Yesterday, President-elect Donald Trump took the first step to putting together his new administration.Trump announcing tonight that his White House chief of staff will be Susie Wiles.
She becomes the first female chief of staff in U.S.history.
The White House chief of staff is often the first position a new president will fill, and there will be many more before Inauguration Day. What does this task of appointing a whole new administration look like?What does it entail?
It is a just gargantuan feat.You have the entirety of our government nearly changing over.There's 4,000 political appointee positions.More than 1,000 of those need to be confirmed by the Senate.
That's our colleague Andrew Restucia.
On top of that, you have every government agency's leadership is going to change over in, you know, over a 24-hour period.
How has Trump talked about forming a new administration?
So he has said that there are things that he wants to do differently.The main thing comes down to hiring.And he's more convinced than ever now, now that he's won a second term, that his worldview is the right one.
And so they want to avoid hiring people that come from a different worldview.Loyalty will be sort of the core thing that they're looking for in all staff, across from low-level people to the highest levels of government.
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power.I'm Kate Leinbach.It's Friday, November 8th.Coming up on the show, who's going to be in Trump's next White House?
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Our colleague Andrew Rastusha has been a DC politics reporter for 16 years.And one thing he really likes covering is the handover of power from one administration to the next.
I could talk about transitions all day.
I mean, I've covered, this is my third transition I've covered, so I have become sort of obsessed with them, so.
So you're like a transition nerd?
You're like at the dinner party being like, hey guys, you want to know what's really interesting?This boring part of government.
You know, I just find government bureaucracy to be sort of, fascinating is probably a strong word, but I think it's really important and I think it's undercover.
And I think you can draw a clear straight line between some of the things that happened in Trump's first term and some of these conversations we're having now.
When Trump was first elected, the transition from campaign to White House wasn't exactly smooth.
There was a sort of big blow up in 2016 on the transition team.So New Jersey, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie was running the transition team initially.And when Trump won the election in 2016, sort of unexpectedly, Trump cleaned house.
And he replaced them with his vice president-elect then, Mike Pence, and sort of the people who had been running his campaign apparatus.
And they actually threw in the trash, literally threw in the trash, all of the plans that Christie had spent months putting together.And they sort of started from scratch.
And that process of getting rid of all that stuff was blamed in part for some of the hiccups that President Trump faced in his first year or so in office.
You know, in the first term, a lot of his staff derided what they called globalists who were hired at the beginning, particularly of his term, you know, Wall Street types who fundamentally disagreed with the president on issues like tariffs.
They believed in sort of a multilateral approach to diplomacy.And he felt like some of the people that he hired weren't loyal enough to him and stood in the way of many of the things that he wanted us to do.
And that really bothered the president and his closest allies, including his family, who felt like he was the person that was elected by the people of this country and that he should get to do what he wants and that he shouldn't have lower-level staff trying to stand in the way.
And so I think that'll be one of the biggest changes this time around.
How prepared is the Trump team right now?
— So, they started late.In theory, the transition should be up and running in the spring, before an election.
— Hold on, excuse me.In the spring?Like, you're still— you've just come out of primaries, and then you're supposed to start thinking about a transition even before you've won the election?
Yeah, the spring of an election year.Yeah.
Yeah.This would be just the earliest stages of planning in a perfect world.And the Trump team launched their transition in mid-August, a few months later than was expected and later than notably they did in 2016 as well.
The person leading Trump's staffing search is Howard Lutnick.
He's a billionaire Wall Street guy.He's the CEO of a financial services firm called Cantor Fitzgerald. He's known Trump for decades.He lives in New York and sort of socialized with him.
He's a registered Republican, but he has a history of donating to both political parties.But in recent years, he has become closer to Trump.They play golf together, and he helped fundraise for him in his 2020 presidential campaign.
— Donald is a dealmaker.You know, the president's a dealmaker.
And notably, Lutnick has been a pretty vocal defender of Trump on cable news, which we know that the president spends a lot of time watching.— He cares about business in America.
