Transition 2025: Donald Trump Won the Presidency. Now He Needs to Staff His Administration

Donald Trump won a clear victory in the 2024 presidential election. He now has ten weeks to put together his administration.

The presidential transition process in the United States stands almost alone among democracies. Most democratic governments move quickly to install new leaders once they are elected. In the United Kingdom, for example, the new prime minister takes office the morning after the election. The United States waits two-and-a-half months.

But the U.S. presidential transition differs from other democracies in a second important way. In most democracies, only the most senior officials leave alongside the departing leader. Most of the government remains behind. When U.S. presidents depart, however, not only does the White House staff depart with them, but so do cabinet secretaries, deputy secretaries, under secretaries, and assistant secretaries as well—along with a host of political appointees.

So Trump will need to decide in the coming weeks who will fill hundreds of positions on the White House staff, as well as the roughly 1,300 government positions that require Senate confirmation and the more than two thousand political appointees who will support them. His task on the latter score will be made easier by the fact that Republicans will control the new Senate that convenes on January 3. But even so, the confirmation process works slowly. Fully staffing the government will take until summer. The result is that the Trump administration, like all of its predecessors, will be short-handed at the start and rely heavily on appointed White House staff in its early days. Those picks do not require Senate confirmation.

Speculation abounds about whom Trump will select to staff him in the White House and lead the various cabinet agencies. Those choices matter because in Washington, DC, people are policy. That is especially true for issues that a president does not have time to oversee personally. Trump’s choices back in 2017 leaned toward individuals like General James Mattis and Rex Tillerson who did not share his world view. Trump likely will avoid that mistake the second time around. The open question, besides specific appointments, is how well Trump’s appointees will work together. Some presidential teams are collegial. The George H.W. Bush administration is perhaps the best example. Others, like Ronald Reagan’s national security team, expended considerable energy on political infighting.

Trump’s 2017 transition was a bumpy affair, in part because he fired the head of his transition effort, Chris Christie, immediately after the 2016 election and threw out the work he and his team had done. Trump has none nothing similar this time around; he no doubt wants a smooth transition. But it could still be bumpy.

One challenge is that the world situation is more dangerous than it has been in decades. Events could push the Biden administration to make decisions that the Trump team will see as tying their hands. To note just one ongoing tense situation, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei vowed earlier this month that Iran will deliver “a crushing response” against Israel and the United States for Israel’s retaliatory attack last month. The bevy of news stories that the Biden administration is seeking to “Trump-proof” its policy initiatives can further fuel distrust between the two camps and complicate a coordinated transition.

A second challenge reflects the fact that presidential transitions are a delicate dance. The outgoing president is the only person charged with the powers of the office. But presidents-elect and members of their team can be tempted to get a head start on their agenda. Trump experienced this problem eight years ago when his pick for national security advisor, Michael Flynn, sought to meddle in U.S. policy toward Russia in the waning days of the Obama administration. Moreover, Trump said repeatedly on the campaign trail this time around that he will settle the war in Ukraine before he takes office. The Biden administration will stress that the United States has only one president at a time and that president until noon next January 20 is Joe Biden. But any pronouncement Trump makes, whether public or private, could be read as signaling that he is speaking on behalf of the United States.

A third possible source of turbulence is that Trump has thus far declined to participate in the formal transition process created by the Presidential Transition Act. Much of the work of a transition can be done outside that process. But one constraint that cannot be evaded is security clearances. Until the formal process begins, the outgoing Biden team will be limited on how it coordinates with Trump’s team because they must abide by the laws on sharing classified information. Incomplete communication will only compound the handoff problems that are inevitable when any administration transitions to another. As the saying goes, it is hard to know where you are going if you do not know where you have been.

A final source of turbulence could come after the transition process formally ends on January 20. Trump has said he will revive Schedule F, a plan to revamp the federal civil service. The move would allow him to fire hundreds, if not thousands, of career civil servants. Their unions would challenge the move in the courts. They are almost certain to lose, however. The personnel turnover would see the loss of institutional memory and likely undermine bureaucratic morale and performance.

All of this is why Ivo Daalder and I wrote four years ago that U.S. presidential transitions are treacherous. At ten weeks in length, they “are too long to be reassuring, too short to thorough, but just the right length to cause trouble.” Let’s hope that whatever troubles arise this time around are minor and quickly forgotten.

The Vote

While it was clear by late Tuesday night that Trump was returning to the White House, many states are still counting ballots. Both Arizona and Nevada have yet to be called. Complete election results won’t be available until next month, which is nothing new. Trump looks on track to win the popular vote. That would make him only the second Republican candidate since 1988 to win a majority of the popular vote, and the first since George W. Bush in 2004. Trump appears to have improved his vote totals in every state but Utah and Washington. Trump’s current 3.0 percentage point lead is likely to shrink given that California still has millions of votes to count. But assuming it holds, his popular vote victory would rank as the fifth largest in the last eight elections. Bill Clinton (a 9.8 percentage point victory in 1996), Barack Obama (7.2 points in 2008 and 3.9 points in 2000), and Joe Biden (4.5 points in 2020) all had larger popular vote victories.

