Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, sent out a statement this week drawing attention to the fact that Donald Trump's campaign is slow-walking the presidential transition process. Both candidates are expected to participate in anticipation of a possible win in November. The process generally starts months ahead of the election to allow for sufficient vetting of potential staffers and political appointees throughout the administration. Coordinating with the current administration's staff to ensure a smooth transition to the new presidency is critical. So far, the Trump team has missed two important deadlines to sign agreements to get it started.
Trump, you may recall, doesn't respect this process very much, having fired his first transition team right after the 2016 election, He prevented Joe Biden's transition team from accessing the process in 2020 while he contested the election. Still, one might think it's a bit odd for Trump's team to again delay the process since once the papers are signed, a campaign is granted access to money and essential services. But it doesn't take a very stable genius to figure out why they are dragging their feet. According to the New York Times, until all the documents are signed, Trump's campaign can avoid federal rules limiting private contributions to the transition process as well as ethics rules that bar conflicts of interest. The Trump team doesn't care for such restraints.
Trump has refused to take the usual security briefings, giving the excuse that he doesn't trust the Biden administration (or the "deep state") not to leak and blame it on him so at least we don't have to worry about that. But we can see by this early decision to delay this standard bureaucratic process that our impression that they don't plan to play by any of the usual rules is correct. The corruption that characterized Trump's first term is already evident.
The Trump transition team is headed by Howard Lutnick, a longtime personal friend of Trump's from the Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald, and Linda McMahon, Trump's director of the Small Business Administration and the former wife and business partner of Vince McMahon of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) fame.
McMahon, as the New York Daily News reports, has just been accused of "knowingly allowing the grooming, exploitation and sexual abuse of young boys throughout the 1980s and ’90s," when she was helping to run the WWE, according to a new lawsuit filed on behalf of five alleged victims. Such damming allegations would probably be cause for her resignation from any other presidential transition, but considering Trump's own history of sexual abuse it's unlikely that he would care about such mundane accusations. It's par for the course in any Trump administration.
Politico reported that Lutnick is causing quite a bit of consternation among Trump loyalists who believe that he's edging out members for the first administration so that he can place his own people in the White House for his personal benefit. Republicans on Capitol Hill are likewise sounding the alarm that he seems to be leveraging his position to lobby on behalf of Cantor Fitzgerald among other investments, including some very controversial crypto projects.
But Lutnick has a very important ally in Donald Trump Jr., who is taking an important role in transition planning. He has said that he expects to have veto power to "block the guys that would be a disaster," he told Axios' Mike Allen:
I want a veto power to cut out each and every one of those people," he said, adding that an "advantage" of a second Trump term is that "now we know" who possible administration officials are.
He claims to trust Lutnick implicitly to pick the right people, telling Politico, “There’s nobody more loyal and capable than Howard, which is why my father picked him to help put together the greatest collection of talent to ever serve in the United States government."
Lutnick claims that any complaints are all sour grapes from people associated with Project 2025 who have apparently been excommunicated from Trump's inner circle for making the former president look bad. But the Times reports that there's a different, much more secretive group that's been putting together a very similar project, called "The America First Agenda" produced by the America First Policy Institute, a group formed four years ago in the wake of the 2020 election. Unlike Project 2025 this group is working directly with the Trump campaign, preparing for the second term. One of its directors is Linda McMahon, the co-chair of the Trump transition.
According to the Times, this agenda isn't as voluminous as the 900-page Project 2025 and doesn't feature some of the more sensational policies like outlawing pornography and prohibiting the mailing of abortion pills but it's MAGA all the way. It calls for policies like mandatory ultrasounds for medication abortion and establishing only two legal genders along with a bunch of standard-issue conservative movement policies going back decades. They claim to have already drafted nearly 300 executive orders ready for Trump’s signature.
There is one issue they take even further than Project 2025, however. It calls for "the elimination of nearly all civil service protections for federal workers by making them at-will employees." That aspect of the plan is being implemented by none other than Howard Lutnick who has apparently frozen out all those Project 2025 Trump lackeys who signed on with the wrong team.
So you can see why the campaign doesn't feel the need to bother with a traditional transition process. They are already vetting hundreds of MAGA faithful and planning to start dramatically expanding executive power the minute Trump takes power. But as with everything else associated with Trump, the whole project appears to be one part grift and one part vengeance with loyalists already backstabbing each other and currying favor with the Dear Leader. Some things never change.
