As the White House continues to dismantle a variety of federal departments and agencies, laying off thousands of federal employees, Donald Trump was asked for his feeling about the many civil servants whose careers he has derailed. NBC News reported:
President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he feels “very badly” for the thousands of civil servants who have lost their jobs in recent weeks but that “many of them don’t work at all.” Asked by NBC News whether he feels responsible for so many people losing their jobs, Trump said: “Sure I do. I feel very badly … but many of them don’t work at all. Many of them never showed up to work.”
He appeared to be rather serious about this, as if he’d completed a detailed review of personnel records and could say with certainty that countless federal workers were receiving paychecks despite doing no work.
REPORTER: What responsibility do you feel to the civil servants who have now lost their jobs? Many of them worked at the Dept of Education during your first term.TRUMP: Many of them don't work at all. Many of them never showed up to work.
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-03-12T16:56:18.959Z
The timing could’ve been better: Right around the time the president made the unscripted comments, Politico reported that a television has been installed in Elon Musk’s White House office so he can “play video games” at work.
But even putting that aside, the obvious problem with Trump’s comments is that they represented a baseless smear against people who deserve better. A similarly obvious problem is that if the fired workers were so awful and lazy, it necessarily raises questions about why the Trump administration has scrambled to rehire so many of them.
The less obvious problem is that the president is inviting a conversation that doesn’t do him any favors.
As a candidate in 2016, the Republican seemed eager to give voters the impression that he’s a workaholic. At an event in New Hampshire, for example, while complaining about Barack Obama’s golf outings, Trump declared that if he were in office, “I’d want to stay in the White House and work my ass off.” Soon after, he assured voters, “I’m going to be working for you. I’m not going to have time to go play golf.”
After taking office, Trump proceeded to golf rather obsessively throughout his first term. His second term is offering more of the same: A recent Washington Post analysis noted that in the first month after the president’s second inaugural, Trump spent 16 of his first 31 days at Trump-owned properties, and 10 of his first 31 days playing golf.
This weekend, Trump is reportedly scheduled to return to Mar-a-Lago, marking his sixth trip to the glorified country club since taking office seven weeks ago.
I suppose there’s a reason he hasn’t repeated the “I’d want to stay in the White House and work my ass off” line since the 2016 race.
But even inside the White House, Trump hasn’t exactly earned a reputation as a workhorse. Axios published an interesting scoop in early 2019, highlighting the president’s private workday schedule from the previous three months. It showed that Trump spent around 60% of his scheduled time in unstructured “executive time.”
As we discussed soon after, “executive time” was a euphemism the White House came up with to describe Trump’s many hours of downtime, leaving the president to do as he pleases, including watching an inordinate amount of television.
If the president wants to spark a debate about firing federal employees who don’t put in enough hours of actual work, I’m all for it. We can start with the most powerful federal employee of them all.
