White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany hired a familiar face last month to join her communications staff. Before she chose him to serve as her principal assistant press secretary, Chad Gilmartin had worked with McEnany on President Trump’s reelection campaign.
But the connections go even deeper: Gilmartin happens to be a cousin of Sean Gilmartin, who happens to be McEnany’s husband.
Landing a White House job is a highly competitive sport, and who manages to get those jobs has always been a subject of fascination. And in the Trump White House, being the relative of someone with a big administration job seems to be one crucial advantage. Family connections, through marriage or direct blood ties, turn up in several places among the people who are in charge of communicating the Trump administration’s agenda or involved in his reelection effort.
For example, Giovanna Coia, a member of the White House press staff until last month, is a cousin of White House senior counselor Kellyanne Conway. Coia, who was promoted to deputy director of the Office of Public Liaison, recently married John Pence, Vice President Pence’s nephew. The younger Pence is a senior adviser to the Trump reelection campaign.
The public liaison office, which the White House describes as “the primary line of communication between the White House and the public,” also employs Andrew Giuliani, the son of Rudolph W. Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney. The younger Giuliani earns $95,000 a year as an associate director, according to White House personnel documents; his job is to coordinate visits to the White House by championship sports teams.
Laura Schlapp, a newly hired public affairs specialist at the Pentagon, is the niece of Mercedes Schlapp, the former White House director of strategic communications, and Matt Schlapp, the chairman of the American Conservative Union. Mercedes Schlapp left her White House position last June to become a senior adviser to Trump’s reelection campaign.
The White House press operation also includes a married couple bridging the president’s inner sanctum and the vice president’s press office. Katie Miller, Pence’s press secretary, is married to Stephen Miller, a senior White House official and Trump’s top immigration adviser. They met while working for the administration and were married in February at the Trump International Hotel in Washington.
Trump’s most well-known family tie in the White House, of course, is to his daughter, Ivanka Trump, and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, both of whom are part of his inner circle. Ivanka Trump’s official advisory portfolio includes women, families and economic development. Kushner has had multiple roles, including serving as the head of a coronavirus response group, chief architect of President Trump’s stalled Middle East peace plan and construction manager for his southern border wall.
And of course Sarah Sanders, who was Trump’s second press secretary, is the daughter of one of his high-profile allies, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. Sanders joined the 2016 Trump campaign shortly before her father endorsed him.
Hiring relatives to senior roles was relatively common for presidents in the 19th century. In the 20th century, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower both appointed their sons to senior positions. John F. Kennedy named his brother Robert as attorney general and his brother-in-law Sargent Shriver to head the Peace Corps. In 1993, Bill Clinton appointed his wife, Hillary Clinton, to chair a task force on health-care reform, drawing criticism from Republicans.
However, the practice generally declined thereafter, circumscribed by federal laws and judicial decisions. But in a legal opinion written in early 2017, the Justice Department concluded that the president has “special hiring authority” and that a decades-old anti-nepotism statute did not apply to the White House. This interpretation gave Trump a green light to hire family members. A judge has not ruled on the Justice Department opinion.
The White House press office declined to comment on its hiring practices.
As a legal matter, “there’s not enough evidence that any of these hirings violated federal anti-nepotism rules, [but] they do raise a larger question about merit,” said Jordan Libowitz, a spokesman for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a government-watchdog group.
“If these people were hired based on their familial relations and not on their ability to do the jobs, that is going to leave the taxpayer represented by a government not qualified to best carry out its work,” he said. “There’s no better example of this than Jared Kushner, who seems to be doing half of the jobs in the White House and none of them well.”
Some conservatives raised an eyebrow during the Obama administration over numerous instances in which journalists were married to, or close relatives of, prominent government figures. The overlapping relationships suggested at least the appearance of a conflict — the suspicion that journalists might pull their punches because of their personal relationships with officials they were covering.
In this case, people close to the White House suggest there is little downside to hiring from within, and there may even be some advantages to it.
McEnany “wouldn’t have hired [Chad Gilmartin] if she didn’t already know he could do the job,” said one official who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity. “She knew he could do it. And he can.”
