churning out memos, handling campaign surrogates, crafting and placing op-eds, etc.
And they were doing it all without pay. Trump’s original campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, promised them that they would be paid. However, when campaign chairman Paul Manafort took over as de facto campaign manager as well after Lewandowski’s firing, he told the D. C. policy team that they would have to work as volunteers. In other words, Manafort effectively told these staffers that they were working for a deadbeat campaign. To his credit, Dearborn tried to get campaign headquarters in New York to approve a budget for his team. It was to no avail.
Besides going unpaid, a lot of the D. C. policy team’s work went underappreciated. They organized a national security advisory committee that only held one meeting with Trump. They also put together an economic advisory team which has only had sporadic contact with Trump. The result was a policy effort that, in the words of one staffer, was “a disaster from start to finish.”
Despite this, most of the team stuck it out through the summer. However, that ended in August, when Dearborn had policy coordinator Patrik Chougule and the other staffers work overtime for two nights on how to prepare Trump for the debates. They even made specific proposals for who would brief Trump on policy topics. But Manafort and the New York headquarters rejected the plan out of hand. According to one staffer, they were told that Trump “would not be receptive to that level of intense preparation.”
Combined with the lack of pay, this was the last straw. Soon afterward, all but a few of the staffers quit. The staffer who described the policy effort as a disaster minced no words–he now realized that Manafort and the rest of the senior staff at headquarters “use and abuse people.” However, most of them don’t blame Dearborn for this debacle. Chougule, for instance, says that Dearborn was “very professional and forthcoming.”
According to a number of sources at the Trump campaign, most people thought Trump would have to fight tooth and nail for every delegate–possibly all the way to Cleveland. However, only a month after the policy shop opened for business, Trump essentially locked up the nomination. At that point, enthusiasm for policy details dwindled, and slowed to a trickle after the convention. Most policy work is now handled at campaign headquarters in the Trump Tower, though there is still a much-reduced operation in Alexandria.
So once again, Trump has been exposed as a deadbeat. And this may cost him dearly in the long run. He knew he was up against a classic policy wonk in Hillary Clinton–and yet, he can’t handle “intense preparation” on policy before the debates? Pass the popcorn.
