Donald Trump’s 2016 flagship policy was famously “Build the Wall.” The early rounds of the 2024 campaign have been dominated by Trump’s stranglehold over the competition, as well as his multiple court cases. Underneath the bluster and chaos, the former president has rolled out a significant number of new policy proposals that have gone without scrutiny, until now. This Washington Examiner series, Trumpism 2.0, will take a closer look at this policy, if it’s realistic, and if it’ll help Trump secure a second term.

Former President Donald Trump is the undisputed frontrunner for the 2024 Republican nomination and is polling competitively against President Joe Biden, but questions remain about who would staff his administration in a second term and how committed they would be to his populist agenda.

Trump and his allies have outlined an ambitious agenda of tariffs, sweeping changes to the federal bureaucracy, and drastic actions to curb crime, but the Washington conventional wisdom is that personnel is policy.

TRUMPISM 2.0: HOW REALISTIC IS DONALD TRUMP’S 2024 PLATFORM

“It’s never really been decided whether personality or populism was the bigger draw for Trump,” said a Republican strategist who requested anonymity to speak candidly about the former president. “Maybe that will be decided next year.”

Those close to Trump believe he now possesses a better understanding of the need to staff an administration with like-minded people. “The federal government isn’t the Trump Organization,” a second veteran GOP operative said. “They are not employees and subordinates in the same way that President Trump is accustomed to.”

Trump has publicly emphasized the need for greater loyalty among his political appointees. He has also acknowledged there was room for improvement in his hiring.

“We had some great people, I had great people,” Trump told Tucker Carlson. “We’ll have even better people if we do this because now I know Washington. Before I didn’t know Washington.”

“But guys like [former Attorney General] Bill Barr were terrible,” Trump continued. “I would say Bushies. I say that with respect to the Bush family, but they were Bushies and it just doesn’t work out for us.”

Even these concessions raise an important question: Is Trump going to define who is a fit in a new administration by policy alignment or by their views on subjects like the 2020 election, which he has continued to maintain was “rigged” and stolen from him?

“There were people loyal to Trump, people who agreed with Trump, and people who were competent,” a veteran of the administration said of Trump’s first-term team. “There weren’t many who were all three.”

When talking about who might be part of a second Trump administration, a few names consistently come up. Stephen Miller, the immigration-focused adviser who came to the White House from Jeff Sessions’s Senate office and who has since founded America First Legal. Russ Vought, a former head of the Trump Office of Management and Budget, similarly started the Center for Renewing America.

These groups, like Brooke Rollins’s America First Policy Institute and the Jim DeMint-founded Conservative Partnership Institute, have been incubators of ideas from which Trump World draws. Even the Heritage Foundation, long a source of policy ammunition for Republican administrations, has moved in a more populist direction under the leadership of Kevin Roberts.

Many loyalists from the first Trump term could be found working for him a second time: social media ace Dan Scavino, body man turned personnel director John McEntee, national security officials Robert O’Brien, Richard Grenell, Kash Patel, and John Ratcliffe would likely be on the list. Former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi defended Trump during his first impeachment trial and has remained close to him.

But Trump’s legal challenges have ensnared some of those who might have otherwise been enlisted again. This includes former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, trade policy guru Peter Navarro, and former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark. Meadows and Clark have both been indicted along with Trump in the Fulton County Georgia RICO case. Navarro was convicted of contempt of Congress for defying the Jan. 6 select committee’s subpoenas, though he has vowed to appeal.

“Everybody in that frigging White House that I went in with on 2017, January, is facing massive legal bills and possible prison time because these SOBs want to keep Trump out of the White House, Navarro told Newsmax.

The Biden campaign blasts “MAGA Republicans” at every opportunity, including in a speech by the president Thursday denouncing “MAGAnomics.” While this messaging originated in a Biden White House focus group, the attacks largely resemble traditional lines about Republicans cutting taxes and entitlement spending with some more novel talk about threats to democracy included.

Personnel was a huge problem in the first Trump administration. There was high turnover and frequent infighting. There were ideological disagreements, with a mix of populists, older-line movement conservatives, and the “Bushies” Trump alluded to in his Carlson interview. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump were centrists by inclination.

As members of Trump’s family, they outlasted populist Steve Bannon. Economic adviser Gary Cohn was described as being part of a clique of “New York Democrats” inside the White House.Trump broke with Sessions, who roaded-tested a lot of Trumpist policies in the Senate, in the same acrimonious fashion he later did Barr.

The movement conservatives and “Bushies” were often more experienced in government than the populist upstarts, which meant they often won internal fights. There was also a desire to heal rifts from the contentious Republican primaries, which led to the prioritization of policy goals Trump shared with the GOP congressional leadership, like judges and tax cuts, over the border wall or infrastructure.

“Infrastructure Week” became a punchline in the Trump White House while much of the shared GOP agenda was enacted. But in a press conference after announcing his retirement from the Senate, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) told reporters that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and former House Speaker Paul Ryan deserved credit for the conservative Supreme Court majority and the tax cuts, respectively, rather than Trump.

McConnell and Trump are no longer on a speaking basis. Ryan left Congress and has called himself “Never Again Trump.”

Trump’s former Vice President Mike Pence is not only running against him for the 2024 nomination but has increasingly spoken out against Trump-era changes to the GOP. “Today,” Pence said in what was billed as a major speech, “a populist movement is rising in the Republican Party. This growing faction would substitute our faith in limited government and traditional values for an agenda stitched together by little else than personal grievances and performative outrage.”

Some of these disagreements still exist inside Trump’s orbit today. His supply-side allies like Art Laffer and Larry Kudlow are pushing for more and deeper tax cuts rather than tariff hikes. Others may have been alleviated. Kushner and Ivanka are not active in the 2024 Trump campaign, while the more conservative Donald Trump Jr. and daughter-in-law Lara Trump remain fixtures.

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What ultimately matters most is who Trump wishes to appoint and how invested he remains in their policy portfolios.

That as much as the 2024 Republican presidential primaries is a process that still may need to play itself out.