The Hatchet Man Maneuver

A theory.

Thomas Wictor would have us understand what the "the Hatchet" means in business. Wictor has been banned from Twitter and Gab was unstable so Wictor has been posting videos on YouTube. In the description to his video uploaded last Tuesday he put a link to Jerusalem Post that explains the meaning of "the Hatchet Man Maneuver."

This Jpost article was published last September and concerns Anthony Scaramucci who in business terms is seen as a Hatchet Man, a person brought in during a period of transition for temporary duty to do the dirty work of getting rid of important people then leaving and taking all the acrimony with him so all the residual hate doesn't fall on the CEO who still has to get things done through those people who must then work with the new people the CEO brings in.

Nurit Greenger writes at the Jpost:

Say you are a business tycoon. You just successfully completed a large-scale acquisition and merger, bringing together multiple smaller companies into one conglomerate. After the merger, you want to put your own people in charge of everything. However, all those smaller companies had their own executives - and, at least for the short term - you need to keep many of them around to keep things running as the blending progresses. So, you keep many of those executives around, letting them retain their own senior staff. You even appoint one of them - the head of the largest of the companies you acquired - to be the CEO of the conglomerate, and he pledges to get all the departments working together harmoniously.  

After a well-oiled transition period, some of them are doing fine in the new conglomerate, while others are clearly causing trouble. 

In fact, the one you appointed CEO, is clearly a disaster. And the newly merged departments are working against each other. Furthermore, you have good suspicion he is dealing in insider trading - nothing you can take to a prosecutor, but there is a lot of circumstantial evidence building up. Worse, he is not only doing his own dirty dealing, but it appears he may even be leaking intellectual property to your competitors, helping them take market share from you.

Clearly, your appointed CEO has to go - and go now.

The problem is, many of the senior employees in your conglomerate are loyal to him. If you just fire him and put in your own chosen CEO, you know you could get a lot of backlash from disgruntled employees. Knowing that in your business there is such a small profit-margin, you really can't afford anything at all that threatens performance. So, what do you do?

In comes the hatchet man.

The hatchet man is someone you bring in for sole purpose of slashing the problems and shaking things up over a very short period of time - but doing so in such a way that deflects any blame or blowback away from you. As soon as the problems are hacked away, the hatchet man leaves - taking the ire and resentment with him, leaving you free to bring in your new team for a fresh start.

More at the link about Anthony Scaramucci, liberals and never-Trumpers, Reince Priebus, and how all this was planned in advance so that Scaramucci can come out of it with benefits that make it worthwhile for him.

Now, apply all of that to Matt Whitaker.

Fine. But who is Thomas Wictor?

He's a nutter and so are the people who follow him. What the heck. ♫ Sometimes you feel like a nut.

If you're straining to see the meaning of Wictor's hat, it's EMT protection gear. Duh.