Well behind schedule, Trump names allies to lead transition team

Former President Donald Trump has appointed two of his friends and financial backers to oversee a transition team preparing for his potential return to power. The move comes as polls show that his once-commanding lead evaporated after President Joe Biden dropped out of the election and Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee.

The two chairs of the Trump transition, Linda McMahon and Howard Lutnick, will oversee efforts to identify and vet potential political appointees and draft executive orders and other plans to implement Trump’s policy proposals, including a sweeping crackdown on immigration and raising tariffs on imported goods.

The selection of the two, which the Trump campaign announced Friday, was notable for several reasons. As a matter of timing, it came months after a typical presidential campaign starts working on contingency planning to ensure a smooth transition should its candidate win the election.

It was also striking that neither McMahon nor Lutnick has been associated with Project 2025, an effort by a consortium of conservative organizations to develop personnel and policy transition planning for the next Republican president. While Trump has close ties to leaders of that effort, he has recently tried to distance himself from it as Democrats have seized on some of its more radical proposals.

“I have absolute confidence the Trump-Vance administration will be ready to govern effectively on day one,” Trump said in a statement.

A Trump team official, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the transition, said the effort would not use the office space and computers that the federal government makes available for transitions, but instead would operate entirely using private funds through a tax-exempt group the campaign has established. The official would not answer questions as to why, but Trump has consistently expressed distrust of the Biden administration and its posture toward him.

McMahon — a major donor to Trump, a onetime Senate candidate from Connecticut and a former executive of a professional wrestling empire that she founded with her husband, promoter Vince McMahon — served in Trump’s Cabinet as the administrator of the Small Business Administration. Lutnick is the chair and CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, a financial services firm.

A Trump campaign statement announcing their selection also lists the former president’s sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, as “honorary chairs” of the transition. Donald Trump Jr. has expressed an interest in ensuring that people disloyal to his father are not selected for jobs in a second Trump administration.

The statement did not name an executive director for the transition team.

Trump had delayed the transition operation process because he was superstitious and dismissed any discussion of transition planning as a distraction from winning the election, according to people who have broached the matter with him but who insisted on anonymity to discuss it. Efforts to engage him on the subject are often rejected with a glib refrain: “We have to win first.”

He only begrudgingly agreed to this late formation of a team, the people said.

“It is late in the day to be initiating transition preparation,” said Max Stier, the CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan group that runs the main organization focused on effective presidential transitions.

“The modern norms are to begin transitions in the spring of the election year, so we are now four months behind schedule,” Stier said. “The consequences are significant, because the requirements of transition are huge. You’re taking over the largest, most complex and important organization in our country, probably our planet, and probably in history.”

Trump’s transition to running the federal government in 2017 was a disaster, regarded as the most dysfunctional transition in modern history. He had announced his 2016 transition team that May, with Chris Christie, then the governor of New Jersey, leading it alongside Jeff Sessions, an Alabama senator at the time. They did a substantial amount of work, but Trump thought it was a waste of time. His son-in-law Jared Kushner loathed Christie, who had prosecuted Kushner’s father.

After Trump won the election, his team discarded the Christie team’s work and started from scratch. Kushner and two other Trump advisers took over, with input from Trump’s children and his first chief of staff, Reince Priebus. They were severely delayed in staffing the federal government, and many policy priorities were not enacted as a result of their late start and dysfunction.

The Christie episode underscored a fundamental truism of presidential transitions: Unless the candidate and his campaign trust the people running the transition, their work will not survive the merger of the campaign and the transition after the election.

In preparation for the 2024 election, close allies tried to insist to Trump that he take the transition more seriously this time, but their pleas went nowhere. The clearest example of this breakdown was Project 2025 — an effort of unprecedented scale, designed to give the next Republican president the resources needed to get off to a running start, effectively a transition-in-waiting.

Project 2025 was led by the Heritage Foundation in partnership with more than 100 other conservative groups. It was run by some of Trump’s closest allies, including his former chief of personnel, John McEntee, and his former budget director, Russell Vought. More than $20 million was allocated for the effort.

Trump’s greatest regret from his first term is hiring whom he believed were the wrong people. And the project’s leaders, beginning work more than two years ago, developed a database of thousands of vetted employees to staff the next Trump administration.

They also recruited a team of volunteer lawyers to draft executive orders that could be issued immediately after Trump took office. And they wrote an expansive policy book.

But Trump and his team came to view Project 2025 as politically toxic: Democrats tagged Trump with some of the project’s most unpopular proposals, including hard-line abortion restrictions. Trump and his advisers responded by publicly criticizing Project 2025, and people affiliated with the project have been systematically cut out of the new transition operation.

The Trump transition team is instead expected to lean heavily on work done by another Trump-aligned group, the America First Policy Institute, according to two people briefed on the planning. McMahon is the group’s chair, and others on its staff, including the CEO, Brooke Rollins, have been involved in transition discussions with the Trump team.

Rollins, a close ally of Kushner’s, ran domestic policy in the Trump administration and was passionate about criminal justice reform. She is viewed with suspicion by some Trump loyalists.

Lutnick, who was a $1 million donor to Trump’s inauguration in 2017 and appeared on an episode of “The Apprentice” while Trump was the show’s host, has no known experience in the federal government. He joined Cantor Fitzgerald in 1983 straight out of college. A spokesperson for Lutnick did not respond to an email seeking comment.

He does have experience with large-scale tragedy: Cantor Fitzgerald lost 658 employees, the most of any company, when terrorists flew two commercial airliners into the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001. His brother, Gary, was killed in the attack. Lutnick serves on the board of the museum and memorial dedicated to the victims.

In a 2011 interview about rebuilding his firm after the loss of so many employees, Lutnick said: “We had a conveyor belt — every Friday, our goal was to hire 50 people. Basically, you interviewed with my head of equities; if he thought you were OK, you got to me, and my fundamental question was, ‘Can you start on Monday?’”

Staffing the federal government is vastly different in its scale and complexity: 4,000 political appointees, hundreds of operating units, a multitrillion-dollar budget. There are only 75 days between Election Day and Inauguration Day, and the transition operation alone usually comprises hundreds of staff members.

“It’s unbelievably complex,” Stier said. “A bit like putting together the universe, pre-big bang.”

Before the Obama era, he said, campaigns were loath to invest in transition planning, fearing that it would open them up to the attack that they were “measuring the drapes” by preparing for jobs before actually winning.

But there has been greater focus on transition planning in recent years.

Because the 2000 presidential election was so close and came down to a court battle over a recount in Florida, the transition team supporting the victor, George W. Bush, had a substantially shorter time. The failure to form a full national security team quickly may have been a contributing factor in the failure to prevent the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, according to a bipartisan commission that studied the matter.

In 2010, Congress enacted a law that gave presidential candidates access to government office space, computers and top-level cybersecurity to help them prepare for transition three days after the last party convention of the election year. The Trump 2024 campaign will be the first since 2012 to reject this government support.

Trump challenged that system after his loss of the 2020 election, when he tried to cling to power by putting forward his baseless claims that Biden had stolen the election through large-scale fraud. Trump administration officials delayed providing Biden’s transition officials with access, including to policy briefings normally accorded to the incoming team and visibility into government data.

Despite Trump’s efforts to stymie the peaceful transfer of power, the Biden team’s transition operation was “the gold standard” for preparedness, Stier said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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