A dwindling number of loyalists surrounds Donald Trump in his golf course exile after failing to carry out a coup, and those who have been cast out worry about the quality of the advice he's getting since leaving the White House.
The former president returned to Mar-A-Lago and summers in Bedminster with some junior aides and a handful of longtime advisers, but even his current advisers admit that former allies have been jettisoned for publicly criticizing Trump's election lies or attempts to overturn his 2020 loss, reported New York Magazine.
“The circle’s very small,” said one current Trump adviser. “Obviously, a lot of these Cabinet officials and others who have been going out there, they are blacklisted or cast out.”
Right now, as Trump contemplates jumping into the 2024 race, his top adviser is Susie Wiles, who heads his Save America PAC, followed by former 2020 campaign manager Bill Stepien and attorney Justin Clark, while Citizens United chairman David Bossie remains in his orbit, along with former speechwriter Stephen Miller, campaign spokesman Jason Miller and former White House press aide Margo Martin, who fetches Diet Cokes and prints out polling and news articles to hand out to guests.
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“It’s Trumpworld, man,” said the current adviser. “It’ll be done the way we do everything else. It’ll be very last minute, it’ll be a surprise. We’ll cowboy it like 2016.”
That alarms some Trump veterans who watched with dismay as the former president surrounded himself with increasingly lower-quality advisers like Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and Mike Lindell, and they're worried that trend will continue downward if he seeks -- or even wins -- a second term.
"The quality is going to be even worse, if that’s imaginable,” said a former Trump adviser. “It’s bad. It’s, like, next level. It’s just one too many times of screwing people that were loyal. I definitely think people are done, like the closest of the close.”