Assuming Trump wins Arizona and Nevada, which seems likely, he will end up with 312 electoral votes. That tops the 306 electoral votes Biden won in 2020, and the 304 Trump won in 2016. But it is just the fourth-best performance in the last eight presidential races. Bill Clinton won 379 electoral votes in 1996, and Barack Obama won 365 in 2008 and 332 in 2012.

So although no doubts surround Trump’s victory, he did not win in a landslide. But expect him to govern as if he did.

Helping Trump on that score is the fact that he appears to have hit the election trifecta. Not only did he win the White House, but Republicans will also take control of the Senate in January and likely the House as well. With the Arizona and Nevada Senate races yet to be called, Republicans will hold at least fifty-three seats in the new Senate. This is short of the magic sixty-seat mark needed to avoid filibusters, giving the Democratic senators some leverage.

As for the House, Republicans had won 211 seats as of this morning, while Democrats have won 199, with twenty-five races yet to be called. Majority control requires 218 seats. Whoever wins the majority will have a slim margin to work with. The outgoing Congress showed just how difficult it can be to run the House when a few defections can scuttle a working legislative majority. A slim margin of control also means that deaths, illness, retirements, and defections can push the majority party into the minority. 

Although vote counting will continue in some states for several more days, voter turnout will likely rival the modern record of 66 percent set in 2020. That said, with millions more votes yet to be counted, it is too early to draw definitive conclusions about the electorate. That said, early voting looks like it is here to stay. Some eighty-four million Americans voted early this year. That is more than half the total turnout four years ago. 

What Trump Is Saying

Trump declared victory in a twenty-five-minute speech that he delivered from Mar-a-Lago at 2:30 a.m. on Wednesday. He pledged to “govern by a simple motto: Promises made, promises kept.

Trump touched briefly upon immigration and defense policy. On the former, he pledged “to seal up those borders and then let people come back in. We want people to come in, but they have to come in legally.” On the latter, he said: “We want a strong and powerful military, and ideally, we don’t have to use it. As you know, we had no wars for four years, except we defeated ISIS in record time.” Trump did not say anything about China, Ukraine, or the Middle East. He will need to say a lot about all three after he takes the oath of office.

Harris called Trump on Wednesday to congratulate him on his victory. She then gave her concession speech on the campus of her alma mater, Howard University, in Washington, DC.

While conceding the election result, she stressed that “I do not concede the fight that fueled this campaign—the fight: the fight for freedom, for opportunity, for fairness, and the dignity of all people. A fight for the ideals at the heart of our nation, the ideals that reflect America at our best. That is a fight I will never give up.”

What the Biden Administration Is Doing

The Biden team is working to get $6 billion of security assistance to Ukraine before Inauguration Day. Whether they will succeed is an open question. As Politico notes: “It normally takes months for munitions and equipment to get to Ukraine after an aid package is announced, so anything rolled out in the coming weeks would likely not fully arrive until well into the Trump administration, and the next commander in chief could halt the shipments before they’re on the ground.”

Trump’s Appointments

Trump named Susie Wiles last night to be his chief of staff. The sixty-seven-year-old grandmother, who helped her father, the former NFL placekicker and announcer Pat Summerall, stop drinking, has led Trump’s political operation since 2021. She comes out of Florida politics and previously worked for Senator Rick Scott and Governor Ron Desantis. She will be the first woman to be chief of staff. She will have a tough job. Trump had four different chiefs of staff during his first term.

What the Pundits Are Writing

Peter Feaver, who served in the George W. Bush administration assessed what Trump’s foreign policy is likely to look like. He argues that two things are clear: “First…personnel will shape policy, and various factions will jockey for influence….. This time around, however, the more extreme factions will have the upper hand….. Second, the essence of Trump’s approach to foreign policy—naked transactionalism—remains unchanged. But the context in which he will try to carry out his idiosyncratic form of dealmaking has changed dramatically: the world today is a far more dangerous place than it was during his first term.”

Politico asked its reporters to preview what to expect from his second term. The topics they covered included immigration, tariffs, China, the Middle East, Ukraine, and climate.

Foreign Affairs asked acclaimed historian Stephen Kotkin to assess what Trump’s election means for the future of U.S. power. Like many analysts, Kotkin stressed that Trump’s presidency could go in different ways. On the one hand, Trump might be “a gift” to China and Russia, “because he doesn’t like alliances, or at least that’s what he says: allies are freeloaders….. So Trump may accelerate what Moscow and Beijing see as that self-weakening trend. But he’s unpredictable. They may get the opposite. And they have revealed a lot of their own weaknesses and poor decision-making, to put it mildly.”

The Presidential Certification Schedule

The deadline for governors to submit their state’s certificate of ascertainment, which certifies the results of the presidential election in their state and lists their state’s slate of electors, is in thirty-three days (December 11, 2024).

Electors meet in each state and the District of Columbia to cast their votes for president and vice president in thirty-nine days (December 17, 2024).

The 119^th Congress is sworn into office in fifth-six days (January 3, 2025).

The U.S. Congress certifies the results of the 2024 presidential election in fifty-nine days (January 6, 2025)

Inauguration Day is in seventy-three days (January 20, 2025).

Oscar Berry assisted in the preparation of this post.