Fresh off spending her days separating children from their parents, outgoing Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen is taking on another challenge: rehabilitating her image so that she can cash in with a sweet corporate job. Progressive groups, meanwhile, are serving notice that any company hiring Nielsen will get blowback, with Restore Public Trust planning digital ads targeting top companies with a message about Nielsen and other Trump administration officials involved in family separation. “She deserves accountability. She doesn’t deserve a big fat paycheck,” said Restore Public Trust’s Karl Frisch.
In a sign of the size of Nielsen’s image-rehab challenge, Politico could only get one Nielsen ally to go on the record under his own name. For an article headlined “Nielsen’s allies trying to rehab her image for life after Trump.” Apparently her allies are only willing to go so far out on a limb for her. That may be because, as one former administration official said, “She’s not a monster” (debatable claim) but “She not only didn’t resign on principle, but she gave the orders, and signed the documents and went before Congress and the public and the media and argued for these things.” And she not only didn’t resign on principle, but the Washington Post reports that, a week before she resigned under pressure, Nielsen cut short a European trip and “furiously tried to save her job.”
Doesn’t sound too much like someone losing sleep over the kids she’d had ripped from their parents’ arms—sounds like someone fighting to keep being allowed to do it. Nielsen should pay the price, if only by losing out on the big corporate paycheck former Cabinet officials usually land.