Trump staffers face threat of blacklist

Politico: When Matt Braynard signed on to run Donald Trump’s data team last fall, he got an email from a veteran GOP operative to whom he was close warning, “You realize once you go Trumptard, your career in GOP politics is over?”
Braynard took the job anyway, explaining that he believed in Trump, and that he wasn’t worried about being blacklisted. “This isn’t a career, it’s a vocation, and only God can take that away,” he said he responded.
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But according to interviews with more than a dozen operatives — including several who oppose Trump, some who support him and the leaders of some prominent D.C. political shops — some of those who go to work for Trump face an implicit, and occasionally overt, threat: Help Trump, and you’ll never work in this town again.
It may be unenforceable, but the push to stigmatize Trump’s aides, advisers and vendors is among the last remaining pieces of ammunition available to a Republican establishment that has tried just about everything else to block the billionaire from taking over of the GOP. And, critically, it has complicated Trump’s efforts in recent weeks to hire top-tier operatives, according to sources familiar with Trump’s campaign.
Already, the conservative digital firm Targeted Victory has fielded questions about its relationship with Trump’s campaign, for which it has been paid nearly $106,000 for processing online payments. And the venerable law firm Jones Day has faced internal grumbling about its work for the Trump campaign (which has paid the firm $672,000 for legal consulting). Multiple staffers at the Koch brothers-backed Americans for Prosperity turned down Trump’s entreaties, in part because they were “concerned about what that would do to their reputation in professional circles going forward,” as one staffer familiar with the entreaties explained.
Meanwhile, the board of directors of the multipartisan American Association of Political Consultants quietly debated whether to publicly call out Trump for capitalizing on racial and religious tensions and the ethics of those working to elect him. (They ultimately decided against weighing in.)