Trump on the cusp: Aggressive transition period signals disruptive second term
WASHINGTON ? The message came at 4:28 p.m. on a Wednesday, seven days before Christmas and Hanukkah. Governing by social media was back, and so was Donald Trump.
Lawmakers had been eager to head home for the holidays after unveiling a stopgap funding bill to keep the U.S. government open that by all accounts looked to be cruising toward final passage. The president-elect had other plans, calling the bipartisan legislation pushed by GOP House leadership a “betrayal of our country” in a joint statement with Vice President-elect JD Vance posted on X.
Trump’s lightning bolt from Mar-a-Lago rocketed through the marble-floor halls of the Capitol. It stunned lawmakers, who had to go back to the drawing board. Chaos enveloped as frustrated Democrats urged their GOP colleagues to stand firm. Republicans seemed baffled.
“Enormous political disruption,” said Vermont Democratic Sen. Peter Welch after a reporter showed him Trump’s statement on a phone outside the Senate chamber. Speeding past journalists into an elevator, Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski uttered, "It’s all a fascinating mess."
Trump 2.0 was already looking a lot like Trump 1.0 – unpredictable and tumultuous, with plenty of Republican infighting. He wasn't even president yet, but Trump was flexing his authority over the legislative process and demonstrating his appetite for conflict. As Trump's second-term Inauguration Day approaches on Monday, the president-elect's allies and his critics tell USA TODAY they expect ample upheaval over the coming months, with a new Republican administration arriving stocked with bomb-throwers and advisers like Elon Musk, the world's richest man, claiming massive change is needed to save the country. It's exactly what Trump promised during the campaign and what many voters want from the next four years.
Polls have shown a majority of Americans approved of Trump's 70-plus day transition since his victory over Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris. During this period, Time magazine named Trump person of the year. The history-making criminal cases that consumed so much of Trump's time and attention during his 2024 presidential campaign have been falling away. His Mar-a-Lago estate in South Florida became a conservative celebrity magnet and host of headline-generating press events where the star attraction's remarks have geopolitical consequences. It's also where Trump strategized over his picks for key administration roles, making decisions that signal an American leader who plans to move fast and break things, according to interviews with nearly three dozen Trump insiders, allies and opponents.
“I think he’s going to come out of the box with a head of steam and he’s going to move very quickly in a way that will be dizzying, and for some disorienting,” said Ralph Reed, founder of the Faith & Freedom Coalition and a longtime Trump supporter.
'It's wild': Plotting the presidency from Mar-a-Lago
A side room off the main Mar-a-Lago living room serves as a portal into the second Trump administration. That's where a recent visitor met the president-elect and transition co-chair Howard Lutnick. They sat across from each other at a large boardroom-style table.
Among those milling around Mar-a-Lago that day were Vance, Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, a billionaire former Trump primary opponent turned adviser.
Trump's transition war room has multiple screens that are used to show television clips of potential nominees, resumes and other information to a visually oriented president-elect who once hosted a reality television show, consumes a lot of TV and has often chosen people for top jobs who worked in media or made frequent appearances in it.
Beyond job seekers, advisers and those who already nabbed administration positions, the Mar-a-Lago transition milieu includes celebrities, heads of state and titans of industry making pilgrimages as the center of American power shifts from the 82-year-old President Joe Biden to his 78-year-old predecessor and successor.
“It’s wild. Everybody in the world is there,” said Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz, once a Trump rival but now an ally who has visited the president-elect in Palm Beach and recommended personnel.
The Mar-a-Lago guest list has encompassed people from across the political and ideological spectrum. Trump hosted liberal Canadian Prime Minster Justin Trudeau to discuss tariffs and has been taunting him since, suggesting Canada should be a U.S. state. Trudeau later announced his resignation. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, a conservative aligned with Trump, visited the South Florida club and upon returning to Rome said she got an invitation to return to Washington for the Republican president's inauguration. Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg has stopped by, as did Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Apple CEO Tim Cook for a dinner with the president-elect.
“Everyone wants to be my friend,” Trump said last month of the attention from business leaders, some of whom viewed his first presidency warily.
