Transitioning to Governing
Preparing for Trump II: Part 1
I’m going to track the Trump II transition to help forecast the nature of federal governing over the next four years. Much will happen in the weeks ahead, so these updates will be frequent. This post is free. But all others will be behind a paywall. Please become a paid subscriber!
In this post:
Everything depends on whether Mr. Trump wants to govern
Wiles selected as chief of staff
What we can infer from early names floated
What we can infer from the cases of Haley, Pompeo, and DeVos
Watch the US Senate
Does Trump Want to Govern Effectively?
I’m focused on one overriding issue: Will the president-elect be an effective conservative governing leader this time around?
Others are probably more interested in what this election means for a partisan realignment, the reliability of polling, President Biden’s legacy, the soul-searching of Democratic Party leaders, etc.
As importantly, “effective conservative governing leader” may not be Mr. Trump’s goal. Since he doesn’t see himself as a conservative, he might not care about federalism, localism, civil society, tradition, etc. Similarly, he might care relatively little about governing victories (like laws and programs), preferring the projection of power, fame, public demonstrations of adulation and submission, etc.
My question, then, is particular and narrow. But it’s why this column exists. So I’m interested in those he hires into his administration and which policies he prioritizes. But those things don’t really matter if Mr. Trump doesn’t want to govern well.
What I mean is this: It is irrelevant who works for him and which policies his team begins to advance if Mr. Trump undermines his team, if his White House is chaotic, if he engages in squabbles with public figures, if he insults potential allies, if he distracts his team with rashness and inconsistency, if his lawyers are constantly cleaning up legal messes, and so on.
If you care about the effective use of the executive branch’s authority, it doesn’t matter how big his election victory was or that this was a remarkable comeback or that he has an amenable Congress if he is not personally committed to the work itself.
Only time will tell.
Wiles as Chief of Staff
News outlets agreed quickly that Susie Wiles, who helped lead his campaign, was the frontrunner to be WH chief of staff. They were right.
Other names were floated, such as Brooke Rollins (who had experience in Trump I and for Gov. Perry of Texas), Linda McMahon (who twice ran unsuccessfully for the US Senate and served in the Trump I cabinet for two years), and former House speaker Kevin McCarthy. They will all probably get other posts (see below). But Trump decided to go with someone he knows well and evidently trusts.
What does this mean for governing?
Wiles had some early-career governing experience (working for a few officials) but has mostly worked in lobbying and campaigns. I would not describe her as a deeply experienced governing expert. So it seems at this point that if she has a major influence on governing it will be because she helped focus the president and his team, minimizing distractions and working toward concrete goals.
Generally, chiefs of staff are picked first and then play a big role in helping select senior staff members, cabinet officials, and other key officials. So as those choices are announced—and we learn how those choices were made—we will get early signs of her influence.
What should be anticipate? A few factors argue for expecting her to be effective. She helped run a successful campaign, that effort was reasonably disciplined, she won an internal battle with Corey Lewandowski, she co-signed the statement distancing the campaign from “Project 2025,” etc.
But on the other hand, Mr. Trump is not one to be managed. Ever. He had four chiefs of staff the first time around, and none of them succeeded even though there were reasons to believe each might. For example, Reince Priebus, the consummate insider, lasted six months and was fired via Twitter, and John Kelly, a retired 4-star general and former cabinet secretary, was let go and later opposed Trump’s 2024 election, brutally assessing his unfitness for office.
Again, only time will tell.
Names Floating
The administration is getting a late start on identifying/selecting senior officials. This is a bad sign for people who want Trump II to be effective.
We’re now in the fevered period when people who desperately want jobs try to get their names floated and people who don’t want other people to get jobs try to get those names torpedoed. It is generally a period of personal positioning and wild speculation. We should take much of the early talk with a grain of salt. But, as with Wiles, some early talk can be correct.
Based on reports of floated names, Trump appears to favor two categories of people: A) Trusted officials from Trump I and B) People he likes but who have little to no governing experience. In the former category, are folks like Richard Grenell, Robert O’Brien, Robert Lighthizer, Jay Clayton, Bill Hagerty, Brian Hook, John Ratcliffe, Tom Homan, Chad Wolf, Mark Paoletta, Linda McMahon, Stephen Miller, Larry Kudlow, David Bernhardt, Ted McKinney, Patrick Pizzella, Ben Carson, Andrew Wheeler, John Fleming…
In the second category are folks like Scott Bessent, Howard Lutnick, Vivek Ramaswamy, Tiffany Justice, Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
In a few places, I’ve also seen the names of a handful of GOP US Senators. Most frequently mentioned are Marco Rubio, Mike Lee, Eric Schmitt, Cynthia Lummis, and Tim Scott. (But Tom Cotton is out.)
It’s very early, but this is shaping up to look much like Trump I: Loyalists, some high-profile governing novices, and a few people who had significant governing experience independent of Mr. Trump.
Insufficient Loyalty?
Seemingly out of nowhere, Mr. Trump declared this weekend that he would NOT give senior posts to Nikki Haley or Mike Pompeo. Both were key parts of his first administration. (It is very, very unusual for a transition, let alone the president-elect, to say publicly that someone won’t get a position. That had always been seen as unseemly.) The WSJ editorial board posits an explanation: That some figures close to Mr. Trump want to ensure that JD Vance is the uncontested post-Trump successor in the GOP. But it seems likely that Haley and Pompeo are also seen as insufficiently loyal, particularly the former, given her spirited campaign for the nomination. Loyalty is always a major consideration for incoming administrations, so some of this kind of stuff is to be expected. The question is how important will loyalty be to Trump II.
Reestablishing Loyalty?
It is hard not to read a recent interview with former Trump education secretary Betsy DeVos in the context of the Haley-Pompeo news. Let me give a little background.
DeVos was so alarmed by Trump’s behavior on Jan. 6 that she resigned as secretary of education. She even wrote a scathing letter to him explaining her decision. She described the “violent protestors overrunning the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to undermine the people’s business. That behavior was unconscionable for our country.”
Then she placed the blame directly at Mr. Trump’s feet. “There is no mistaking the impact your rhetoric had on the situation, and it is the inflection point for me.” She ended by invoking the ethical duty of public officials, particularly those representing schools and students. “I believe we each have a moral obligation to exercise good judgment and model the behavior we hope they would emulate […] To that end, today I resign from my position, effective Friday, January 8, in support of the oath I took to our Constitution, our people, and our freedoms.”
But in an in interview with Education Week’s Alyson Klein published just a few days ago, DeVos struck a quite different tone:
“I think President Trump in his second term is going to do a great service and great things to focus on families and students. If you recall, my resignation was specifically out of concern for putting myself in the seat of young kids and families. There was an opportunity to lead in a different way, to say things at more opportune times. I felt strongly that we had accomplished many good things, and that we should be talking about those things as we left office. I know that President Trump has a heart for America and Americans. And he has a very tender heart for kids and families who want the best for their kids.”
When Klein asked if DeVos would want to serve as his education secretary again, she said, “If President-elect Trump wanted to talk to me, I would be very open to talking.”
The Role of the Senate
In a previous column, I noted that a key question will be whether the GOP-led Senate will rubber-stamp Trump nominees (including controversial ones) or resist in some cases. As if on cue, Politico reported that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Elon Musk could get confirmed. The article suggests that GOP senators seem eager to largely defer to the president. Deference is common in these cases—same-party senators generally want the new president to have the team he desires. But we should remember that some have previously shown a willingness to buck Trump—including Murkowski, Collins, Tillis, and Cassidy.
A Washington Post article this weekend makes it seem like Mr. Trump is very willing to lean hard on the Senate.