Trump Posts ‘Blacklist’ of Candidates Who Need Not Apply for Jobs in his White House
As difficult as it may be to believe that the brash billionaire from New York had little or no idea of the traps that had been set for him by the administrative state, it was the truth.

On Wednesday night, President-elect Donald Trump took to Truth Social to share a list of individuals who will be excluded from consideration for roles in his second administration. Highlighting that his team has already hired more than 1,000 “outstanding” individuals, he wrote:
In order to save time, money, and effort, it would be helpful if you would not send, or recommend to us, people who worked with, or are endorsed by, Americans for No Prosperity (headed by Charles Koch), “Dumb as a Rock” John Bolton, “Birdbrain” Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, disloyal Warmongers Dick Cheney, and his Psycho daughter, Liz, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, General(?) Mark Milley, James Mattis, Mark Yesper, or any of the other people suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, more commonly known as TDS. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
Predictably, this post did not sit well with our friends on the Left side of the aisle. One man attached Trump’s comments to a post on X with the caption, “Trump makes clear that he is discriminating against candidates for administration jobs if they have links to his political opponents or critics.”
Discrimination? I call it discernment.
In a new Truth Social post, Trump makes clear that he is discriminating against candidates for administration jobs if they have links to his political opponents or critics. pic.twitter.com/I4XPYXbmrs
— Tom Dreisbach (@TomDreisbach) January 16, 2025
It’s not only understandable that Trump would avoid hiring individuals associated with those who actively undermined or opposed his first-term agenda—and, in many cases, continued that opposition over the following four years, it’s essential. Naturally, he wants to surround himself with loyal staffers who share his vision and will steadfastly support his goals. Every president does.
Personnel decisions can often shape the course of a presidency. For example, President Lincoln replaced five commanding generals during the Civil War before finally selecting Ulysses S. Grant, who ultimately led the Union to victory.
Poor hiring decisions significantly hampered Trump’s first term, a point he has openly acknowledged. For instance, Trump should have replaced FBI Director James Comey upon taking office, rather than allowing him to remain in the role. Other blunders included appointing Attorney General Jeff Sessions, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, and the outgoing FBI Director Christopher Wray.
At a Fox News town hall in September, Trump was asked, “What could you share that you’ve learned from your first time being in the Oval Office for those who are hesitant to vote for you now?”
Trump replied, “The most important thing I found, and you can say this is true in business also, we have to get the right people. I didn’t know much about Washington. I was there 17 times in my whole life. And I wasn’t in D.C. very much.”
He continued, “But I got to know ’em, and I got to know ’em the hard way. And I know the good ones, the bad ones, the weak ones, the smart ones, the dumb ones. I know ’em all now.”
The bottom line was to “get the right people. You put the right person and the right group of people at the heads of these massive agencies, you’re going to have tremendous success. And I now know the people better than anyone would know them,” Trump said.
Trump was spot on. As difficult as it may be to believe that the brash billionaire from New York had little or no idea of the traps that had been set for him by the administrative state (or whatever one chooses to call the permanent group of unelected officials who run the government), it was the truth. His unfamiliarity with how things worked in D.C. left him completely unprepared for the injustices that lay ahead. It’s fair to say he was naive. He took advice from those who wanted him to fail and he trusted the wrong people.
He will return to the White House in three days. His eyes will be wide open. And he will be surrounded by trustworthy individuals who share his goals and his vision for the future.
He’s already begun.
The Trump Transition team has asked 3 career diplomats to resign ahead of his Inauguration.
The swamp draining is underway.https://t.co/WpXH23ASy9
— David Joe May (@TheGrayRider) January 16, 2025
Elizabeth writes commentary for The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation and a member of the Editorial Board at The Sixteenth Council, a London think tank. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.

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Comments
This is a great relief.
I was worried Bolton would not be available to take my garbage and recycling to the curb each week.
LOL.
I have to say that, for me, Bolton was a huge disappointment. He just went completely apesh*t nuts, and for no good reason. It was amazing, really. I had been a huge supporter of his up until that.
Ditto
Bolton went sideways because that was the only way he was going to remain relevant enough to get on talk shows.
A problem with draining the swamp is that the creatures remaining become more closely associated…. more scum per square mile. Let’s hope the crowding leads to more infighting. Dispersing the agencies to their respective and needed areas of the country would help. Trumped tried that but Biden reversed it. The task of changing Rome on the Potomac to Reagan’s City on the Hill would make Hercules faint.
