New Delhi: US President-elect Donald Trump has pulled off the biggest comeback in the American democratic system in nearly 130 years by managing to win back the White House after losing it.
From the US to Russia and China to India, and the rest of the world, everyone is looking at how Trump will govern once he is sworn in as the 47th President in January next year.
This is because he has set several precedents as a political figure, both during his first term in office and after.
However, he also holds the distinction of having a very expansive list of high-profile allies and aides who have either turned against him, or had him turn against them. And many of them have spoken out against him on the record.
At least 11 former Trump staffers have publicly warned of him being unfit to serve a second term, calling him everything from “fascist”, “conman,” “predator,” and “racist”, to “cheat”, a “bully,” and accused him of being “undisciplined,” and even “creepy”. One former staffer even said he “hasn’t got the brains” for a dictatorship, another said that he is “the domestic terrorist of the 21st century”.
The chorus of criticism speaks to the deep-seated anxiety among Republicans about the volatility that Trump brings to arguably the most powerful office in the world.
Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, Major John Kelly, called his old boss a “fascist” in an interview to the New York Times just three weeks before the election—and over a dozen of Trump’s former staffers then signed a letter in support of his statement.
Among those who signed it include Kevin Carroll, former senior counselor to Kelly; former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci; former deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews; former press secretary Stephanie Grisham; former assistant secretary of homeland security Elizabeth Neumann; former chief of staff of the Department of Homeland Security Miles Taylor; and former national security adviser to vice-president Mike Pence, Olivia Troye.
Not only did Kelly tell the New York Times that Trump fitted the definition of a fascist, the Atlantic magazine also ran a story detailing how former Trump advisers said he wished for “the kind of generals that Hitler had”. Kelly was also quoted in this story, saying Trump is “certainly an authoritarian”.
The Trump campaign has denied the accounts.
The Trump administration was a revolving door of Washington’s who’s who, with a remarkably high attrition rate, public spats, and high-profile departures.
ThePrint brings you what some of Trump’s most famous former aides had to say about him after they left office.
Mike Pence: Pence served as Trump’s vice-president from 2017-2021, and was said to be his closest confidant for years. Their relationship soured after the Capitol Hill Riots on 6 January, 2021. Trump was angry that Pence refused to overturn the election results in Trump’s favour and block Joe Biden’s 2020 election win—a power the vice-president anyway does not have. His supporters chanted “Hang Mike Pence” during the riots, and Trump reportedly told aides that Pence “deserved” to be hanged.
In March 2024, the former governor of Indiana publicly announced that he would not endorse Trump’s presidential bid. “It should come as no surprise that I will not be endorsing Donald Trump this year,” he told Fox News. “As I have watched his candidacy unfold, I’ve seen him walking away from our commitment to confronting the national debt. I’ve seen him starting to shy away from a commitment to the sanctity of human life.”
Pence attempted to run for the White House as the Republican candidate, and opened his bid in June 2023 with a far more direct attack on Trump. Saying that he wasn’t fit to be president, he added that anyone who “puts themselves over the Constitution should never be president of the United States, and anyone who asks someone else to put them over the Constitution should never be president again.”
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John Kelly: Kelly is a retired US Marine Corps general who has served in multiple positions under the Trump administration—first as Trump’s secretary of homeland security in 2017, and then as White House chief of staff from July 2017 to January 2019, which was also the longest role that someone held as chief of staff under Trump. Their relationship weathered a fairly public decline—in 2018, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump had issued orders to “stop calling John for anything”.
Kelly also called Trump an “idiot” and his administration “crazytown”, according to Bob Woodward’s 2018 book Fear: Trump in the White House.
In 2023, he told CNN that Trump is a “person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law. There is nothing more that can be said. God help us.”
James Mattis: Mattis was Trump’s first defense secretary and one of the first major conflicts in his administration. The two clashed over how the US should treat its allies, and the ways in which the US administration could “malign actors and strategic competitors” across the world. Mattis used these words in his 2018 letter of resignation to Trump, which happened a day after Trump abruptly withdrew US troops from Syria.
“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try,” he said in a 2020 interview tearing into Trump. “Instead, he tries to divide us.”
