This is a preview of this week’s episode of “The Signal Sitdown.” Don’t miss politics editor Bradley Devlin’s interview with American Moment CEO Nick Solheim by turning on YouTube notifications for the premiere at 6:30 a.m. EST on Sept. 11.
“Personnel is policy” is an old truism in the conservative movement.
After President Donald Trump won the 2024 election, one of the big question marks as he headed into his second term was whether or not those tasked with setting up his administration had fully appreciated that time-tested wisdom.
In his first term, Trump saw his agenda undermined by deep state and Republican Party apparatchiks alike. That problem most clearly manifested at the top of the administration, with figures such as former National Security Advisor John Bolton, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley playing outsized roles.
But the American Right’s personnel problem runs far deeper than the Cabinet. At every level, Trump was facing a shortage of staffers who believed in the president’s vision and were willing to enact it.
Nick Solheim co-founded American Moment with Saurabh Sharma and Jake Mercier in 2021 to solve this problem beyond just a second Trump term. Solheim, now the organization’s CEO, joined “The Signal Sitdown” to take viewers inside the conservative movement’s changing personnel pipeline.
Solheim told The Daily Signal that in the lead-up to Trump’s first term, “there were not nearly enough people that existed in the ecosystem here in Washington, D.C., that were both competent and also aligned with the president.” But the election results don’t lie: “They got to be out there somewhere,” the American Moment founders thought, “and all that they’re waiting for is someone to find them.”
American Moment set out to identify, educate, and credential a new cohort of right-wing activists and operators. It would bring its fellows to Washington, D.C., place them in internships, and prepare them for full-time jobs.
“Junior staff do everything,” Solheim explained. “They do everything from being the principal’s gatekeeper — so, who’s allowed in the door — to scheduling meetings, to doing briefings for those meetings, to … doing a lot of the policy work, too.”
Solheim recalled what a friend at the Pentagon once told him: “The easiest way to learn the way that the Pentagon works is to be a special assistant first, because you touch a little bit of everything.”
“The way that I sort of think about this from [Trump’s first term] is if there was somebody bad in this assistant secretary slot, or whatever, it’s pretty safe to assume that a lot of the people under them were also bad,” Solheim said. “I know for a fact from many conversations that the special assistants were actually where a lot of the leaking was coming from outside of the White House in the first term, particularly at DHS [the Department of Homeland Security] and some of the other high level departments as well.”
The most powerful weapon in American politics remains the fact sheet — a fact sheet on an upcoming bill that staffers create for briefing members of Congress, a media fact sheet for officials to prepare for interviews, etc. — they are products often produced by these more junior staffers.
“I hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but 99% of members of the House, the Senate, do not read those bills,” Solheim joked.
“Really, the sort of analysis of whether a bill or an amendment or whatever is good, bad, how you should vote on it, how people in your district feel about it — all of that is coming up to you through staff,” Solheim explained.
“Like 90% of that information that you need to know about the bill or the amendment or whatever, and what you should do about it comes from the people that work for you,” he continued. “And so, if the people that work for you are bad and they’re not aligned with your worldview or, in the administration’s case, the president’s worldview or the secretary’s worldview — all the way down to the deputy assistant secretary’s worldview — you’re going to have a bad time.”
“My central thesis on this is that it is very important to have senior level people that are aligned with you, but you are not going to win on 100% of what you care about if the junior staff aren’t with you as well,” Solheim told The Daily Signal.
“Basically our goal is to create 10,000 [White House Deputy Chief of Staff] Stephen Millers.”
