President-elected Donald Trump transition process was practically non-existent and was thrown into chaos by the ouster of New Jersey Governor . Chris Christie by allies of Vice President-elected Mike Pence and Donald Trump Tower staffers, who feared that Chris Christie's Bridgegate scandal would overshadow their efforts.
It’s been five days since the reality TV star became the reality president and judging from his public pronouncements and a slightly dizzy 60 Minutes appearance, he still seems to be grappling with the vast implications of his stunning and unexpected victory. But in the past few days amid protests in several major cities of United States of America and a massive case of the national frights about his fitness to govern Donald Trump has made a handful of moves that offer the first hints of what kind of president he will be.
So what do we know? He’s basically the same brash invader who sacked the establishment citadel on Election Day but seems a lot more flexible than the sloganeering populist who vowed, in an oath of iron and blood, to build that wall, trash Obamacare and overcome the rigged system.
In the space of the last 48 hours, a mellower, more presidential Donald Trump seems a bit more comfortable with the system he will soon lord over: His selection of RNC Chairman Reince Priebus has already sparked a mini-rebellion among some supporters who were hoping Donald Trump would, for real, detonate the establishment.
Reince Priebus would not have been my choice, longtime Donald Trump adviser Roger Stone told me. It's going to upset people but one appointment does not an administration make.
The presidency is, simply put, the most complex job on the planet and has bedeviled men with far more preparation and experience. Will he imperiously control his underlings like he did on The Apprentice?" Or will his disinterest in the mechanics of governing render a politician whose appeal is rooted in strength a staff-controlled weakling? Nobody knows especially Donald Trump.
Here are five takeaways from Donald Trump’s 5 days as improbable president-elect Donald Trump.
He’s going to build a big, beautiful what? Since his election (and a 90-minute sober sit-down with a suddenly admirable Barack Obama he’s softened nearly every one of the big, bold policy promises he made to wild approval at his rallies. He's always bought himself wiggle room by emphasizing his flexibility as a deal-maker, but back-pedaling has been the prevailing feature of his short pre-presidency.
Donald Trump says he won the election “easily, but he’s well aware that’s not exactly the case, people in his orbit freely admit. Hillary Clinton is likely to prevail by one or two percentage points in the popular vote nationally, when California completes its long, slow count this week — and that erodes his argument for having a clear mandate, Democrats say.
Moreover, he’s well aware of the frayed nerves, domestic and foreign, in the wake of his win.
Repeal and replace Obamacare? Sure, but only if some version of the prohibition against discrimination of patients with preexisting conditions is preserved.
Lock her up? Not a big priority. Let’s talk infrastructure, he says.
Drain the swamp of lobbyists and special interests? Eventually, but not right away. Everybody that works for government, they then leave government and they become a lobbyist, essentially. I mean, the whole place is one big lobbyist, he told CBS. “I'm saying that they know the system right now, but we're going to phase that out.
The threat to re-evaluate security partnerships with allies like South Korea? One call to Seoul cleared that up on the eve of his victory he reiterated in standard-president-ese his commitment to maintain the status quo.
That deportation force that will forcefully eject millions of illegal south-of-the-border types? That’s been modified, in the course of several interviews, to a more moderate plan to more aggressively catch and punish illegals who commit crimes here.
How about the 800,000 college students who might deported if Donald Trump repeals Barack Obama’s 2012 executive order? Reince Priebus, Donald Trump’s new right-hand, told MSNBC the day after the election: “He’s not calling for mass deportation” not a mass rollback of Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
But the biggest non-shocker came on Sunday night when 60 Minutes host Leslie Stahl asked Donald Trump if he still planned to build his big beautiful wall with Mexico or whether less drastic measures will do.
In certain areas, a wall is more appropriate, he said I'm very good at this, it's called construction but here could be some fencing.
Reince Priebus reigns. Cue the theme song for the “Odd Couple” and an updated version of the show's iconic opening question: Can two men who want to dictate the direction of the Republican Party share a West Wing without driving each other or Donald Trump crazy?
On Sunday, the campaign announced the not-unexpected news that RNC Chairman Reince Priebus one of the few mainstream GOP leaders to remain mostly loyal through Trump's darkest days would be awarded the most powerful job next to the presidency, chief of staff. Steve Bannon, the enigmatic Trump Whisperer who runs Breitbart, an alt-right news/propaganda emporium that has been accused of antisemitism and sexism, was given the important but subsidiary position of chief strategist and counselor.
In a statement, Donald Trump described the two men The dapper, disciplined and deeply establishment Reince Priebus Felix and the rumpled, rich, literary, laid back, and zealous Steve Bannon Oscar “equal partners to transform the federal government.
They aren’t. Donald Trump, who is not exactly a student of presidential history, may not know it yet but he will eventually: Chiefs of staff, by definition, run things controlling the day-to-day flow of information that reaches the president, critical under-the-radar appointments (like deputy cabinet secretaries) and, most importantly, the tenor and direction of the communications, political and legislative teams that determine the direction of an administration.
One senior Trump aide likened Reince Priebus to one of Donald Trump’s property managers, His attitude is just get the job done, and do anything you need to so.
