Former White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon left the Trump administration earlier this month. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)
The circumstances of Sebastian Gorka's departure from the White House are in dispute (anonymously sourced reports say he was fired; he says he resigned), but this much is clear: Gorka wasn't getting much done on the inside.
“It is clear to me that forces that do not support the MAGA promise are — for now — ascendant within the White House,” he wrote Friday in a letter to President Trump. “As a result, the best and most effective way I can support you, Mr. President, is from outside the People's House.”
That final sentiment — it is possible to accomplish more by not working in the administration — has become a common refrain among members of Team Trump.
When White House rapid-response director Andy Hemming left one day before Gorka, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told Politico that Hemming and the White House had reached a “mutual decision that he could best help promote the president’s agenda on the outside.”
Sebastian Gorka, a deputy assistant to President Trump, left the administration on Aug. 25. (Sarah Parnass,Amber Ferguson/The Washington Post)
A week earlier, outgoing White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon told the Weekly Standard that he was now “free.”
“I can fight better on the outside,” he said. “I can't fight too many Democrats on the inside like I can on the outside.”
Trump's former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, consistently pops up in news reports as a possible addition to the administration, yet he has remained in the private sector.
“I can be very, very helpful from the outside — maybe much more so than even on the inside,” Lewandowski explained to Fox News host Tucker Carlson in May.
Another campaign fixture, spokeswoman Katrina Pierson, initially accepted a role in the president's press shop but backed out before his inauguration.
“I made a personal decision to remain on the outside for now,” she told the Daily Beast in March. “I have plenty of time to serve.”
Former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), an informal Trump adviser who never joined the administration, talked up the benefits of staying out of the White House, in an April interview with The Washington Post.
“There is some virtue in being your own person,” he said. “It allows you to render independent judgment, to not have to say black is really green or red is really purple. When you are in the White House, any White House, you can get isolated from the larger world.”
After expressing interest in the White House press secretary gig during Trump's transition into office, radio host and LifeZette founder Laura Ingraham told administration officials that she preferred her role on the outside, when the position appeared on the verge of reopening in the weeks before Sean Spicer's resignation.
Sean Hannity, another informal Trump adviser, has said that he would never accept a role in the White House.
There is surely a lot of spin in these statements.
That job I didn't get or just lost? I didn't want it, anyway! I'm actually more powerful without it!
Riiight.
Still, the notion that certain Trump allies can be more effective on the outside is not total baloney. I have argued that is the case for Bannon and Ingraham, for example.
The Post's Dan Balz says the firing of chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon simultaneously changes everything and nothing for the Trump administration. (Bastien Inzaurralde,Jhaan Elker/The Washington Post)
Most of the people named above have two things in common: They are in the media game, and they are, to borrow Gingrich's term, pirates. They are the folks who helped elect Trump by saying provocative things in the press, occasionally while wearing a necklace made of bullets.
Basically, they are better suited to campaigning than governing. A president — any president — needs a team outside of government to run a perpetual campaign while others help him run the country.
Trump's outside team is probably more influential than most because Trump is so often part of their audience, watching on TV or scrolling through Twitter. Proximity to the president is only useful if the president listens. Bannon and Gorka, marginalized when they held fancy titles, might have a better shot to sway Trump through Breitbart's tweets than they did in the West Wing.
Hannity, Ingraham, Gingrich and Lewandowski might hold Trump's attention longer on Fox News than if they were to join the administration.
When these people say they can do more outside the White House, they have a point.
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