Eight years ago, as President-elect Donald Trump prepared to take the oath of office, his transition team was capping off several weeks of pure chaos.
The power centers of the transition were split between Trump’s Manhattan skyscraper and a nondescript office near the White House in Washington, causing confusion early on. Within days of Trump’s 2016 victory, the transition’s plans and systems developed before the election were essentially thrown out, and certain staff were fired as part of a purge. The backbiting and infighting led to Chris Christie being pushed out as the chairman of the transition. Important decisions like Cabinet appointments were made outside of the “normal” process of carefully vetted lists of candidates that are systematically whittled down. Even two months into the first Trump term, offices in federal departments and agencies remained unfilled, which could be traced to the dysfunction of the transition.
Things are clearly different this time around—and that suggests the second Trump administration could operate with a lot less mayhem, too.
There’s no question that Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s home and club in Palm Beach, Florida, is the center of the transition universe. Beyond a single scuttled Cabinet appointment, the personnel drama that dogged the first transition has been practically nonexistent. The leadership of the transition, co-chairs Linda McMahon and Howard Lutnick, has been steady, while incoming White House chief of staff Susie Wiles has continued to impose the discipline she inculcated on the campaign on a staff that might otherwise follow the lead of the mercurial president-elect.
“I feel pretty comfortable that I can instill order at the staff level,” Wiles told the New York Times recently.
A hallmark of that order has been the remarkable dearth of unauthorized press leaks. While various factions within the first transition—conflicts that had carried over from the 2016 campaign and continued into the Trump presidency—had leaked their battles to a news media eager to exploit divisions, very little internal brawling has spilled out in the open this time around.
The exceptions, such as an early confrontation between Lutnick and longtime Trump aide Boris Epshteyn, stick out for how rarely they’ve repeated themselves. And while Elon Musk has earned plenty of media attention for his “near-constant presence” at Mar-a-Lago and remarkable influence (and perhaps interference) on the incoming administration, the sniping at the world’s richest man has largely come from outside the orbit of the official transition.
Meanwhile, the work of the transition to prepare the administration has happened quickly and quietly. Confirmation hearings for more than a dozen Cabinet-level appointees are taking place on Capitol Hill this week, while the raft of more than 100 executive orders Trump hopes to deploy in the first days and weeks of his presidency are reportedly being prepared. Matt Gaetz, Trump’s ill-fated first nominee for attorney general, has been the only real stain on the transition’s record. Trump 2.0 is doing better than Bill Clinton on that front.
Wiles gets much of the credit for this relatively smooth presidential transition. People who know her say her organizational skills fill an important role for Trump, who appreciates her as a “safe pair of hands” who proved herself during the campaign. As the Times reported, Wiles sent out a memo last month that “warned all members of the new administration that none of them speak for the United States or Mr. Trump, and ordered them to get approval from the incoming national security adviser and White House counsel before any pre-inaugural contacts with foreign officials.”
In addition, Trump transition officials and staff have signed nondisclosure agreements, according to multiple people familiar with those agreements. That’s a repeat of what happened in the transition after the 2016 election, when Trump employed NDAs (just as he often does in his business operations) to keep staff quiet. But that year, the incoming chief of staff was Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus, a Trumpworld outsider without much cachet with personnel he did not bring over from the RNC. The NDAs, combined with the respect Wiles has from Trump himself, seem to be keeping a lockdown on unauthorized leaks.
“I think there is a larger societal issue here, as NDAs are just increasingly a part of the way that people do business in 21st century America,” said Tevi Troy, a presidential historian at the Ronald Reagan Institute and a veteran of both the George W. Bush administration and the pre-election transition team for 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney. “Politics is just a little late to the game, even though security clearances have long served as the less effective governmental equivalent of NDAs.”
But the real source of discipline within the transition may be, ironically, Trump himself. No longer the political neophyte shocked by his own victory in 2016, the former and future president is more assured about what he wants from his administration. He has a stable of reliable loyalists, including Wiles, Epshteyn, and longtime aide Jason Miller, a senior adviser for the transition who was with Trump during the president-elect’s meeting with lawmakers on Capitol Hill last week.
“It all comes back to [Trump] knowing exactly what he wants to do and having Susie in place as the boss, which wasn’t established in 2017,” Miller told The Dispatch.
A competent transition hardly guarantees a successful presidency, and the problems facing Trump already loom. Will his first and likely best attempt to rack up legislative wins for his domestic policy agenda come in the form of “one big, beautiful bill,” as House Republicans desire? Or will Senate Republicans get their way and break it up into two separate pieces of legislation, which they argue will be better for accomplishing Trump’s goals? The president-elect’s lack of clarity on the matter does not bode well. The best laid plans during a transition can go awry when Trump is in charge.
But with the vast majority of the party—from its staffers to its elected leaders to its donors—all singing from the same MAGA hymnal, there’s a greater sense this time around that the wind is at Trump’s back.
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