*Former Surgeon General Jerome Adams says he could not find a job after his four-year stint with the Trump administration.
“People still are afraid to touch anything that is associated with Trump,” Adams told the Washington Post in a new interview.
In the profile published Friday, Adams, 48, calls Trump “a force that really does take the air out of the room,” but notes that people didn’t want to “touch anything” connected to Trump following his presidency.
Adams stepped down from his post last year and returned to Indiana. He says he still hasn’t shaken off the “Trump Effect.”
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Former surgeon general Jerome Adams and his wife, Lacey, often find themselves talking about what they’ve named the “Trump Effect.”
The predicament underscores a givens of today’s political environment: Association with Trump becomes a permanent tarnish. https://t.co/kfh2eaMKX0 pic.twitter.com/1tZzpyxdYd
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) November 29, 2022
“The Trump hangover is still impacting me in significant ways,” said Adams, noting that Trump’s announcement of his presidential candidacy in 2024 “will make things more difficult for me.”
After serving four years as America’s top doctor under Trump, Adams says he sought out jobs at universities but received rejections from officials who were concerned about how left-leaning students would react to his presence on campus.
“It was a lot harder than he thought to find a landing spot because of the Trump Effect,” Adams’ wife, Lacey, said in the interview.
Adams was reportedly out of work from January 2021 until September of that year when he was tapped by former Republican Indiana governor-turned-Purdue University President Mitch Daniels to serve as executive director of health equity initiatives at the school.
Adams was a most prominent figure on the White House coronavirus task force in 2020 and he spoke to Business Insider last year about his efforts “to raise the alarm that COVID-19 was going to disproportionately hit Black and brown people” but was often dismissed due to his association with Trump.
“In February and March of 2020, I was talking with the NAACP and the National Medical Association in trying to raise the alarm that COVID-19 was going to disproportionately hit Black and brown people. I worked with groups to tell them that the virus would affect people in poor health and among lower socioeconomic groups particularly hard. It was heartbreaking, quite frankly, to see it play out the way that it did, because you know, from a scientific point of view, I saw it coming,” he told Insider.
“It was frustrating because in many cases, the pitch was not heard the way I wanted it to be heard, because people only saw the guy standing next to President Trump. They didn’t see the Black man who fought and overcame so many challenges just to become a doctor after growing up poor and in a rural area. They didn’t see the person who spent his entire career really fighting for health equity. They saw ‘Trump’s Surgeon General’ and that caused people to discount, dismiss, or just distrust anything that I said in that space,” he added.
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