This is insane even for a Trumpian RNC. It means that everyone in the place — every researcher, lawyer, fundraiser, receptionist — is an avowed election denier. How does the Committee ever recover from this? Maybe the answer is it shouldn’t.https://t.co/qiQeguUh6a — Marc E. Elias (@marceelias) March 27, 2024 The warlord has been driven into …
Trump allies remember well the chaos of that first transition, led first by Chris Christie, then tossed to Mike Pence, and then hastily taken up by Jared Kushner when Trump actually won, surprising even members of his campaign. Infighting and division were rampant, and by the second day of his presidency, Trump had filled only 500 of the thousands of open positions. The result was a first-year revolving door of firings and defenestrations (Flynn, Comey, Dubke, Spicer, Priebus, Bannon, Scaramucci, Gorka, and a dozen others) and ineffective policy-making, too. The latter is the raison d’être of the dueling turnkey staffing outfits, both of which believe a fully vetted and prefabricated MAGA government—staffers, policy playbooks, and all—can truly effectuate the Trump vision…
Granted, there’s some truth to the notion that the third Trump campaign is a far more buttoned-up, practically leak-free enterprise compared to its previous incarnations. But it’s much easier to impose discipline on a campaign of several hundred people than it is to staff the entire federal bureaucracy. Hence the growing apprehension in some quarters that housing the transition team operations at Mar-a-Lago and having Trump micromanage it—or worse, hand it to some faction they personally dislike—could be a recipe for chaos. “You have to hire 6,000 people. That is an immense, immense undertaking,” a Trumpworld consultant told me. “You have to vet probably 15,000 people and find 6,000 people capable of running our government. And you’ve got to do it in five months.”
Previous transition efforts for George Bush, Barack Obama, and Mitt Romney were staffed and run by people who either had extensive Washington connections or experience running major operations in the private sector. (Boston Consulting Group, in fact, put together a 271-page guide for finding the right people to staff a transition.) But one person’s extensive experience is another person’s establishment swampiness, especially when the “ideal candidate” knows better than to tell Trump that a desired action would be improper, illegal, or unconstitutional. “He doesn’t want somebody who’s gonna do a completely—I hate to say it—professional job of putting together a transition,” a Republican insider put it. “He wants somebody to be closely in communication with him to basically do what he wants, day to day, all the time. And personnel-wise, he wants people whose only mantra is: Whatever the president wants, we’re gonna do.”…
The key reason to keep the transition at Mar-a-Lago, however, has little to do with what exactly a potential appointee could bring to the administration, and more to do with weeding out people who are likely to directly contradict Trump—whether out of disobedience, self-righteousness, or self-preservation. “Trump’s overall thing that he has learned from his last go-round as president is that he’s like, ‘I don’t want people who are going to tell me no, and I don’t want people who are gonna say, ‘This is not feasible, Mr. President,’” the insider told me. “Like, ‘When I want to have a military parade in Washington, D.C., I don’t want Jim Mattis saying, “We can’t have tanks going down Constitution Avenue because it’s gonna tear up the streets and it’s just gonna be too expensive.” I don’t want that. I want yes.’”