‘Wondering how strong to go’
In 2016, Trump's transition operated out of his private golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, and New York City, where potential nominees paraded in front of reporters camped out in the Trump Tower lobby. Many Trump staffers acknowledged at the time that planning was chaotic and full of internal backbiting that the president-elect egged on as part of his leadership style.
According to the recent Mar-a-Lago visitor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, Trump’s 2024 transition operation is “much more organized” than in the past. Other Republicans echoed that comment. “I was around during his first term, and now during his second term, they’re a lot more prepared and focused heading into Inauguration Day than they were the last time,” said Rep. James Comer, R-Ky.
Yet while those around Trump say the transition has been smoother than the first operation, its results have also been contentious, with a number of personnel moves that have sparked bipartisan concern.
Trump's process for making the picks includes soliciting advice from a wide range of people. A person who spoke with Trump early in the transition said the president-elect asked what the person thought of appointing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, a decision he had yet to make.
“He was wondering how strong to go" with the pick, the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said.
Nominating Kennedy to lead the nation’s health agencies has been a controversial choice. The health issue Kennedy is best known for is questioning the safety of vaccines, which the agencies he wants to lead say are safe and crucial to saving lives.
Yet Kennedy has attracted a following in the MAGA movement and beyond through criticism of public health practices and industrial food production, and he is viewed as a disruptor. Choosing Kennedy signaled to the person who spoke with Trump about the pick that the president-elect is looking for forceful people who will bring big changes.
“I think that’s what he’s doing, he understands that, as opposed to last time,” said the person, who noted Trump is very “hands on” with his Cabinet picks and studied “each one.”
Trump’s series of controversial Cabinet announcements began with his choice of attorney general nominee Matt Gaetz, a former congressman who faced a federal sex trafficking investigation but never was charged, and continued with former Fox News host Pete Hegseth to lead the Department of Defense, longtime ally Kash Patel to lead the FBI and former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard to head intelligence agencies.
Hegseth has been accused of sexual assault, which he denies, and doesn't have high-level military experience. Gabbard has limited intelligence experience and has drawn criticism for comments perceived to be sympathetic to dictators. Critics call Patel a Trump sycophant.
Gaetz withdrew his nomination amid an outcry. But Trump’s other controversial picks have held on during the transition as the president-elect digs in to defend them and with Senate confirmation votes expected to begin as early as Monday with the handoff to a new administration.
Many of Trump’s choices have criticized the agencies they would lead and are expected to overhaul them. Republicans and Democrats alike say the team Trump has assembled says a lot about how he'll govern, although they view what's ahead very differently.
“These guys are going to get in the octagon and rumble,” said Rep. Morgan Luttrell, R-Texas.
Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said Trump selected people “who are willing to fight, and that’s what he needs.”
More: Big policies, small margins and a Trump wildcard: What to expect from the new Congress
“They have to get in these agencies and clean house so his administration isn’t undermined from the Deep State,” Johnson said.
Retribution concerns
In an NBC interview at Trump Tower in Manhattan that aired Dec. 8, Trump said members of the House committee that investigated his role in the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, “should go to jail.” The interview and some of Trump’s appointees again are raising the question of whether Trump will seek retribution against political opponents.
“It doesn’t bode well for democracy,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., the former House Jan. 6 Select Committee chair, pausing in a walkway underneath the Capitol to reflect with a reporter on the retribution threat.
Though some Trump allies have dismissed the president-elect's threats as idle talk and Trump himself told NBC that “retribution will be through success,” Thompson said Trump’s words and appointees raise serious concerns.
John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser turned critic, said the president-elect is picking “yes men and yes women” for jobs, and some of them are “very worrying.”
“Because I think it underlines that Trump's retribution agenda … is a serious proposition,” said Bolton, a longtime GOP foreign policy adviser and George W. Bush-era U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Bolton is on a list of people whom Patel identifies in his book as members of the “deep state.”
A Trump transition spokeswoman dismissed the retribution concerns, pointing to the president-elect's comments. "President Trump has said repeatedly that success will be his retribution, and he has chosen brilliant and highly respected outsiders to serve in his administration because the American people are tired of the status quo," Anna Kelly said. "Now, with the help of his highly qualified Cabinet nominees, all families will benefit as he delivers on his promises to lower costs, secure the border, and Make America Great Again."
