When Republicans Said They Wanted Federal Workers Fired, They Didn't Mean Jesse Watters's Friends!
Leopards, faces, etc.
When Elon Musk’s DOGE first started out on its mission of going from department to department haphazardly cutting everything they didn’t understand and firing people at random, most Trumpists cheered. They imagined themselves pointing and laughing as Federal employees who had been hired to do nothing but sit around being a Black transgender lesbian all day long while collecting millions of taxpayer dollars lost their jobs. They imagined themselves becoming super rich from all of the money Elon was saving them. They imagined Trump heroically ending the deficit and paying down our debt and this … affecting their day-to-day lives in some capacity? They imagined getting to laugh in the faces of all of the smug liberals who just didn’t realize that government didn’t need money and workers to function properly, or that all of our tax money was being sent to 250-year-old vampires.
So far, that hasn’t happened. Some have been pretending that it’s been happening, but it hasn’t happened. What has happened, to cite but a couple examples, is that they’ve accidentally fired people working on avian flu, as well as nuclear weapons specialists, whom they now need to locate and rehire (despite not knowing how to reach them). The point of the arbitrary firings was clearly meant to prove that federal workers are so pointless that you could just fire any of them without any regard to what they actually do and things would continue working just fine. As it turns out, that’s not really true.
Another thing that has happened is that a lot of the people who have been fired have been Trump voters or relatives of Trump voters, who — like so many Trump-voting relatives and spouses of undocumented immigrants — thought they would get a pass. As it turns out, this even includes a friend of Fox’s Jesse Watters.
On yesterday’s “The Five,” Watters issued a plea to Trump to rehire his buddy Chris, a guy he met at a “shooting event” who was fired from his job at the Pentagon despite not even being a “DEI consultant.”
Via Mediaite:
“Let me tell you a story about Chris. Chris was a guy I met at a shooting event in New Jersey,” Watters began.
“Was Chris in the interview or another guy? Male or female?” panelist Harold Ford Jr. jibed.
Watters continued: “Let me finish: a 20-year veteran of the U.S. Military, one of the guys who has killed a lot of bad guys. Put his life on the line. He punched out after 20 years of working for the Pentagon. And he’s only been there a few months, so his probationary period he just found out he’s probably going to get laid off. He’s going to get DOGE’d.”
The host added: “He texted me and said: ‘Jesse, this is not good. I’m really sad. I’m upset.’ This guy is not a DEI consultant. He is not a climate consultant. This guy is a veteran. So when you’re talking about DOGE-ing people, veterans should get priority. Because if you’re going to go out there and kill enemies, put your life on the line, you should not be in the same category as people that are doing DEI.”
Pivoting to Ford Jr., Watters hit back: “Now, Harold and his ilk, they like to talk about the slash and burn corporate ethos – he just need[s] to be a little bit less callous with the way, Harold, we talk about DOGE-ing people. I want that to sink in.”
Ohhh, except here’s the thing — giving veterans priority is literally a DEI initiative. Especially disabled veterans. As Watters surely recalls, the Trump administration specifically stopped using the term DEI and started using DEIA (diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility).
Now, while I believe it is entirely possible to hire a veteran who is just as qualified (and has as much “merit”) as someone who is not a veteran, the anti-DEI people have hammered it home that going out of one’s way to interview or recruit people from underrepresented populations hurts those in heavily represented populations. The fact that some veterans may also need additional accommodations for disability or understanding from their co-workers is also a big, big no-no in the current Trump/Musk anti-DEI framework.
“Chris” isn’t the only Trump voter (or friend/relative of a Trump voter) who has lost their federal job. Should you check the r/leopardsatemyface or r/youvotedforthat subreddits, these folks pop up several times a day. People who cheered for DOGE to get rid of all the “waste” only to find that they or their family members were the ones who got hurt and who are now begging Trump to get them hired back.
“I voted for Donald Trump. But this is not what I was expecting,” one anonymous disabled veteran from Virginia who lost his job at FEMA told WTOP News.
It’s become such an issue that Trumpy actor Zachary Levi, star of the most annoying show I’ve ever seen in my life (“Chuck”) has come forward to warn Musk that some of the people getting fired aren’t even Democrats!
“Please, Elon and all of your team and whatever needs to happen, please don’t let everybody fall through the cracks, as we are doing what is necessary, which is to get in there and cut a cancer out,” Levi told Jesse Watters earlier this week.
