The work to staff the administration and prepare policy goals will begin immediately. It is of particular importance for an incoming president who has pledged to reshape the federal bureaucracy and purge it of “deep enemies of the state” so he can launch sweeping efforts such as a massive deportation program on the first day of his presidency.

Compared to 2016, when his victory stunned the world and even his own team, Trump is better prepared to start implementing his agenda on January 20. Not only is his own organization more coherent and stable; Alumni from his last administration have spent the past four years laying the foundation for the next.

“They are in a much better position than they were in 2016,” said Jack Kingston, a former Georgia congressman and Trump surrogate during that first campaign. “The first team was a difficult transition, a difficult team, it had a lot of green people.”

This time, Kingston said, there is a “bigger player pool” of Republicans eager to join the administration, a far cry from 2016, when many credible Republican officials opposed Trump or were uninterested in joining his administration to close. Kingston said the Trump transition-in-waiting began at least a month ago asking for names for appointments to key federal agencies.

Trump’s transition will particularly benefit from a crucial resource he denied President Biden four years ago: cooperation. Because Trump refused to accept his defeat in 2020, his administration refused to participate in fundamental aspects of the transition process. It wasn’t until November 24, nearly three weeks after Biden won the race, that the General Services Administration, a key federal agency, even recognized the victory.

As she admitted in Washington on Wednesday, Harris pledged her and Biden’s full support for a smooth transition. The GSA also issued a statement saying that all resources would be made available to Trump.

But that doesn’t mean the process will go smoothly. In the weeks leading up to the election, his team broke with long-standing practice by refusing to sign official agreements with the Biden administration that would formally initiate key aspects of the transition process.

That decision could potentially delay the transition by delaying when new Trump staff can arrive at federal agencies to discuss the transfer process, according to Government Executive, a federal government trade publication. In 2016, these memoranda of understanding required the Trump transition to provide the Obama administration with the names of every person authorized to go to every federal agency and certify that each had agreed to transparency rules and a code of conduct.

A Trump campaign spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on the status of those agreements or the transition efforts in general.

While this latest version of Trump’s political machine is less burdened by feuds and infighting — the kind that saw Chris Christie appointed as transition chairman just days after the 2016 election — Trump’s Republican machine remains a circle of sharp elbows. There will almost certainly be fierce competition for key government posts and for influence over the newly elected president.

Previews of potential conflict came during the 2024 campaign itself, with Democrats focused closely on emerging blueprints for a second Trump term, especially one drawn up by his allies at the Heritage Foundation think tank. The blueprint, called Project 2025, outlined detailed policy and regulatory positions — some extreme, such as banning pornography — and also specifically recommended personnel to staff an incoming administration.

Democrats tried to make Project 2025 an unlikely bogeyman and tried to tie Republicans to its unpopular proposals. In response, the Trump campaign aggressively created distance between the former president and the Heritage document — even though its architect, Russell Vought, was a top Trump administration official — promising that anyone who worked on the blueprint linked, would fail to secure a position if Trump were to win. re-election.

After Trump’s victory, however, some vocal conservatives boasted that the distancing measure would be a bait-and-switch. “It is my honor to inform you all that Project 2025 was real all along,” influential pro-Trump social media poster Benny Johnson tweeted on election night.

The final few weeks of the campaign, as well as the early hours of the transition period, illustrated how the transition could include a mix of well-known figures from Trump’s previous campaigns and administration, as well as power brokers who have quickly emerged in recent months.

The chairs of Trump’s transition effort are Howard Lutnick, the billionaire chairman of the legendary Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald, and Linda McMahon, the professional wrestling entrepreneur who became a GOP power player and eventually headed the Small Business Administration in the first Trump administration.

Elon Musk, the multi-billionaire CEO of Tesla and He was photographed both on election night and on Wednesday spending time with Trump and his family at his Mar-a-Lago club.

Meanwhile, former independent presidential candidate and Trump ally Robert F. Kennedy has been repeatedly praised by Trump and his supporters as a leader who will quickly take the lead on public health. Kennedy has long stoked vaccine skepticism and although he has been an environmentalist, Trump jokingly warned him on election night to “stay away from the liquid gold,” by which he meant fossil fuels.

Others reported to be involved are Trumpworld stalwarts. According to Politico, Robert Lighthizer, who served as US trade representative during the first administration, is leading the charge for vetting economic personnel, while John Ratcliffe, who served as director of National Intelligence for Trump, is vetting national security and intelligence personnel.

In 2016, the infighting surrounding the Trump transition would have hindered its progress, given how precious every hour is in the spring leading up to the inauguration.

While some Trump allies are optimistic that the transition will be much smoother in 2024, some are still echoing a warning. “If you mess up the 75-day period,” Kingston said, “you can’t recover.”

Sam Brodey can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @sambrodey.