Some of the president-elect’s appointments were products of patronage. Back in January 2016, South Carolina’s lieutenant governor, Henry McMaster, became the first statewide official in any of the three early-nominating states to endorse Trump. McMaster went all in, traveling with the campaign and becoming close to the future president, never wavering in his support. A few days after the election, Trump called McMaster and said, “Henry, what do you want? Name it.”
McMaster told him he wanted to be governor.
“That’s it?” Trump replied. “Well, that should be easy. You’re already the lieutenant governor!”
McMaster explained that it wasn’t that simple. Elections were uncertain things. The only way to ensure his promotion would be for Nikki Haley to go away. Within days, seemingly out of left field, Trump announced Haley as his pick for ambassador to the United Nations. McMaster was sworn in on January 24.
The only thing that seemed to bother Trump during the transition was the occasional rejection of his job offers. The president-elect felt as though he were making knights of commoners, extending to them a prestige unattainable in other walks of life. In reality, many Republicans who interviewed for administration jobs knew they would be taking pay cuts to work tough, thankless jobs that carried the indelible stigma of serving under President Donald Trump. Most interviewees nonetheless found the fragrance of power too strong to resist. Of those who did not, Ken Blackwell’s rejection of Trump became the stuff of legend.
Formerly the mayor of Cincinnati and the Ohio secretary of state, Blackwell had spent decades as a shot caller in the conservative movement, serving on the boards of the Family Research Council and the National Rifle Association. When Pence took over for Christie, Blackwell jumped in as the head of the domestic transition team. As Trump hunted for a secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Blackwell was a natural fit. He had worked under a previous HUD secretary, Jack Kemp. He was experienced. He was knowledgeable. And he was, well, black. (Diversity was a stated goal in filling many positions, but none more so than at HUD.)
The problem was, Blackwell didn’t want the job. He was knocking on seventy’s door and didn’t need the headache of working in government. When Trump learned of his disinterest, he demanded that Blackwell be summoned to New York. Sitting across from him days later, Trump asked Blackwell to accept the job. Blackwell declined. “So, you’re afraid of the challenge?” Trump asked.
Blackwell said that he wasn’t afraid. He simply wasn’t interested in the position.
“Maybe you don’t have the street credibility we need,” Trump said.
Blackwell arched an eyebrow. “You don’t have to worry about my street credibility.”
“Oh yeah?” Trump replied. He picked up his phone and began dialing. The others in the room, including Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon, exchanged looks. “Hey, I’m trying to kick the tires on a guy from Ohio,” Trump said into the receiver. “I’m wondering if you know him. His name’s Ken Blackwell.”
Everyone heard the voice singing on the other end: “Kennn-aaaaay!” It was Don King, the legendary (and black) boxing promoter.
Blackwell shook his head. “Like I said,” he told Trump, “you don’t have to worry about my street credibility.”
All things told, the transition process was orderly compared to the anarchy of Trump’s campaign. The RNC, flush with Priebus’s longtime staffers, was a natural farm system for mid-level hires. (One of them, twenty-five-year-old Madeleine Westerhout, broke down crying on Election Night, inconsolable over Trump’s victory. To the amusement of her RNC peers, she was later chosen as the president’s executive assistant, and now sits just outside the Oval Office.)
Pence’s ties to the conservative movement, and to so many members of Congress and Republican leaders around the country, were instrumental in filling out the administration. So, too, was a project by the Heritage Foundation years in the making that sought to provide an incoming Republican president with an exhaustive file of ready-made appointees to federal jobs from secretary of defense to White House speechwriter. Heritage, once the mighty engine of the right, had seen its influence wane in recent years. Rumors had circulated about the board’s displeasure with DeMint, who had antagonized many of the think tank’s allies and mismanaged the foundation from the top. The ambitious staffing project bought Heritage some goodwill, but it seemed unlikely to save DeMint’s job.
Any other Republican president might have sent the base into open revolt by tapping a pair of veteran Goldman Sachs executives, Steven Mnuchin and Gary Cohn, for treasury secretary and National Economic Council director, respectively. Yet the rapture of the postelection period, on top of Trump’s promises of hiring “the best people” to help the government run more like a business, bought him plenty of leeway. This was equally true for his eventual secretary of state choice: Exxon-Mobil’s Rex Tillerson, who enjoyed a warm relationship with Russian officials that would traditionally have sent the GOP’s hawks into a tizzy.
There was plenty of slack being cut in part because the new president, aided by Pence, was filling out his roster in ways that were largely energizing to conservatives. Jeff Sessions, the Alabama senator and immigration hard-liner, was picked for attorney general. Rick Perry, the former Texas governor (who’d called Trump “a cancer on conservatism”), was tapped to lead the Energy Department. And Ben Carson, the storied heart surgeon whose political ascent began with a viral rebuke of Obama, ultimately accepted the position at HUD.
The most reassuring hire, for many Trump fans and skeptics alike, was Jim Mattis. The retired four-star Marine general, lauded for his intellect and beloved by his subordinates, was appointed secretary of defense. Nicknamed “Mad Dog” for his array of plucky quotes (“Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet”6), Mattis was better known within the military as a warrior monk. He was married only to the Marine Corps, a general known for taking watch shifts alongside young grunts and requiring moving vans to relocate his vast collection of books.
One hire did give party officials heartburn: Michael Flynn, the retired general who had joined a chant of “Lock her up!” while addressing the GOP convention, would be Trump’s national security adviser. Flynn was qualified on paper, but his temperament and judgment were suspect; in December 2015, he had attended a dinner in Moscow honoring the television network Russia Today (RT), a state-run propaganda outlet. Flynn’s seatmate at the gala dinner? None other than Vladimir Putin.
The most symbolic selection for Trump was his White House chief of staff.
The candidate’s general election victory had been, to paraphrase the young private from Platoon, a child born of two fathers. On the one side, the energy and grassroots support behind Trump’s candidacy owed largely to the base, as embodied by Bannon, the combative former head of Breitbart. On the other side, the infrastructure and organizational support were lent primarily by the party’s establishment, whose avatar was Priebus, the mild-mannered RNC chairman.
The jockeying began no sooner than the race was called. Everyone on the right saw Trump as malleable to their ideas, if only they controlled the flow of information. That job belonged to the chief of staff; the competition to fill it became a proxy war for the soul of Trump’s presidency.