Former President Donald Trump on Friday announced the leaders of a transition team tasked with overseeing key personnel choices and preparing his policy playbook should he return to the White House.
Linda McMahon, a former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment who was once Trump’s administrator of the Small Business Administration, and Howard Lutnick, the CEO of financial services giant Cantor Fitzgerald, are set to co-chair the transition. Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), and his sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. are set to serve as honorary chairs.
Trump Jr. recently said he wanted “veto” power over top appointments in his father’s second administration.
“I don’t want to pick a single person for a position of power. All I want to do is block the guys that would be a disaster,” he said in a July interview with Axios. “I want to block the liars. I want to block the guys that are, you know, pretending they’re with you.”
McMahon is a top Donald Trump donor; Lutnick recently hosted a Hamptons fundraiser for him in New York that raked in $15 million.
“The 2024 GOP Platform to Make America Great Again is a forward-looking agenda that will deliver safety, prosperity and freedom for the American people,” Trump said in Friday’s announcement. “My administration will deliver on these bold promises.”
His selection comes notably late in the presidential campaign, as HuffPost previously reported. When Trump sought to take the White House in 2016, his campaign had a formal transition team in place by June 1.
The delay this time around points to the possibility that he plans to outsource the actual transition to Project 2025, a vast right-wing blueprint for transforming the federal government into a MAGA policy factory. One aspect of Project 2025 policy involves recruiting and training hundreds of Trump loyalists to replace career civil servants and overwhelm bureaucratic obstacles to the more radical elements of his agenda.
The Republican nominee’s campaign denies that he plans to implement Project 2025 and claims that the GOP platform, which the party releases every four years at its nominating convention, is the real playbook for a second Trump presidency.
“I know nothing about Project 2025,” the former president wrote last month on his Truth Social site.
However, Trump in 2022 took a private flight with Kevin Roberts, who serves as president of The Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank leading Project 2025. Their destination was a Heritage event where Trump appeared to personally endorse the group’s work.
“They’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do,” Trump told the audience, as The Washington Post reported.
Hours of Project 2025 training videos obtained by ProPublica include guidance for first-time federal officials, such as how to avoid leaving a paper trail for outside activists and congressional watchdogs to follow.
Russell Vought, a close Trump ally who oversaw the writing of the GOP platform on behalf of the Trump campaign, is also a key author of Project 2025. Vought, in a recent conversation aired by CNN that featured two British journalists posing as relatives of a conservative donor, claimed Trump is merely “distancing himself from a brand.”
“He’s raised money for our organization, he’s blessed it … he’s very supportive of what we do,” Vought said.