Steve Bannon's role of counselor last occupied in the Barack Obama White House by John Podesta can be a powerful position, but it is essentially advisory, and fits Steve Bannon’s chosen and paradoxical role during the campaign. He was a goad, pushing Trump to take on a crooked system run, in his view, by international bankers and biased media. But he was also an insecure candidate's Linus blanket, calming Donald Trump down and urging him to resist the urge to haphazardly tweet or defend himself to distraction.
Steve Bannon doesn’t give about the day-to-day stuff, and didn’t want to get into that kind of minutiae during the campaign, so he’ll be cool with this,” said a Donald Trump ally close to both men. “People get Steve Bannon all wrong They think Trump loves him for the ideology. Wrong. He’s businessman. He loves him because he helped him win. That’s why he’s in the White House, period.
Two West Wings? No two presidential advisers never mind the fact that are the first two presidential advisers appointed by Donald Trump have ever represented such radically different visions of the conservative movement as Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon.
Donald Trump aides say everybody gets along pretty, pretty well. But suppressed rivalries have a way of popping up under the pressure of running the country.
Even before Donald Trump takes office, the Reince Priebus-Steve Bannon appointment set up a natural, if not irreconcilable, factional division in the West Wing possibly pitting the arch-anti-establishment Bannon and the why-can’t-we-all get-along, big-tent conservative Priebus, against each other.
The 44-year-old chief-to-be has never held a government job before, but he’s a seasoned and temperate political operative who rose from running the Wisconsin GOP to the big national job by dint of his flexibility and commitment to enlarging the party’s appeal. It was Reince Priebus who presided over the famous-infamous 2012 Republican National Committee post-mortem of Mitt Romney’s losing campaign, which pinned the blame on an archaic ground-and-data operation and policies which alienated blacks, Hispanics and women.
Our message was weak; our ground game was insufficient; we weren't inclusive; we were behind in both data and digital; our primary and debate process needed improvement, Reince Priebus said when the document which was shredded, burned and mocked by Trump’s team in 2016 was released four years ago. "There's no one solution. There's a long list of them.
But Reince Priebus is a pragmatist, and the RNC’s commitment to providing Donald Trump with the rudiments of a battleground ground game coupled with Donald Trump’s innate appeal to white working-class voters helped deliver his candidate’s big win in the upper Midwest including a razor-thin victory in basic-Blue Wisconsin.
Steve Bannon couldn’t be any more different. His conception of the GOP establishment is as a diseased host organism ripe to be taken over by outsider candidates who tap the coiled rage of the forgotten men and women of the lapsing white electorally majority. Under Steve Bannon, Breitbart has become a traffic-driving, baldly pro-Donald Trump site promoting a populist, anti-globalist agenda that targets establishment Republican stances on trade, world affairs and the inclusiveness championed by Reince Priebus and the party’s macerated mainstream.
Most importantly, the 62-year-old Steve Bannon former naval officer and Goldman Sachs investment banker has encouraged a war’s worth of Donald Trump frontal assaults and was one of the principal authors of the President-Elect’s Midnight-in- United States of America closing argument that targeted bankers, media elites and the Democratic coalition of minorities and coastal elites as villains who were keeping U.S. from being great again.
Donald Trump likes to have his subordinates battle it out but this is something else, said one senior Republican party official friendly with Reince Priebus. This is either going to be ‘Team of Rivals’ or Hunger Games’ or maybe both.
Reince Priebus is close to the squeaky-clean and policy-obsessed House speaker a widow’s peaked anti-Trump who delayed his endorsement, then flayed the GOP nominee for the Access Hollywood tape. Donald Trump returned the favor by calling the speaker weak and ineffective while tweeting (a month before Election Day, Despite winning the second debate in a landslide every poll, it is hard to do well when Paul Ryan and others give zero support!
But Donald Trump’s pique with Ryan was nothing compared with Bannon’s animus, which pre-dated the candidate’s tussle with the former House Ways and Means Committee chairman. Steve Bannon railed against Ryan as the enemy and claimed his policies were aimed at creating a one world government, according to Breitbart insiders interviewed by The Hill’s Jonathan Swan.
When one staffer suggested building a bridge to Ryan in a December 2015 email leaked to Swan, Steve Bannon replied that his goal was to see Ryan gone by spring.
Paul Ryan and Donald Trump have, for the moment, patched things up the speaker lavishly praised Donald Trump’s win and even gave him props for minimizing GOP congressional losses, a move which one Trump associate called “paying his tribute. And Ryan is likely to stay out of the firing line as long as Reince Priebus remains in the president-elect’s good graces.
I think it could be a problem, said one top Donald Trump adviser who has talked with him several times since Election Day. Reince Priebus is Paul's guy, not Donald Trump's.
Donald Trump is nervous and he should be. White House officials present for Donald Trump’s visit to the Oval Office last week said the man who ridiculed Barack Obama and questioned the legitimacy of his birth certificate seemed genuinely humbled by the encounter and grateful for assistance.
It's enormous. I've done a lot of big things, I have never done anything like this, he told Stahl of his reaction to being elected. it is so big, it is so it's so enormous, it's so amazing. I realized that this is a whole different life for me now.