“Have we used sticks so far? … I hadn’t noticed,” White House deputy chief of staff James Blair said with a wry grin, explaining the Trump administration’s carrot-and-stick approach to pursuing its goals.
In an interview with Politico, President Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff for legislative, political, and public affairs discussed getting the president’s MAGA agenda through Congress.
“The president and the vice president, the whole team is pretty aware of the various levers that can be pulled to move the agenda along, and I think we are not bashful—and will not be bashful—about pulling those levers. And fortunately, we have a president who does it himself,” Blair explained to Rachael Bade, Capitol bureau chief for Politico.
Blair is a finance graduate from Florida State University, and his early political career was as a top aide for then-Florida House Speaker Richard Corcoran. In that capacity, he was in charge of the political arm of the Florida House Republican majority effort during the 2016 campaign.
In 2018, the term-limited Corcoran appointed Blair to Enterprise Florida, the state’s economic organization that leads public-private partnerships. Followers of Florida politics saw the appointment as a measure by Corcoran to have lasting influence in reducing crony capitalism. Corcoran had critiqued Enterprise Florida as giving “corporate welfare” handouts.
Blair then served as a senior adviser to then-Congressman Ron DeSantis in his successful 2018 bid to become the governor of Florida. He managed the DeSantis Transition Advisory Committee and was named deputy chief of staff for the new governor.
Blair is also the founder and president of Rapid Loop Consulting, a Tampa, Fla.-based political consulting and public affairs firm. In 2020, he assisted Trump during his presidential campaign in Florida, and in 2022, he led campaign and super PAC efforts for battleground states in Arizona, Michigan, and Ohio, in addition to his home state of Florida.
He returned for Trump’s 2024 bid, leading Trump’s efforts to turn out low-propensity voters, and was appointed the political director of both the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee.
In the Politico interview clip released Wednesday, Bade asks Blair about the administration’s carrot-and-stick approach to advancing its agenda.
”I think that our goal is always to resolve things privately, and that’s what we strive to do,” Blair told the interviewer.
With the Trump administration racking up a variety of wins from reforming the State Department and USAID to getting Democrats to agree to continue to fund the government to working on a coming budget bill that will further secure the border, there are a lot of policy wins to cite.
