They are some of the biggest names in the Republican national security firmament, veterans of past GOP administrations who say, if called upon by President-elect Donald Trump, they stand ready to serve their country again.

Foreign policy experts who signed letters indicating that Trump is not qualified to be president are finding that now that Trump has won the election, they are having trouble getting hired by Mr. Trump to work in his administration.

Not just names in the firmament. The biggest names in the firmament!

But their phones aren't ringing. Their entreaties to Trump Tower in New York have mostly gone unanswered. In Trump world, these establishment all-stars say they are "PNG" – personae non gratae. Their transgression was signing one or both of two public "Never Trump" letters during the campaign, declaring they would not vote for Trump and calling his candidacy a danger to the nation. The letters were explicit in their denunciations of Trump's professed support for torture of terrorism suspects, his pledge to build a wall along the border with Mexico, his anti-Muslim rhetoric and his admiration for Russian President Vladi­mir Putin.

We need better interrogation (not "torture") of terrorists, we need a wall, and we need to stop Muslim immigration. Only the Putin criticism is warranted, so these guys are more off base than the man they are criticizing.

Some of the "Never Trump" letters signers fear they are at the bottom of the pecking order, below those who expressed verbal opposition to Trump's campaign but did not sign either of the letters. Eliot Cohen, a State Department counselor during the Bush administration who had helped organize the War on the Rocks letter [said] "Believe me — my phone is not ringing,".... [NeverTrump] Mary Beth Long, who served as assistant secretary of defense in the Bush administration, said her inquiries to the Trump transition team to get clarity on some of his foreign policy positions have gone unanswered. She said that she has spoken with retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, Trump's designee for national security adviser, whom she knows from the Pentagon, but that she isn't expecting a job. "If I were asked to sign a letter like that again, I would be much more careful about the verbiage that related to the candidate himself," she said.

Astute readers may know I was never a big supporter of Donald Trump. But neither did I sign a letter saying he was unqualified to be president, and then after the election go begging hat in hand to Mr. Trump for a job. I have to agree with the Trump people on this one – declaring him in writing to be unqualified to be president, and then expecting a job after the election because you view yourself as indispensable by virtue of your history in the "Bushie" foreign policy establishment, brings hypocrisy to a whole new level.

Trump has hired at least one NeverTrump, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, for U.N. ambassador, but that was probably more because she had the right kind of skin color and body parts that would bring "diversity" to his cabinet and less because of her foreign policy experience dealing with Georgia and North Carolina. For all the rest, they'll have to continue sitting in their cubicles at "think-tanks" writing monographs about new paradigms of poverty management in rigidly politically monolithic but economically porous third-world rat holes.

Ed Straker is the senior writer at NewsMachete.com.