I know he cares about business in America.
— And about a year ago, Trump called Lutnick and said, hey, I'd love to get your help getting re-elected.And he became a little bit more involved in his campaign.And then late this summer, he officially became co-chair of the transition.
Lutnick is a lifelong New Yorker, and there was one experience decades ago that shaped him.His firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, had offices in the World Trade Center.
When the plane struck on 9-11, all of his 658 employees who were in the office that day were killed, including his brother.
And he spent years sort of rebuilding Caniff-Ritz-Gerald and hiring new people.
And so that process of hiring thousands of people over years to rebuild his company was one of the selling points for putting him in charge of personnel on the transition.
So he's like a headhunter for the new administration. Exactly, yeah.
And he is pretty active in trying to recruit people.He, late last month, was at a fundraiser for Trump in New York, and he openly said, like, look, to all these sort of, you know, donors and a couple dozen people in the room, look, we need your help.
Like, send me resumes of anybody that you know.
And let's go, let's go select the greatest government we've ever had, have smart people do it, really get great people to commit to serving the government, which I have every day, everywhere I go.
Leading up to the election, Lutnick was compiling shortlists of names for the biggest roles in Trump's cabinet, jobs like secretary of treasury and secretary of state.And Lutnick will pass those lists onto Trump.
The president notably really cares about personnel and isn't going to cede that to anybody else, especially at the most top-level jobs.
Is Trump listening to him?
So, as far as we can tell, Trump likes him a lot.And this is the tricky thing about reporting on Trump's orbit, is there are a lot of different views, and it's often difficult to tell exactly what Trump thinks in any given moment.
But Trump notoriously, like, does things his own way. Is there a sense that he might try to change the playbook on how this transition stuff is done?
Absolutely.I mean, if they give him a short list and the people that he has identified in his head aren't on it, he's going to probably sit in the back and ask him to add those people.
And then there's always the sort of broader concern, which I've heard from people close to the transition, which is like, will any of this work that they're doing matter?
Is Trump just going to, you know, sit at Mar-a-Lago and come up with his own list of people?Is he going to ignore the work of the transition sort of altogether?
And while Lutnick may have Trump's backing, there are people in Trump's inner circle who have questioned Lutnick.
He has at times appeared to make statements about personnel decisions in the view of some in Trump before they're made and before Trump has weighed in.He, for example, said that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
wouldn't be getting a job at the Health and Human Services Department, which annoyed people in Kennedy's orbit, for example.
His appeals to his Wall Street friends to help him find people have ruffled some feathers in Trump's orbit, in part because of this concern that we talked about, about hiring Wall Street-type globalists that don't agree with the president's agenda.
But as far as we can tell, Trump himself likes the guy.Of course, that could change at any moment.
And especially now that he's going to be paying really close attention to the transition's operations, we'll have to watch closely to see how all that plays out.
Coming up, who might be in Trump's cabinet?
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As you look at these short lists for all these different jobs, what do you see?What is a unifying characteristic of the candidates on these lists?
I would say the unifying characteristic is that they are loyal to President Trump.They have publicly and privately shown fealty to him, repeatedly.These are not people who have, at least publicly, reservations about what he might do in office.
In fact, they're encouraging him to be aggressive and to use his authority aggressively.
Okay, so let's get into these different positions. Yesterday, Trump picked his chief of staff, Susie Wiles.Who is she?
Yeah, she is the sort of person that has been credited, at least in part, with getting Trump back into the White House.She was the co-manager of Trump's presidential campaign this time around.She is a longtime Florida political operative.
And she is known as sort of this quiet, steady hand behind the scenes.So for all of the sort of rambunctiousness and bombast of the characters in Trump world, she is not one of them.
The Trump campaign and the Trump advisors hope that she's going to be a steadying force behind the scenes after Trump sort of cycled through chief of staff after chief of staff in his first term.And she's going to try to
put some order in place in what can be sort of a chaotic environment.And so the steadying hand rule is going to be an important thing to watch.