“There are good people, people that voted for Donald Trump, who are losing their job,” Levi said. “We gotta make sure that we don’t leave those folks behind.”
Yes, he actually did say out loud that people who voted for Donald Trump should get an exception.
This lady thinks her daughter should get an exception as well.
Here is a letter to Florida Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart, Sens. Rick Scott and Ashley Moody and Governor Ron DeSantis, from “Thomas,” a very “dejected” Trump voter who found out that his darling son was not going to get the NASA job of his dreams because of the hiring freeze.
![Hello, my son [redacted] was hired by NASA in 2024 to work in the [redacted]. He has worked extremely hard to get his Masters in AeroSpace Engineering at [redacted] taking on student debt along the way. He worked at [redacted] after graduation. He obtained Top Secret clearance and was working on [redacted] amongst other projects. He interviewed with NASA (his dream job) and after several interviews and negotiations he took a position in [redacted] and moved to Orlando with his fiance who got a nice job in Orlando. He was NOT a DEl hire. He got the job based on his intelligence and work ethic. Now, through no fault of his own he is going to be fired/let go. I thought we were going to base priorities on merit. I have voted for Trump 3 times now, and feel very dejected. I am a Republican and left my home state of Illinois to be down here.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Zg6W!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffe36aa20-a631-4209-aa11-372ed84a053f_1760x1106.png "Hello, my son [redacted] was hired by NASA in 2024 to work in the [redacted]. He has worked extremely hard to get his Masters in AeroSpace Engineering at [redacted] taking on student debt along the way. He worked at [redacted] after graduation. He obtained Top Secret clearance and was working on [redacted] amongst other projects. He interviewed with NASA (his dream job) and after several interviews and negotiations he took a position in [redacted] and moved to Orlando with his fiance who got a nice job in Orlando. He was NOT a DEl hire. He got the job based on his intelligence and work ethic. Now, through no fault of his own he is going to be fired/let go. I thought we were going to base priorities on merit. I have voted for Trump 3 times now, and feel very dejected. I am a Republican and left my home state of Illinois to be down here.")
It reads:
Hello, my son [redacted] was hired by NASA in 2024 to work in the [redacted].
He has worked extremely hard to get his Masters in AeroSpace Engineering at [redacted] taking on student debt along the way. He worked at [redacted] after graduation. He obtained Top Secret clearance and was working on [redacted] amongst other projects.
He interviewed with NASA (his dream job) and after several interviews and negotiations he took a position in [redacted] and moved to Orlando with his fiance who got a nice job in Orlando. He was NOT a DEl hire. He got the job based on his intelligence and work ethic. Now, through no fault of his own he is going to be fired/let go. I thought we were going to base priorities on merit.
I have voted for Trump 3 times now, and feel very dejected. I am a Republican and left my home state of Illinois to be down here.
Almost all of these people specify that they or their loved ones are not “DEI hires” — by which they mean people who are unqualified but were hired because of their specific identity.
The problem with that, however, is that it was never really a thing to begin with. People were hired based on merit and their qualifications for jobs that actually do need to be done — the DEI part just ensured that qualified women, people of color and LGBTQ+ were not passed up in favor of less qualified white people.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. The fact is, this is going to keep happening and it’s going to keep being a giant mess, because Musk and his minions have no actual idea what they are doing and are trying to solve a problem they made up themselves.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
When these people say "they were not DEI hires;" they are really saying these people are white.
All my life I've heard the people who are now Trumpers saying the same old shit. Their neighbor, worthless sister-in-law, lazy coworker, the kid down the street; they're all moochers. They just sit on the couch munching bonbons watching soap operas, living high on the government hog. Having free abortions, living the dream.
They themselves, their kids; they all deserve and desperately need government assistance. Because nobody suffers like they do. And they're good people, not lazy wasters. Not like Those People.
They all sneered at my family. 8 kids; alcoholic dad; dysfunctional Mom who stays with dysfunctional Dad. We grew up on Welfare. And we didn't even have the decency to cringe and cower in shame all the time.
Now we're all grown up. We all earn well above the median household income. And we don't even have the decency to still live in the shithole town we grew up in, to be held in low regard by those people. We've long since paid in more in taxes than the benefits we received. We could only do that by getting educated and leaving that hellhole.
We're utterly shameless.