Even as Bolton said he worries about what Trump may be planning with his picks, he argued they also reflect a transition that is not very well organized, careful or deliberative despite Republican assertions to the contrary. That could signal a second Trump administration as chaotic as the first. Some of Trump’s picks show a “remarkable lack of vetting,” Bolton said, mentioning Hegseth.
And while Republican allies describe a formal process to interview and select people for administration jobs, there are informal channels as well, namely “anyone with a direct line to Trump,” said a source close to the transition who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
“New year, same song,” the source said.
Pushing boundaries
Trump's early transition moves, including his unorthodox Cabinet picks, reaffirm his willingness to push boundaries and subvert the traditional way of doing things, according to Gwenda Blair, a Trump biographer.
“That won’t change,” she said. “Also, that’s why people voted for him. They love that. Very entertaining.”
Blair also said she questions the narrative Trump allies are pushing that he’s appointing outsiders who aren’t “beholden to some kind of elite group." She noted many of his picks are incredibly wealthy. According to Forbes, Trump has appointed at least nine billionaires or people married to billionaires. Their vast business holdings create potential financial conflicts.
During his first White House term, Trump regularly faced ethics questions about using the federal government he led for his own personal gain, including using his properties for both official and unofficial events. The issue was a defining and recurring theme throughout his first administration.
Now Trump also owns Truth Social, a social media company, and a cryptocurrency business, which ethics experts want could both present big financial conflicts. At the same time, there are fewer constraints on his power after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that presidents have broad immunity for official actions in office.
“When it comes to boundaries and ethics, I think we've had a noticeable deterioration” in recent years, said Richard Painter, chief ethics lawyer for former President George W Bush.
Trump’s boundary-pushing extends not just to financial ethics but questions surrounding the limits of presidential power and operating within the rule of law, Painter said. The president-elect has floated deploying the military to help with mass deportations, which raises legal questions, and won't rule out using military pressure to acquire Greenland and the Panama Canal.
Painter said he hopes Trump will advance his agenda by “playing by the rules.”
“Is that his personality? Well, that's not what we've seen so far,” he said.
A CNN survey Dec. 5-8 found that 55% of Americans approve of how Trump had been handling his transition, but he risks losing his “political capital” if he goes too far, Painter said.
There are many potential pitfalls, including a narrow GOP House majority that could make it difficult for Trump to get his agenda through Congress, despite Republican control of both chambers.
“The Republicans can’t even afford somebody to have a cold,” said a GOP consultant aligned with Trump who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The precarious nature of Trump's position as his second term begins came into full focus when the government nearly shut down before Christmas. Congressional Republicans had been trying to set the agenda during the closing weeks of the lame-duck Biden administration when Trump demolished it, harking back to the turmoil of his first White House, when lawmakers and the nation constantly were on edge waiting for a tweet that could appear any time of day or night and turn the vast machinery of the federal government on its head.
In this instance, Trump forced lawmakers to recalibrate and pass a revised spending bill, but only after the legislation the former and future president wanted failed, thanks to opposition from 38 Republicans. The House speaker had to rework it. By blowing up the stopgap funding bill, Trump demonstrated the power he has over a narrowly divided Washington. But Trump also exposed himself and Republicans to questions about whether the unified GOP control of government they're all about to enjoy can deliver on a raft of campaign promises.
On Capitol Hill that late December day, confusion quickly turned to recrimination as Democrats slammed Republicans and Republicans slammed Republicans.
"What we’re seeing right now is an embarrassment,” said Missouri GOP Sen. Josh Hawley, who blamed House leadership led by his own party for the dysfunction. He added that he had told Trump the same thing in a phone call in which he argued that Mike Johnson shouldn’t be speaker anymore.
A little more than two weeks later, Johnson hung onto his speakership by just a couple of Republican votes, thanks to Trump's late lobbying and support. An uneasy alliance endured ? for now ? into the start of Trump's next presidency.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump poised for disruptive second term as Inauguration Day arrives