WASHINGTON — Donald Trump arrived in Washington the day before his inauguration as the nation’s 45th president in a swirl of cinematic pageantry but facing serious questions about whether his chaotic transition has left critical parts of the government dangerously short-handed.
Trump will be sworn in at noon on Friday (midnight in Bangkok), but his team was still scrambling to fill key administration posts when he got here on Thursday, announcing last-minute plans to retain 50 essential State Department and national security officials currently working in the Obama administration to ensure “continuity of government,” according to Sean Spicer, the incoming White House press secretary.
The furious final staff preparations included designating Thomas A Shannon Jr, an Obama appointee, as the acting secretary of state, pending the expected confirmation of Rex W Tillerson.
As of Thursday, only two of Trump’s 15 cabinet nominees -- John F Kelly, to head the Department of Homeland Security, and his nominee for defence secretary, Gen James N. Mattis -- had been approved by congressional committees and were close to assuming their posts.
In all, Trump has named only 29 of his 660 executive department appointments, according to the Partnership for Public Service, which has been tracking the process. That is a pace far slower than recent predecessors, falling far short of the schedule originally outlined by Gov Chris Christie of New Jersey, who was Trump’s transition director before Trump ousted him 10 weeks ago.
None of this seemed to bother Trump. After arriving from New York, the president-elect trod solemnly down red-carpeted stairs from a government plane at Joint Base Andrews with his wife, Melania, then sped off to deliver a speech at a reception held at his ornate new hotel near the White House. There, he declared, with typical bluster, that his cabinet nominees had “by far the highest IQ of any cabinet assembled.”
Later, he laid a wreath at Arlington National Cemetery and attended his Lincoln Memorial inaugural concert, saying that one had never been held there before even though many similar events have taken place in front of the iconic seated statue of the 16th president.
“Tomorrow seems to be the big one,” Trump told a black-tie dinner crowd at Washington’s stately Union Station on Thursday night, referring to his inauguration. In off-the-cuff remarks, he teased his incoming chief of staff, Reince Priebus, for having a difficult-to-pronounce name, and chided fundraisers who did not contribute to his campaign until after he won. He also described his political opponents as “going crazy” over his cabinet selections.
Trump campaigned on a platform of shaking up Washington, but his pomp-and-circumstance arrival began with two jarring concessions to a city he may not inhabit full time: This week, he was forced to abandon his cherished “Trump” 757 for an Air Force jet, and, according to people close to the transition, he has traded in his Android phone for a secure, encrypted device approved by the Secret Service with a new number that few people possess.
The official rationale was security. But some of Trump’s new aides, who have often been blindsided when a reporter, outside adviser or officeseeker dialed the president-elect directly, expressed relief. Several of them, however, expect the new president to satisfy his compulsion for continuous communication by calling outsiders and by tramping from office to office in search of gossip and sounding boards.
Trump’s management style places unique strains on his top advisers, including Priebus, who is stepping into what is traditionally a gatekeeper’s post that has involved restricting the flow of people and paper to the Oval Office.
Priebus is navigating a West Wing crowded with powerful figures in their own right, including the president-elect’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who will always outweigh anyone else regardless of title; the chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon; the counselor Kellyanne Conway; Vice President-elect Mike Pence; and the economic adviser Gary Cohn, the blunt former Goldman Sachs executive who is rising fast in Trump’s circle.
In a conference call with incoming staff this week, Priebus informed midlevel aides that they should avoid interacting with Trump without his permission, that they were prohibited from talking to the news media, and that they should carefully restrict their social media posts, according to two people with knowledge of the call.
On Thursday, aides released names of more than a dozen appointments to the White House staff. Most of them had worked for Priebus at the RNC. Trump also named a friend, Woody Johnson, the owner of the New York Jets, to be ambassador to Britain.
Thursday’s hires notwithstanding, the halting pace of transition has alarmed senior Obama administration officials and some Republican lawmakers, who have repeatedly complained about the Trump team’s unwillingness to coordinate transition planning with them.
Since his election on Nov 8, Trump has had little interest in the minutiae of his transition, saying it was “bad karma” to get too involved, according to a person who spoke with him at the time. At one point, he wanted to halt the planning altogether, out of superstition, the person said.
“In 21 years of covering the State Department and in eight years of serving there, I’ve seen rocky transitions and experienced what feels like a hostile takeover, but I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Strobe Talbott, the president of the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank, and a former journalist and Bill Clinton administration official.
For weeks, transition officials and people close to the process have suggested that the delays are the fault of Christie, accusing him of botching the preparations during the eight-month transition.
But copies of Christie’s plan, some of which were reviewed by The New York Times, were circulated in weekly installments to the transition team before his ouster and were discussed at weekly meetings. They revealed thorough blueprints on a range of core planning issues, from the pace of the transition to what the president-elect’s daily schedule should look like, even 100-day and 200-day plans of action.
Each sheet detailing the “landing teams” arriving at agencies had a notation on which advisers had weighed in on the selections.
On the list the day of the election was a senate nomination and confirmation plan, a first-100-days agenda to take to congress, members of landing teams and their status and interest in jobs at key departments, and a suggested schedule for Trump that included the presidential daily briefing each day and key meetings.
The work was not fully completed; some pages, such as the landing team list for the Small Business Administration, were half-filled and had no input from senior advisers. The work was hobbled by the concern that most Republican policy officials had about working for their nominee.
And Christie’s decision to put some of his own top allies on lists for prime jobs did not wear well with Trump’s team.
Still, there was thought put into the transition and what would come next, including a draft of dozens of executive orders and recommendations for a communications plan to avoid “idle” time in the president-elect’s schedule that the news media would use to describe him as unfocused. There were proposed themes for each week, to lend a “cadence” to the transition.
The suggested schedule called for completing cabinet appointments by the first week of December, taking care of the undersecretaries and deputies the second week, and naming ambassadors by the third week, just before the holidays.