His status as a novice was immediately apparent. When his term began, there were roughly 4,000 open positions in government he was going to need to fill, and his Cabinet was a mishmash of characters who had glommed onto the surprisingly effective politician. Trump’s Cabinet had several revisions within the first two years — he fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Attorney General Jeff Sessions quit under pressure related to the investigation of Russian involvement in the election, Environmental Protection Agency Director Scott Pruitt and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke both resigned under the cloud of ethics scandals, and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis resigned over Trump’s decision to remove troops in Syria. 

Trump was slow to put his best people around him, and the result was a rocky start out of the gates when he had a friendly House and Senate. 

Eight years later, Trump is a seasoned professional who has a well-oiled transition team in place that, 24 hours after he was announced president-elect again, is already making moves to put the Trump administration 2.0 people in their places, our politics team wrote this morning.

“With Republican senators easily flipping the upper chamber back into their hands, the former president is likely to have a smoother path to confirming his Cabinet selections for his second administration. The GOP currently has a 52-44 majority, with the margin likely to grow when final races are called,” the team wrote.

“A senior Senate aide confirmed to the Washington Examiner on Wednesday that lawmakers are already talking with the Trump campaign about holding hearings once the new Congress is sworn in on Jan. 3, 2025, before the former president’s inauguration on Jan. 20, a move that is not unprecedented,” the team added. 

Like in 2016, Trump is headed to the White House with allies across town in the Capitol. It’s not clear which party will control the House, but a comfortable Senate majority will free Trump up to push through his preferred picks for government positions and Cabinet members without worrying about singular Democratic dissenters holding up the process. It could also allow him to pluck senators out of the chamber without risking eating into the majority. 

Unlike in 2016, Trump also has the winds of winning the popular vote at his back. He drew an inside straight to beat Clinton and had to spend time batting away charges that he was installed illegitimately — whether it was by Russian influence or because his victory relied on a handful of votes in key states that delivered him an Electoral College victory. 

What is slightly more complicated for the older, wiser, and more popular Trump is who he can lean on to help produce lists of names for him. The Federalist Society was a key ally eight years ago in providing suggestions for Supreme Court nominations. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 tried to set itself up as a similar outfit but has suffered reams of bad press and Trump publicly denouncing the effort and distancing himself from the policy shop filled with his former staffers. 

There’s a chance Trump mends those fences now that he has won his contest, but, the team wrote, he also has the America First Policy Institute trying to play a similar role and a bevy of lawmakers jockeying for positions more intimately involved with the White House. 

Click here to read more about Trump’s lightning-fast transition efforts.

Time for choosing

Democrats are doing some soul-searching this week after Vice President Kamala Harris failed to repeat President Joe Biden’s victory in 2020. She took over his campaign, his staff, his headquarters, and his money a little more than 100 days ago. She also took over the problems voters said were his administration’s fault. 

Many people in the party are already pinning the historic loss — Republicans are on track to win the popular vote for the first time in two decades — on Biden. 

“He had no business running again,” Charlie Comfort, an Iowa Democrat and Oskaloosa City councilman, told White House Reporter Naomi Lim on Wednesday. “I blame him for giving us another four years of Trump because he chose to be selfish and egotistical. His legacy is severely tarnished in my book.”

There is also a lot of blame going around for Harris’s decision to pick Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) as her running mate, for third-party candidates cannibalizing votes, a murky media strategy, and poor messaging. 

White House Reporter Haisten Willis has an item for us this morning delving into whether the party is going to be capable of transforming its core or whether the changes stop after the finger-pointing and message-massaging cease. 

“The Democratic Party may need to adjust its policies, as Trump has forced the Republican Party to do so in order to compete going forward,” Haisten wrote. “The 2024 election demonstrated that abortion is not enough to drive out turnout for Democrats in a post-Roe v. Wade world.” 

Party players told Haisten that Democrats need “a much stronger, more populist economic message” and to treat illegal immigration as a legitimate problem that needs to be addressed. 

They also need to sharpen their economic messaging. The economy was consistently polled as the most important issue for voters leading up to Election Day, and Trump was consistently viewed as the candidate who could be trusted to handle it better. 

“There is a cohort of Americans frustrated at feeling like the middle class is out of reach,” Tom Cochran, a partner at 720 Strategies, told Haisten. “People vote on feelings, not facts. Geopolitical issues, existential questions about democracy, or identity politics don’t resonate with this cohort. And last night demonstrated that this is more than half of the country. My recommendation would be to speak less and listen more.”

Click here to read more about the Democratic Party’s search for its soul.

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For your radar

Biden will give an address from the Rose Garden at 11 a.m.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre will brief reporters at 1:30 p.m.

Harris has nothing on her public schedule.