“Tell me who you walk with, and I'll tell you who you are,” goes an old Mexican saying, translated into English. These days, Donald Trump’s administration appears to be walking with a Breitbart contributor, an “ethnic cleansing” conspiracy theorist, and a reality show reject (not Trump!) who invented some sort of “survivalist” tool to use following the collapse of society (which is super reassuring these days).
This is all according to a report detailing hundreds of new officials quietly installed across the highest reaches of the government. While high-profile trainwrecks—er, nominees like Betsy DeVos and Rick Perry have been the ones to make headlines due to Senate confirmation, “members of these so-called ‘beachhead teams’ have operated largely in the shadows, with the White House declining to publicly reveal their identities.” After a quick read, it’s no surprise they don’t want to talk about them:
Curtis Ellis was a columnist for WorldNetDaily, a website best known for its enthusiastic embrace of the false notion that President Obama born outside the United States. A column headlined the “The Radical Left’s Ethnic Cleansing of America” won Ellis an admiring interview with Steve Bannon, now Trump’s top aide. He is a longtime critic of trade deals such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
Ellis was hired Jan. 20 as a special assistant to the secretary at the Labor Department. Asked about his role in a brief phone interview Tuesday, he said: “Nothing I can tell you.”
Jon Perdue, a self-described guerrilla warfare expert and fellow at a little-known security think tank, wrote a book called “The War of All the People: The Nexus of Latin American Radicalism and Middle Eastern Terrorism.” He is also a onetime contributor to Breitbart.
Perdue was featured on CNBC’s reality series “Make Me a Millionaire Inventor” for his invention, the Packbow, which Perdue came up with while studying “collapsed societies, and what people who lived in those societies came up with to either defend themselves or to survive.” It’s a bow and arrow that doubles as a compass, tent pole, walking stick, spearfishing rig, and water purification tablet receptacle.
Perdue was hired as a special assistant at the Treasury Department. The agency didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
John Jaggers ran the Trump campaign in Maryland and Virginia, where he made headlines for endorsing the conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton was “very, very sick and they’re covering it up.” As he put it last August: “The woman who seeks to be the first female president of the United States wears a wool coat at every single thing. Have you ever stopped to wonder why? It’s a big deal, folks.”
Jaggers was hired Jan. 20 as senior adviser at the General Services Administration, which oversees tens of billions of dollars of government procurement every year. But records show he left the job on March 3. He declined to comment.
The investigation also found dozens of lobbyists from “health insurance and pharmaceuticals to construction, energy and finance. Many of them lobbied in the same areas that are regulated by the agencies they have now joined.”
Remember all those “Drain the swamp” chants from Trump’s campaign? The administration is looking more like Swamp Thing now.