MEDIA/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT/TRUMP PEOPLE: “On May 10, 2017, less than 24 hours after President Trump fired James Comey as F.B.I. director, Comey received an email from a man he had never met. The correspondent, Matt Latimer, began by praising Comey’s ‘decades of faithful service to the United States government and to the cause of law and order’ and offering sympathy for the ‘tumultuous period’ he was going through. Then Latimer got to the heart of the matter. As the head of a Washington literary agency called Javelin, he wanted Comey to know that if he ever had any interest in writing a book — ‘and we’d urge you to consider the possibility’ — he wanted Comey as a clienT…The problem for these officials is that many of the White House exits have been nailed shut. The path from the executive branch into highly remunerative private-sector work — the standard post-administration trajectory, for better or worse, in recent decades — used to be smooth, as Barack Obama’s press secretary Jay Carney (now at Amazon) or George W. Bush’s communications director Dan Bartlett (Walmart) can attest. While veterans of Trump’s State and Treasury Departments have tended to navigate this path successfully enough, some people who have worked in other, more controversial precincts of Trump World have had a hard time even getting job interviews.”
–Jason Zengerle, “How to Leave the Trump White House With a Million Dollar Parachute,” The New York Times online, March 26, 2019