EMILY: This is Emily (ph).
ARLO: And Arlo (ph), in St. Louis, Missouri.
EMILY: I’ve been listening to the NPR POLITICS PODCAST every single day since some time in 2019.
ARLO: This podcast was recorded at…
MILES PARKS, HOST:
1:05 p.m. on Wednesday, November 20, 2024.
EMILY: Things may have changed by the time you hear it, but I’ll still be listening every single day, sometimes with my buddy Arlo. Thanks so much for all you do, NPR POLITICS PODCAST team.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE BIGTOP ORCHESTRA’S “TEETER BOARD: FOLIES BERGERE (MARCH AND TWO-STEP)”)
TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: That is so sweet.
PARKS: That is so nice. We have been on quite a journey since 2019.
KEITH: And the journey continues.
PARKS: (Laughter) Hey there. It’s the NPR POLITICS PODCAST. I’m Miles Parks. I cover voting.
KEITH: I’m Tamara Keith. I cover the White House.
RON ELVING, BYLINE: And I’m Ron Elving, editor correspondent.
PARKS: And today on the show, the presidential transition. It is a bit more complicated than Joe Biden just tossing the keys over to Donald Trump. Tam, you have done a lot of reporting on this period, and I’m hoping we can just talk through it. So there’s all this high-profile stuff happening basically every day right now, with, you know, nominees being named. But there’s a lot going on behind the scenes as well. Can you tell us a little bit about what this process looks like?
KEITH: So it begins in the summer, when you don’t know who will be president, but the White House, the incoming administration begins making preparations for that handoff. And the nominees for the Democratic and Republican parties stand up transition teams and begin preparing to take power. And that includes, in theory, vetting potential cabinet members, just making plans for the presidency.
PARKS: But your reporting in the last couple of weeks has found that the Trump transition team for this second go-around has not done what is considered – right? – a pretty critical thing when it comes to making this process kind of a smooth transition. Can you talk about that?
KEITH: I don’t want people’s eyes to glaze over here, but this all comes down to a memorandum of understanding – or actually three of them. One is with the General Services Administration. That gives the transition access to office space, government email accounts. Then there is a memorandum of understanding with the White House, and that’s a really important one. It essentially would allow various government agencies to talk to the Trump transition. You know, they don’t have the controls yet, but they’re able to get briefings, particularly at the national security level. They’re able to get briefings on things of critical importance.
And then there’s a third – it’s with the Department of Justice – and it allows the FBI to conduct background checks on cabinet picks, subcabinet picks, people who would work in the administration. And those aren’t happening right now because, as far as we know, it hasn’t been signed. And I have reached out to the Trump transition. They have not gotten back to me with answers to my specific questions. But I will say, right after the election, they told us that they weren’t ruling out signing these, but that they were still working through the process.
PARKS: Ron, I wonder what your takeaway from hearing Tam’s reporting here is. I mean, is this normally something that kind of has a level of rockiness to it? Or has this traditionally been a fairly smooth handoff?
ELVING: It takes a bit of memory to get back to what usual looks like…
(LAUGHTER)
KEITH: Yeah.
ELVING: …Because we’ve had a lot of rocky transitions lately. Four years ago, it was up in the air who had won the presidential election, at least in the mind of Donald Trump, and therefore in the mind of many of the people in his administration. Now, some of the stuff on the ground level went forward, but a lot of the high-profile people in the first administration of Donald Trump continued to deny that he had lost the election, including the president at that time, Trump himself. So that made that transition very difficult.
In 2000 there was a big question as to who had won. Very hard to go forward when you don’t know who the president is going to be, and that took five weeks before the Supreme Court essentially decided it. So when you go all the way back, yeah, there was more of a spirit of cooperation, peaceful transfer of power and so on, but it’s been a long time.