It goes the other way, once you remove the invasive foreign predators all the native hard worker species can finally flourish and become productive 🤌🙂
“more scum per square mile.”
This is the essence of cities, that it is much easier for them to scheme and collude with like minded people. The Beltway is orders of magnitude worse.
Fifth columnists need not apply?
HOW DARE HE.
Yeah! Who does he think he is? PRESIDENT?!?
“Trump makes clear that he is discriminating against candidates for administration jobs if they have links to his political opponents or critics.”
Uh…yeah? That’s the point in a new administration. You usually don’t hire people that want to undermine you and your agenda at every turn, undermined your first administration or that just don’t like you. I think Trump needs to recall Miley to active duty and have a Courts Martial hearing then bust him to 2cd LT and give him an other than honorable discharge. Removing everyone not in government security clearance should be day 1. In fact, review everyone in government that has one and start yanking them.
this … clearances need to be reviewed stringently .. and “Gen” Mark Milley needs to face a general courts martial .
Democrats may come to regret cheating on the 2020 election. Having Biden come in between Trump’s first and second term literally changed the world.
Trump had his hands tied in his first term, not to mention the fact that he was surrounded by all these traitors and back stabbers. If he’d just gone straight into his second term, he would not have the tremendous impact that he is having right now. Four years gave Trump time to regroup, get better organized and lay plans to make this term a game changer.
They hired 2000 mules to stuff ballot boxes with biden votes! Trump had sold evidence of voter fraud but judges threw the cases out! all crooked judges.Don’t pay attention to Barr and his lwayers. The dems cheated!!! hahahahahahaahh
They hired 2000 mules to stuff comments on conservative websites. One of them is you. Don’t pay any attention to trolls like tjv1156. In three more days Trump with be president. Hahahahahahaahh!!!!!!
TDS and IQ around 15. Bad combination.
dont feed the troll
Troll, junior varsity.
I swear this retard is JR.
But it’s kind of fun having a new troll isn’t it? I mean we get so serious here sometimes, it’s nice to have someone to provide some comic relief.
Dance for us fool! Dance!
Preferably, the Nutcracker.
No, this one’s just stupid.
Leftists are completely justified in being outraged that Trump is refusing to have leftists, traitors and spoilers in his administration.
Their rice bowl is in serious danger of being broken by these America First extremists.
Absolutely! Not just the bigger more well known figures either. By refusing these folks for appointment to his Admin he prevents these folks from bringing in their acolytes, understudy and protege. That in turn prevents another round of resume building by the neocon hacks. Without an appointment they can’t point to ‘I served as deputy assistant, undersecretary’ in the past and be considered ‘qualified’ to advance in another admin to a more Senior position.
Wow. I guess the left would prefer that Trump hire Chinese Communists because otherwise it would be discrimination.
But the left is good at this. Swallows had his own private Chinese tramp. The dead dimwit from California had her own Chinese Communist Party Driver.
The left fought long and hard to give Communists control of this country from going back more than 100 years.
Why wouldn’t they get their panties in a wad about not hiring those with TDS.
Don’t forget Debbie Does Miami Schultz and her little foreign espionage ring.
Debbie Does Miami! I’m stealing that. She’s got those “suck the chrome off a trailer hitch” lips.
She is a double bagger in a dark room but beer goggles can work wonders.
In other news a jury has just found CNN guilty of libel and has awarded 5mil in direct damages and next week discusses how big the punitive damages against CNN will be.
If there is any justice in this world the punitive damages awarded against CNN should dwarf the billion dollars what’s his face had to pay the sandy hook families!!
Exactly. Equal justice and all that….
CNN had to shell out to Nick Sandmann, too.
You’d think the monolithic MSM would spread this type of joy around equally, but apparently only one network keeps getting hung out to dry.
I doubt Sandamann got very much. But Young must have got at least $10 M and likely more like $20 M.
Trump’s biggest mistake from the first term was buying the ‘fine men and women’ nonsense, and trying to treat it like a business that he had taken over where the employees didn’t like him.
When you take over a business, you can rely on performance and expect employees to want to actually do their jobs and make the business money, even if they didn’t like the new boss at first. Maybe you need to weed out a few incompetents but you can
Trump was totally unprepared for the fact that a large number of the so-called ‘non-partisan’ employees wanted him to fail and were willing to INTENTIONALLY outright sabotage him, and would rather see government fail and Americans be hurt than allow Trump to succeed.
