Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the preparations, personnel decisions and policy deliberations of Donald Trump’s transition. POLITICO Pro subscribers receive a version of this newsletter first. Send tips | Subscribe here | Email Eli | Email Lauren | Email Lisa | Email Megan DONALD TRUMP knows how to play the Washington game this time, and it’s already showing in his transition. The incoming president is making appointments at a rapid clip, dispensing with all pretense of governing with a broader GOP tent and moving to consolidate executive power as he prepares to return to office with an expanded base and a popular-vote mandate he lacked in his first term. Trump has named his chief of staff (SUSIE WILES), border czar (TOM HOMAN) and U.N. ambassador (Rep. ELISE STEFANIK, the House No. 3 Republican), all within the first six days of his win. He also selected longtime adviser STEPHEN MILLER as deputy chief of staff for policy and former GOP Rep. LEE ZELDIN as EPA administrator. After struggling to steer key appointments through Senate confirmations in his first term, Trump is angling to circumvent that process this time around. On the one hand, he is demanding the chamber’s Republican leaders relinquish their power to confirm his picks by allowing him to make appointments when the Senate is out in recess. On the other, he is attempting to bypass the process entirely by placing key people (Homan) in roles that don’t require Senate approval. He’s also moving much more quickly than he did eight years ago. And, in another sign of a been-there-done-that mentality, Trump appears to have traded the pageantry of his first transition — in which he paraded his potential picks in front of his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, and made MITT ROMNEY eat crow over a posh dinner in New York, only to pass him over for secretary of State — for rewarding loyalists and elevating hardliners who are more likely to carry out out his most ambitious aims without resistance. Trump’s early maneuvers reflect a few realities: The former president is returning to power having quelled nearly all dissent within his party with his electoral romp. MITCH McCONNELL will no longer be Senate GOP leader next year and gone is (at least the appearance of) other resistance from Republicans like Romney or former Speaker PAUL RYAN . Trump and his allies now stand as the GOP establishment they spent much of his early years as the Republican standard-bearer fighting against. He has had four years out of office to learn lessons from his first term and plot for his second. And the fact that he is term-limited — and at the end of his political career — appears to be emboldening him to pursue even his most controversial plans. “2016 was almost like a shotgun marriage. Here we’ve had a long engagement period, and it’s allowed him to better understand” the players he wants around him and the game at hand, said MATT MOWERS, who served as a senior White House adviser in the State Department during Trump’s first term. Trump is “much more comfortable with both the subject matter, the job description and the people around him. And you see that in some of the early picks he’s made. These are largely people who’ve been around him — in some cases, like Stephen Miller, for almost a decade at this point,” Mowers said. And when it comes to Trump filling his Cabinet, Mowers said, “clearly he’s willing to use any tool at his disposal … to get people he needs in the right seats.” Trump and his allies aren’t just trying to lord over Congress as they prepare to retake power. A conservative lawyer working on Trump’s transition issued a stark warning Monday that any career Justice Department lawyers thinking about bucking the incoming president’s agenda — including mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and issuing pardons and commutations to Jan. 6 defendants — should get out or face possible termination. “Those employees who engage in so-called ‘resistance’ against the duly-elected President’s lawful agenda would be subverting American democracy,” MARK PAOLETTA wrote in a lengthy post on X that served as a broader shot across the bow at career government workers. But Trump’s power plays might not all pan out. Navigating Senate recess appointments could prove particularly tricky, even as the three Republicans vying to become majority leader expressed various levels of openness to the idea. Still, after four years of imagining his second term, Trump is proving he wants to waste no time. MESSAGE US — Are you IVANKA TRUMP? We want to hear from you. And we’ll keep you anonymous! Email us at westwingtips@politico.com. Did someone forward this email to you? Subscribe here!
| 