PARKS: I do want to ask you, Tam, though. I feel like there has been this sense, since Trump won the election, that Trump learned a lot from the first go-around in a bunch of different aspects of his presidency, and that he was going to hit the ground running here in round No. 2. What you’re saying, I guess, about this transition being a little bit rocky so far, I guess I wonder just how that squares with this notion that they have taken all these lessons from 2016 because the transition then was kind of rocky as well.
KEITH: Right. I think that there is, like, a real conflict there because they did learn a lot. And they are moving incredibly fast, much faster than he did last time around, in announcing the people he wants to be in his cabinet. But when you get below the surface, it’s not clear that they aren’t going to make the same mistakes in different ways. And let me try to explain that. Chris Christie was the transition chief for the first Trump administration. He had a staff, he signed all of those memoranda of understanding that we’re talking about, and then he was summarily fired. His binders full of recommendations were, you know, basically kindling, and the Trump team started anew, losing all of that work.
Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, was actually on a Council on Foreign Relations Zoom call yesterday that I monitored, and he was asked about this. Like, do you think this time is going to be any different? And he gave this anecdote about a conversation he had with Trump during the first campaign.
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CHRIS CHRISTIE: He says to me, Chris, I know you’re serious about this transition stuff, but I don’t want you to spend too much time on it because, look, you and I are both so smart. He said that we could leave the victory party on election night two or three hours early and get the whole transition done. I don’t think he feels any differently today. He’s not right, and he wasn’t right then.
KEITH: So the fear that I hear from people, including Christie, others who specialize in transitions – their concern is that because the Trump transition didn’t sign these documents, they aren’t doing FBI vetting of their cabinet picks at this point, that at some point they’re just not going to have their people in place.
PARKS: Ron, what do you make of this question of whether Trump has kind of learned anything from the first go-around, based on what we’re seeing in this transition time?
ELVING: It does seem as though he has inverted the mistakes of 2016. Arguably, some people have reported, he was somewhat surprised when he won in 2016. And he did seem to have let teams of people get started, but then he fired Chris Christie just shortly after the Election Day. And he replaced him with Mike Pence. But he did not bring out his cabinet picks very quickly at all. In fact, the major ones – for State and for the Department of Treasury and Interior and so on – were all well after Thanksgiving, some not until January, believe it or not, and quite a few of them were in December. So that seemed to have gone fairly slowly, but there was a fair amount of cooperation that had gone on, as Tam says, below that particular level.
The exception, the people he named first – that Trump named first for his first term – were Jeff Sessions, who came right out of the box, were just about the first one he named, and Betsy DeVos. And you could say that those were, well, somewhat ill-fated choices. He fired Jeff Sessions two years later. And Betsy DeVos was the only one of his first-term nominations who only got a tie vote in the Senate, had to be broken by Pence to break the tie in the Senate.
KEITH: The lesson Trump learned was that he shouldn’t pick people who others say are good, that make people feel comfortable. He should just pick people who he knows will be loyal to him, will do what he wants them to do. That was the lesson. The lesson wasn’t about any of the sort of transition process. And, in fact, it’s possible that the lesson he took – and we don’t know yet because we are still early in the process. It could be the lesson that he learned is, gosh, all that procedural, technical stuff and ethics agreements and background checks, all of that was just a giant pain.
PARKS: All right. Let’s take a quick break, and when we come back, I want to talk about what this means for the United States.
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PARKS: And we’re back. The federal government is huge and has a huge number of political appointees and people who would theoretically be involved in this process, who are not just, like, the top headline names.
ELVING: That’s right, there are scores of them – more than scores. Hundreds of people whose nominations need to be confirmed by the Senate. But the focus is going to be on the few that are going to be controversial. The Senate is probably going to deal with most of the rest in batch form. They’re not going to spend weeks having confirmation hearings about every single one of them. But the focus is going to be primarily on this fast and furious release of four that Trump had to know were going to be somewhat controversial. There may be some others coming.
