Former Trump State Department official recounts struggles working with career bureaucrats

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Former State Department staffer recounts watching career officials try to stymie Trump

Amanda Milius joins 'Tucker Carlson Today' on Fox Nation

Former State Department adviser Amanda Milius joined Fox Nation's "Tucker Carlson Today" on Friday to discuss the proverbial culture shock of moving from Los Angeles, to grassroots politics in Middle America, campaigning for Donald Trump, and then to Washington, D.C. where she was an official in the White House.

Milius, a filmmaker and daughter of "Apocalypse Now" screenwriter John Milius, told host Tucker Carlson about her time working on the campaign trail in Nevada, where she met people from all walks of life who gave their time for a cause they believed to be "greater than themselves," in her words.

But then, when Milius got to Washington, D.C., she said she encountered frustrations working with career bureaucrats in the government.

"Everything I thought was wrong is way worse. It's so much worse, and it was so frustrating because I mean, like I said, there was so few of us," she said.

President Donald Trump speaks after awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Olympic gold medalist Dan Gable. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

"Imagine having an administration like ours where it was so important to to to go in like guns blazing on day one and not let up, mean, we were already up against the whole machine," Milius said of Trump's landmark win in 2016.

She said that once she got to D.C., she and her fellow Trump-era colleagues realized that the career bureaucrats had no concern for the intended policy changes and platforms of the new president.

"To have most of us be the people that knew the agenda and wanted to execute the agenda get whittled away by these… conniving nobodies, and then think that the administration is somehow still got a fighting chance -- It's like we fought with one hand behind our back," she said.

Mike Pompeo speaks during a news conference at the State Department in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Thursday, March 5, 2020. Alex Wroblewski/Bloomberg via Getty Images (Getty Images)

Milius remarked that she and her colleagues were receiving advice on how to navigate the federal government from Reagan-era officials, noting that no one from the Bush administration was likely to support them. 

"So we'd we'd be pulled aside by like some serious old-timers and been like, 'Hey, actually, you know, this is how you don't get screwed in this one area or whatever' - And so, where's the manual for that?"

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"By the way, who's building that manual now? I have some friends I know that are writing it, but there's a lot of institutional knowledge there that if we live in a real country and ever take power again, we're going to really need," Milius told Carlson.

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