President-elect Trump appears to be a politician in a hurry when it comes to staffing his upcoming second administration’s top jobs.
Trump has announced roughly 20 Cabinet and other top-level positions in the nearly two weeks since decisively winning the 2024 presidential election over Vice President Kamala Harris.
The former and future president’s staffing pace is far ahead of where he was eight years ago, after his first White House victory.
And he’s also making his picks at a quicker rate than President Biden following his 2020 election, and former President Obama 16 years ago.
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The Republican presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump, arrives at his election night celebration at the Palm Beach Convention Center on November 6, 2024 in West Palm Beach, Florida. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
One reason for the quick pace – unlike eight years ago when Trump and his top aides were relatively new to the process, this time they’re experienced hands. And this time around, Trump enjoys a larger national mandate, due to his sweeping Electoral College victory and his capturing of the national vote, which he didn’t accomplish in his 2016 White House win.
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“He certainly knows the ropes and I guess in some ways, he kind of knows the dopes. He knows who he likes and knows who he doesn’t. He knows what he wants to accomplish,” Matt Mowers, a veteran Republican consultant and 2020 GOP congressional nominee in New Hampshire who worked on Trump’s 2016-2017 transition and served in the first Trump administration, told Fox News.
Mowers noted that the clock’s ticking for Trump.
“It shows that they recognize that with only four guaranteed years, they have to make an impact starting on day one. So it’s one of the reasons why they’ve chosen candidates at the speed he has and really started to announce policy at the speed he has – because they know they only have four years to really fundamentally guarantee a change of direction of the country based on what he campaigned on,” Mowers emphasized.
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Matthew Bartlett, another Republican consultant who also served at the State Department during Trump’s first term, told Fox News that “we are seeing the operation warp speed, that Trump is rapid-fire naming Cabinet and agency heads.”
“Some of that is because he absolutely knows who he wants in place for his second term,” Bartlett said. “And it’s possible that some of it is because he is extemporaneously firing off names that are in his ear. So this looks like a mix of professionals and possibles.”
But the past-face of announcements could potentially have a downside when it comes to the Senate confirmation of some of the more controversial picks by Trump.
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“The American people have an appetite, maybe even a demand, for a disruptor, but I’m not sure that they voted to see a destroyer as a Cabinet secretary,” Bartlett said.
And he predicted that some of the nominees “are going to go down” during the Senate confirmation process.
Paul Steinhauser is a politics reporter based in New Hampshire.