He went on to say that the nationwide protests in 2020 following George Floyd’s death were the “consequences of three years without mature leadership”, and that he makes a “mockery” of the American constitution.
Rex W. Tillerson: Tillerson was Trump’s first secretary of state and an extremely high-profile hire as the former chief executive of Exxon Mobil Corp. Serving for just over a year between February 2017 and March 2018, he was famously fired via a post on X (then Twitter). Tillerson only learned he had been fired after reporters asked him about the tweet. Trump, meanwhile, told reporters that their differences were due to “chemistry”.
During his time as secretary of state, Tillerson reportedly called Trump a “moron”. Trump responded by challenging him to an IQ test. They also publicly disagreed on foreign policy, especially toward North Korea. Trump tweeted that Tillerson was “wasting his time” by trying to negotiate with Kim Jong Un.
Mark Esper: Esper was Mattis’s successor, serving as Trump’s second defense secretary from 2019 to 2020. Trump fired him via a tweet, too. A politician and marketing executive, he publicly broke from Trump when the then president used military force to clear protestors from a public park in Washington DC in June 2020. He told reporters that the “option to use active-duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used…in the most urgent and dire of situations. We are not in one of those situations.”
But the tensions had existed long before: he repeatedly clashed with Trump, which he extensively detailed in his 2022 memoir. One such issue was his refusal to send “missiles into Mexico to destroy the drug labs”, which Trump was reportedly angry about for months.
John Bolton: Trump’s third national security adviser between 2018 and 2019, Bolton served as assistant attorney general under Ronald Reagan and was the US Ambassador to the UN under George W. Bush. Known as “hawkish” and a foreign policy expert, he pushed for the US to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, which it did in 2018.
But the bone of contention between Bolton and Trump was Afghanistan. Trump reportedly began to exclude him from meetings about the Afghanistan war—and finally fired him after Bolton tried to stop him from inviting leaders of the Taliban to come to Camp David for peace talks. Trump ultimately scrapped the idea, but also got rid of Bolton in the process.
Bolton has since written about his experience in a 2020 memoir. In May 2023, he said in an interview that he believes foreign leaders think Trump is a “laughing fool”.
Michael Cohen: Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, Cohen was so close to the president that he once described himself as Trump’s “attack dog with a law license”. Despite working as Trump’s lawyer from 2006 to 2018—as well as co-president of Trump Entertainment—their relationship turned sour when Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to several counts of campaign-finance violations and bank fraud after a special investigation was launched into Russian interference in the 2016 elections. He served three years in prison and completed his sentence in 2021.
This was the same investigation that former FBI director James Comey looked into—Trump fired him in May 2017 because he wouldn’t give it up.
Cohen was the star witness in Trump’s criminal trial over hush money payments made to adult film star Stormy Daniels, in which Trump was found guilty on 34 counts.
Steve Bannon: The story of how Bannon went from Trump’s chief strategist to being called “Sloppy Steve” is Washingtonian lore. The executive chairman of rightwing conservative website Breitbart, Bannon was one of Trump’s earliest cheerleaders and was quickly snapped up by the Trump campaign, with Trump referring to him as the “best talent in politics”.
Trump would reportedly demand “Where’s my Steve? Where’s my Steve?” while on the campaign trail in 2016. This trust translated into his immediate appointment to a newly created role as “chief strategist” in the Trump administration—a decision that prompted 169 members of the House of Representatives to write an angry letter to the then president-elect highlighting Bannon’s “bigotry, antisemitism, and xenophobia”.
Bannon was given a seat at the National Security Council in early 2017, another move that angered many members of the Washington establishment. But he lasted barely two months—reports emerged that his role was shrinking and that he was receding from the White House, until finally exiting in August 2017 after which he returned to Breitbart.
The real reason, according to news reports, was that Bannon “undermined Trump’s ego”. The clash deepened in January 2018 after Bannon alleged that a meeting that Donald Trump Jr. held with a Russian lawyer in New York during the presidential campaign was “treasonous”. Trump then said that Bannon had “lost his mind” after leaving the White House.
Hope they can find a job