At the Trump transition offices in West Palm Beach, Fla., prospective occupants of high posts inside the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies typically run through a gamut of three to four interviews, dominated in recent weeks by a mix of Silicon Valley investors and innovators and a team of the MAGA faithful.
The applicants report that they have been asked about how to overhaul the Pentagon, or what technologies could make the intelligence agencies more effective, or how they feel about the use of the military to enforce immigration policy. But before they leave, some of them have been asked a final set of questions that seemed designed to assess their loyalty to President-elect Donald J. Trump.
The questions went further than just affirming allegiance to the incoming administration. The interviewers asked which candidate the applicants had supported in the three most recent elections, what they thought about the events of Jan. 6, 2021, and whether they believed the 2020 election was stolen. The sense they got was that there was only one right answer to each question.
This account is based on interviews with nine people who either interviewed for jobs in the administration or were directly involved in the process. Among those were applicants who said they gave what they intuited to be the wrong answer — either decrying the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6 or saying that President Biden won in 2020. Their answers were met with silence and the taking of notes. They didn’t get the jobs.
Three of the people interviewed are close to the transition team and confirmed that loyalty questions were part of some interviews across multiple agencies, and that the Trump team researched what candidates had said about Mr. Trump on the day of the Capitol riot and in the days following. Candidates are also rated on a scale of one to four in more than a half-dozen categories, including competence.
Karoline Leavitt, the incoming White House press secretary, declined to address specific questions about the topics being raised in job interviews. Instead, she said: “President Trump will continue to appoint highly qualified men and women who have the talent, experience, and necessary skill sets to make America great again.”
Previous administrations, of course, have also been interested in whether new hires were aligned with the president’s agenda. But the distinction between Mr. Trump’s process and past ones is that the interest goes well beyond alignment on policy. The Trump transition team appears to be trying to figure out whether prospective hires have ever shown a hint of daylight between themselves and Mr. Trump on specific issues, particularly as he tried to revise the history of his final weeks in office and its aftermath.
Mr. Trump has maintained that Jan. 6, when a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol, was actually an event filled with “love.” He has insisted that no one who was arrested was armed; criminal indictments say otherwise. He has described people convicted and imprisoned for their role in the Capitol attack as “hostages” and he has claimed, falsely, that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
Charlie Kirk, the right-wing activist and pro-MAGA podcaster, is among those conducting the loyalty tests, along with members of the personnel team. That team is led by Sergio Gor, who has helped run the publishing company that produces the president-elect’s books and ran a multimillion-dollar super PAC that supported Mr. Trump.
The more policy-focused interviews have been conducted by members of the transition staff and by potential agency heads, such as Kash Patel, Mr. Trump’s choice to lead the F.B.I., and Tulsi Gabbard, his pick to be director of national intelligence.
For some applicants, the process was a jarring mix of substantive policy discussions and clear attempts to assess their fealty. Two applicants said they were impressed by the quality of the questions on how to get new technology into the Pentagon, or change the structure of the intelligence agencies, only to be shocked by the final questions.
‘Traitors’ and ‘Snakes’
Mr. Trump has long been fixated on the concept of loyalty, but past criticism is not always a deal breaker. Vice President-elect JD Vance once called himself a “Never Trump guy” and said Mr. Trump was “unfit” for the office. Mr. Trump’s pick for secretary of state, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, once described Mr. Trump as a “con artist” who couldn’t be trusted with the nuclear codes.
Many of the people who worked for Mr. Trump in his first term and, to a lesser extent, those entering his next administration have said something critical about him at some point in time, given his hostile takeover of the Republican Party in 2016.
But he has transformed the G.O.P. in his image, and many of those past critics have now become vocal defenders of the Trump worldview.
Mr. Trump has told advisers that his biggest regret from his first term was appointing “traitors,” some of whom came to view him as a threat to democracy. He has singled out for especially harsh attacks his chief of staff, John F. Kelly, who has called Mr. Trump a fascist; his defense secretaries, Jim Mattis and Mark T. Esper; and his attorneys general, Jeff Sessions and William P. Barr.
Mr. Barr is a staunch conservative who satisfied Mr. Trump right up until the final weeks of his presidency, when he refused to use the Justice Department to help Mr. Trump overturn the 2020 election.
Mr. Trump had grown convinced that the “deep state” was out to get him during his first impeachment trial, which focused on his effort to pressure President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to investigate the son of his political rival, Joseph R. Biden Jr.
He became fixated on the bow-tie wearing State Department official George Kent, who testified against him. Mr. Trump demanded to know how someone like Mr. Kent, who would offer unflattering testimony, could be working in his government.
At the time, Mr. Trump brought back into the White House his close aide and “body man,” John McEntee, to serve as his loyalty cop. Mr. McEntee had no experience in government hiring but Mr. Trump appointed him in early 2020 to take over the powerful presidential personnel office — giving him the specific task of finding and firing the “snakes.”
Mr. McEntee got to work fast. He and his team incorporated a questionnaire designed to test loyalty in the hiring of government employees. As they were doing that, Mr. Trump’s lawyers were quietly working on a plan, called Schedule F, that would make it much easier to fire career civil servants. Such employees have protections to keep a stable level of expertise from one administration to the next, regardless of whether the presidency switches from one political party to the other.
Mr. Trump’s allies have made clear that Schedule F will be brought back in his second term.
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