What do you see as the significance that she is his pick?
I think it says that Trump is interested in, at least in this moment, is interested in trying to have a calming and steadying force in his orbit.The thing that Wiles gets the most credit for is trying to professionalize the Trump campaign.
where the first 2016 campaign could be described as sort of the Wild West.This campaign was a lot more disciplined.
You didn't see the level of publicly backstabbing and leaks and personnel drama and all that stuff leaking into the press in the same way you did in the 2016 cycle.And so this seems to indicate that they're trying to
mimic that environment in the White House.But Trump's an unpredictable character.Best laid plans in Trump world often go off the rails.But at least for now, that's what the signal is.
Okay, so let's talk about an important post in terms of the economy and money, the Treasury Secretary.Who's on that list?
Yeah, so there are two sort of finance veterans at the top of the list.The first is a guy named Scott Besant.He is a longtime investor, and he has grown quite close to President Trump over the last year and a half.He's often on the road with him.
He appears at rallies.He has been involved in some of the economic policymaking and campaign proposals that have happened over the last year. There's another billionaire investor named John Paulson who is also up for the job.
Paulson has talked publicly and privately about, you know, trying to implement some of the things that Trump prioritizes, including cutting government spending.
And Paulson rose to prominence by famously betting on the housing crisis.
That's right.Yeah.And so he sort of made money, his critics would say, off the back of a lot of people suffering during the housing crisis.And so that would certainly be an issue that came up in any confirmation hearing.
I'm not sure that that necessarily would stop Trump from picking him.He really values people who have amassed wealth and been successful in the business world.So we'll have to see how that plays out.
There are still many more important roles that will be vital to Trump's policy agenda, like Homeland Security for his immigration plans and Secretary of State for Global Affairs.
And during his campaign, Trump leaned on some influential people who will likely get roles in his administration.
Elon Musk, Trump has said that he's going to be overseeing the sort of government efficiency commission, which is going to try to cut at least $2 trillion in federal spending, which is a huge number and experts say that might be difficult to actually achieve.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is likely to get some sort of health related advisory role in the administration.
And Trump spends a lot of time on the phone with people that he's known for years, you know, donors and, you know, financiers from New York and friends.
And so it'll be a real massive group of people who will have influence over the president in these coming months.
On Wednesday, Trump was on a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Elon Musk made an appearance. So given that Trump has done this transition before, do you think that will make this one smoother?
Trump himself has said, and the senior advisors have said, that he now knows how to do this job.It's no secret that in 2016, when he won the election, a lot of people in Trump world were surprised.They might not like to admit that, but they were.
We know that from our reporting.This time they are. Not only the Trump team, but lots of outside groups have been preparing for this for years.They have assembled lists of people that they want to work in the government.
They've assembled detailed policy proposals.And so I think it's fair to say that they are more prepared than they were in 2016.They are trying to run a more tight ship.It still remains to be seen exactly how that'll play out.
That's all for today, Friday, November 8th.The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal.Additional reporting in this episode by Rebecca Ballhaus, Rachel Louise Ensign, Vivian Salama, and Brian Schwartz.
The shows made by Katherine Brewer, Jonathan Davis, Pia Godkari, Rachel Humphries, Ryan Knutson, Matt Kwong, Jessica Mendoza, Annie Minoff, Laura Morris, Enrique Perez de la Rosa, Sarah Platt, Alessandra Rizzo, Alan Rodriguez-Espinosa, Heather Rogers, Pierce Zingy, Jivica Verma, Lisa Wang, Katherine Whalen, Tatiana Zimis, and me, Kate Leinbaugh, with help from Trina Menino.
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Additional music this week from Katherine Anderson, Peter Leonard, Billy Libby, Bobby Lord, Emma Munger, Nathan Singapak, Griffin Tanner, and Blue Dot Sessions.Fact-checking by Mary Mathis.Thanks for listening.We're off Monday.See you Tuesday.
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