This suggests a great deal of preparation before Trump’s return to the White House. A team of lawyers and policy experts developed a plan for a successful second administration long before Trump was re-elected. They prepared personnel rosters for key appointments, crafted policy manuals aligned to the president’s philosophy, and drafted preliminary executive orders to kickstart his policy agenda. Chris Liddell, an expert on presidential transitions and former deputy chief of staff to the president, was involved in this effort.
I’ve worked in the private sector for most of my career, but I had a chance to work on both the incoming and outgoing transitions for President Trump. Years before, I worked on the Romney transition planning. I like institutional transformations, and so I wrote a manual, if you like, about the steps to set up the U.S. government.
There are some obvious differences with the private sector, but any transition happens in three phases: planning; transition; and post-transition (early phase). The length of those phases differs depending on whether it’s a parliamentary or presidential system, but the basic concepts are the same. To get off to a fast start—and you should, because those are your best days—you want to manage the transition to that new staff as effectively as possible.
Typically, we think of the first “100 days,” or just over three months, as being enough to get something done and be impactful. That timeframe was conceived in the FDR administration. Another metric is the first 200 days, which gets you through to the August recess. I talk about 200 days as being a more important metric for the new administration. In contrast, an incoming CEO spends his first 100 days talking to people and listening rather than acting and implementing their plan.
In the private sector, there’s a clear sense of what you are trying to achieve. The most successful CEOs have a strong mission or vision in mind. In the president’s case, it’s typically the same but the institutional structure you establish will determine whether you achieve this. The White House can be a mess of multiplier force—people come together for a brief period of time, with different personalities and different objectives. The president needs a White House with a clear vision. Consider James Baker, for example. He is often considered the best chief of staff, though he wasn’t originally part of Reagan’s team. That worked well but I think the core of the president’s team needs to have been part of the “year zero” team, where they would have ironed out the kinks before it’s time to govern. You don’t want a group of newcomers working out their dynamics on-the-job in the first 100 days.
In a typical second term, you’ve already figured out the office, so the big challenge is re-invigorating your platform and trying to recreate the energy and dynamism of your first term. Many second-term presidents struggle with that. They’ve just come off an electoral campaign and now they have to govern, which is exhausting. Also, the second term is often more conservative by nature. There can be a sense that the second term is about consolidating the first, which I think of taking you backward rather than forward. I argue you need to have a forward motion in the second term. Though the second-term president may understand the office very well, they’re possibly lacking the energy and ambition of the first term.
But Trump 2.0 is different. He had such a fast start because he came in with the knowledge of a second term but the energy of a first term. That’s on display right now. Trump has a whole set of new programs. It feels a bit like a first term for him. Most traditional second terms are planned for during the president’s fourth year. Perhaps you’re dealing with a bad mid-term and you’ve been dealing with a combative Congress, and so you’re running a campaign while running the country. If you have a period away like he did, you can reflect on what you want to achieve without the pressure to govern. It can be an advantage because you’ve been able to think deeply about policies and people, without having to deal with the issues of governing.
Yes, any organization should start with the end in mind...
In the presidency, it’s particularly so because crises will come along. External forces are strong. You won’t get the Congress you want. You’ll have personality conflicts on your team. You’ll deal with foreign nations that don’t behave as you want them to. So, you need a laser-like focus on what you want to achieve. Any organization should maintain that focus. “What will your legacy be?” “What will you be known for?” That’s how progress is made—driving toward those goals every day.
Presidents can spend a lot more time communicating if they have the machinery around them. Communication is clearly important but a fast start means delivering results or setting the preconditions to those results. You want your communication machine to be ready when you need the most important thing: getting people to vote for you. This is similar to a public company. They need to communicate to customers, the company, the media—some are better at it than others. But the overall success of the company is what they did.
You get results because someone wakes up every day and pushes the ball forward one foot. Then wakes up the next day and does it again, overcoming the inertia and counterforces that try to push it back a foot. It’s a relentless focus on achieving things, legislatively or otherwise. The president must be able to rely on these people by autopilot. He will see a relatively small number of people on a day-to-day basis, and so he has to rely on them to be able to do the things he wants done when he’s not looking. I describe that notion as goal alignment. The president has 4000 appointees. He’s there for a relatively short amount of time. In each case, he only needs them to do a relatively small number of things. Most agencies or arms of the government cannot do 20 things in 4 years, but they can do 3 or 4 things really well. Your staff’s competence speaks for itself. Loyalty means loyalty to the cause and a general commitment to working with others. They’re all inextricably linked.
I did quite a lot of research before I went into government services. I read a lot about government. I wasn’t particularly shocked but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t different. In the private sector your goals are a lot simpler. Your objectives are somewhat simpler. Your role description is somewhat simple. Government is way less binary, way grayer, there are a lot more people involved, and a lot more time must be spent federating decisions. It’s a more complicated environment. I came to really appreciate how difficult it is to get meaningful change in government.
History is a really good teacher. Read around the topic as much as you can. Depending on the role, read about people who have done that role in the past. Do your basic preliminary work by reading biographies and reading about the job. Read about the context of the role. Talk to people who have done it before, and in the presidential case there is so much resource to digest. Begin preparing, I think, six-to-twelve months in advance. If you read my book and some others you can probably take the first six months off the preparation.