Here are the people that we’re talking about. The first one was Pete Hegseth to be the secretary of defense. Then we got Tulsi Gabbard, who is a former member of Congress and a Democrat. But she has been named to be the director of national intelligence. Then you got Matt Gaetz, who may still be the headline in all of this, as the attorney general nominee. And then finally, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
I suspect, I don’t know if it’s going to be Matt Gaetz or if it’s going to be Tulsi Gabbard, but there’s probably going to be a certain amount of desire on the part of at least a few Republicans to raise a flag. So we don’t really have a precedent for a president coming out like this with a flurry of challenging appointments of this nature. We’re going to have to see how much they actually are willing to divulge without a memorandum of understanding. We’re going to have to see how much the Senate committee might – each of the Senate committees of jurisdiction might insist upon.
PARKS: Trump is showing this willingness to kind of push ahead with these very controversial nominees and at this point without these MOUs. Tam, is there precedent for kind of flouting this traditional part of the transition? And what would actually happen if they just were to choose not to sign these things?
KEITH: I’ve talked to experts who are following this, and yes, these things are required by law or described in law. They aren’t purely norms. But there isn’t really an enforcement mechanism. No matter whether these get signed or not, Donald Trump becomes president on January 20. And then it will be his Justice Department, and no MOU is needed. The question is will the Senate say, we still want these background checks, we still are going to require this ethics paperwork? Or are they going to say, well, we have enough and we can vote? That’s where the real pressure point is ultimately going to be.
And, you know, why do these ethics agreements matter? Well, they’re actually there to protect both the American people and the equities of the American people, but primarily to protect the people taking on these very big jobs, because there are laws against conflict of interest or putting your own interests above the United States. You know, personally profiting, for instance, from your work in the government. And that’s why that exists. But in a Trump administration, I’ve talked to people who say, is the Trump Justice Department really going to be concerned and going after ethics issues? Maybe not. Because Trump, although he nodded to the idea of divesting in his first term, he didn’t actually really divest from his business interests. And he has already said, for instance, that he’s not selling his stock in Truth Social.
PARKS: It does make me wonder, Ron, how much we’re just going to end up talking about – whether it’s norms. I’m just having so many flashbacks from the 2017, 2018 era of how much – whether it’s talking about norms or talking about the kind of nitty-gritty aspects of bureaucracy that Trump, in some cases, just doesn’t seem all that interested in.
ELVING: He’s not. And I think he has in the past tried to de-emphasize his lack of interest in that and show a certain amount of respect for it, but those days seem to be in the past. He’s not facing the voters again. He has before him the prospect of a unified government that is very much in his train. They do see themselves as owing their jobs largely to Donald Trump – not that he was necessary to their election in this most recent election, but that he would be necessary to their next election.
So whether you’re a House member running in just two years or a senator looking down the pike, you know that if you buck Donald Trump on any of this stuff – whether it’s MOUs or things of that nature, or voting against one of his nominees for his cabinet – you can count on having a challenge in your next primary from a more Trump-loyal Republican who will run against you for your seat. And that at a minimum will cost you a great deal of money and a great deal of time and make you more vulnerable come November. That’s a big, big sword of Damocles over all these senators.
PARKS: Well, we are two months away from Inauguration Day. Tam, what are you watching for next, as this transition kind of keeps rolling on?
KEITH: It is possible that these forms could get signed, that these agreements could get signed, so I’m definitely watching for that. I’m watching members of the Biden administration speak in increasingly urgent terms about their desire to have a smooth transfer of power. And they are speaking about it in such a way that it is like they are trying to will it into existence. I’m watching to see if ultimately the Trump team does sign the paperwork, does begin these processes and that, you know, maybe this moment of alarm will pass, or maybe it will become the norm. I don’t know.
PARKS: All right, well, let’s leave it there for today. I’m Miles Parks. I cover voting.
KEITH: I’m Tamara Keith. I cover the White House.
ELVING: And I’m Ron Elving, editor correspondent.
PARKS: And thank you for listening to the NPR POLITICS PODCAST.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE BIGTOP ORCHESTRA’S “TEETER BOARD: FOLIES BERGERE (MARCH AND TWO-STEP)”)
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