He also put too much stock in the RINO crew of McConnell and Ryan to staff himself with a bunch of deadweight that would just straight up lie to him about what they were doing.
He learned from the ‘non-partisan’ disasters of Comey and Wray. He should have fired Comey on day 1, and never should have listened to the RINOs saying Wray was ‘non-partisan’.
He’s approaching this term prepared, it seems.
What exactly did Trump gain with that name-calling, flame-throwing post?
Getting the truth out??
Nothing he won by going to the center and winning exactly the people who supported someone like Nikki Haley and the people who support Mike Pence.
Luckily that was his last election lets hope he gets things done in congress so wins the midterms this time so we could finally stop caring when Trump celebrates Festivus.
At this point midterms will be all about what do we do with our majority Trump antics are very fortunately no longer relevant.
It seems unnecessary in truth
Right. We can add another in the “Unnecessary” column.
Who are you and what did you do with gonzotx? That’s twice in less than a week you’ve criticized the man you called :’The One’ and castigated anyone who dared disagree with him even one jot.
Nothing any harsher than the Left. Smash mouth politics. Islam does this in the real world, except someone gets buried. The Left demands total commitment from its believers. No use playing nice when nice doesn’t work.
A harmless chuckle.
I certainly liked it. And it had the added benefit of being truthful.
Nimrata Randawah Haley sure disappointed me.
She was a good UN representative, not so good Governor
And sold herself
Kind of like DeSantis but at least he seemed to wake up
I was thinking the same thing. Haley??
.
I believe she received 20% of the primary vote in some states. Why alienate Haley voters?
Those were states with open primaries – i.e. they were democrats.
If the choice is between ‘Haley voters’ and her constituency of grifting neocon goons who’ve effed up pretty much every foreign policy decision of the last 35 years OR the the huge number of center right populists and their groundswell of support for a clear eyed foreign policy agenda that places the best interests of US Citizens as it’s priority and not those of the defense industrial complex and megalomaniac ‘nation building/compassionate conservative BS then it’s a very easy choice….unless you believe that Ukraine’s border is more important than our own.
Triggered Tom on Xtwitter must not realize that Presidents don’t hire their political opponents as a matter of common sense.
Only Trump could get the point across this way, despite the hand wringing by some. “Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
I believe Trump’s NSA designate has also told all the agency people seconded to the NSC to clear their desks by noon on the 21st, and his team will select the people they want for staff.
Wow. What is Trump thinking? I can name a ton of Trump supporters in Biden’s administration.
Also a number of Trump supporters and patriots kicked out of the Biden agencies and military.
In an upside-down world like this, /sarc designations are necessary.
No, you can name a lot of FAKE Trump supporters in Biden’s admin. Out of expediency.
Nikki Haley has to be one of the most annoying creatures ever. Now, I can ignore the annoying part, but after what she did in the primary I have no interest in ever seeing or hearing from her again.
Yeah after what she tried to pull with trying to get Democrats to let her ‘win’ the primary, she and everybody who worked for her can shut their mouths and go away forever.
You proved you were not to be trusted. Don’t whine that nobody trusts you now.
Most of you are reacting to the reaction of the left. Few of you are noticing that normal people don’t do this. He’s on course for self destruction—just like last time.
Upvoted you by mistake.
Few of us voted for “normal”. “Normal” is what we had in the past. We voted for “healthy”.
Fine with me. So let me correct my statement:
Healthy people don’t do this.
Might want to get that TDS taken care of
Stuytown,
No political figure has ever endured what Trump has (short of successful assassination, and that’s debatable). These people each and all absolutely f**cked him. They deserve to be called out. Trump doesn’t hold all the cards now, but he’s got the most anyone’s had in many, many years. Get some popcorn.
Democrats vote in midterms, too. And many Democrats actually voted for Trump come election time. So did many Haley-voting Republicans. How do you keep them? Not like this.
An administration bent on resentment and retribution will waste time and resources—and may fail—no matter how much the other side deserves to suffer.
Out of curiosity, how does a politician like Haley get the Trump voting Republicans? No one ever seems to ask that. And given how handily Trump won the last three Republican primaries the Haley’s of the world need to give serious thought to that.
“Discrimination” is not a bad word. A “discriminating” person “discriminates,” meaning he gives due thought to his choices before making decisions.
The BOSS is back!