Will Donald Trump’s team be able to Make America Great Again?

President Elect Donald trump wants to make a “Jump Start” with his transition team to get onto to his agenda and fulfil his electoral pledges to be synced with his voter’s support base.

US President Elect Donald Trump wants to make a “Jump Start” by appointing his loyalists in key post of the second administration so that he can take off smoothly in Washington DC riddled with bureaucrats who can shift stands easily as the wind blows.

Trump is considering Marco Rubio for the post of Secretary of State, one of the most important posts in the government, wants to replace Christopher Wray, the director of FBI, even if it means forcing his out, after having appointed Stefanik as the UN Ambassador, Susan Wiles as chief of staff in White House, Stepen Millier as deputy chief of staff, and Lee Lendl as the Environment Secretary.

The much-awaited announcements for the posts of health secretary and economic advisor are likely to go to Robert Kennedy Jr and the world’s richest billionaire Elon Musk
Donald Trump is doing exactly what his sweeping election win entitled him to do by systematically building a governing team in his own hardline MAGA image. What may end up as the modern age’s most right-wing West Wing will target Washington elites and undocumented migrants, seek to shred the regulatory state, and tell the rest of the world that from now on, it is America First.

The shape of Trump’s second administration is emerging from his Mar-a-Lago resort, where he is being feted by club members amid a circus atmosphere enlivened by the presence of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. Each of the president-elect’s new picks for top jobs has been enough to send shudders down liberals’ spines. And that was part of the point., CNN says in a report.
Stephen Miller, last seen in public declaring that “America is for Americans and Americans only” at Trump’s seething Madison Square Garden rally, is expected to be named as White House deputy chief of staff for policy, CNN reported, a position in which he would choreograph mass deportations.

Tom Homan, the pick for “border czar,” sports a gruff persona that is a good fit for a president-elect who loves a tough guy. He played to type Monday by going on Fox News, where he has served for years as a pundit, and warning Democratic governors who try to block deportations “to get the hell out of the way.”

And CNN’s Kaitlan Collins reported that South Dakota Governor. Kristi Noem, who has been a fervent supporter of Trump dating back to his first term, is his pick for Secretary of Homeland Security. Noem is a film star of the MAGA movement and star of conservative media. If confirmed for the role, she would form an uncompromising trio of officials responsible for border enforcement alongside Miller and Homan.

While Trump’s word will be law in the new administration, the president-elect’s national security picks so far suggest a more mainstream Republican approach to foreign policy than those for immigration.

Trump is likely to nominate Marco Rubio as secretary of state, Collins also reported. The Florida senator crudely mocked Trump on the 2016 campaign trail and was seen as the kind of neoconservative whom the president-elect’s fans love to hate. But Rubio has long since converted to Trumpism, and at the Republican National Convention this summer told the nation, “The only way to make America wealthy and safe and strong again is to make Donald J. Trump our president again.” The New York Times first reported rubio’s selection.
Trump’s choice for UN ambassador is House GOP conference chair Elise Stefanik, whose career rocketed after she ditched mainstream conservatism to become one of Trump’s top defenders. “I stand ready to advance President Donald J. Trump’s restoration of America First peace through strength leadership on the world stage on Day One at the United Nations,” the New York Congress member said in a statement.
Sources said Trump asked Florida Rep. Mike Waltz to be National Security Adviser in a move that will send shock waves across the Atlantic given the former Green Beret’s warning this year that “it’s time for allies to invest in their own security” and that US taxpayers had footed “the bill for far too long.”
Rubio, Waltz, and Stefanik are all hardcore China hawks, and their selection offers a clear pointer of how Trump’s policy will develop toward America’s new superpower rival.
The president-elect also tapped former New York Rep. Lee Zeldin to head the Environmental Protection Agency, despite or because of his rock-bottom ratings from progressive green groups while in the House. The last two Democratic presidents have used the EPA’s regulatory powers to try to fight climate change. But Zeldin pledged to implement Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” energy policy and framed his responsibilities as “protecting access to clean air and water,” paraphrasing his new boss’ non sequitur that he uses when asked about global warming.

The one thing the new picks have in common.
Given Trump’s unpredictability, no staff pick is ever certain until it is official. And even then, many staff do not last long. But each selection or anticipated pick so far has one thing in common: Ultra-loyalty to Trump, especially during his indictment-strewn post-presidency. Each person is known for paying the kind of exaggerated homage in television interviews that the president-elect adores. A sense of betrayal often burned in Trump’s first term when members of government prioritized their oath to the Constitution over their fealty to him, as was the case with former FBI chief James Comey and many others.
The drip-drip of top government picks suggests a level of planning and organization absent from Trump’s first transition in 2016 and may reflect the influence of incoming White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, who ran an efficient general election campaign in parallel to the president-elect’s outlandish eruptions at his rallies and on social media. It is far too soon to say, however, whether the current approach will be repeated in the White House. Often during Trump’s first term, he trampled over his agenda by openly feuding with members of his administration on whom he quickly soured.

The likes of Rubio, Waltz, Stefanik, Zeldin, Homan, Noem and especially Miller are anathema to Trump critics who fear that the president-elect will head off in extreme directions. But each of these picks personifies one aspect of the president-elect’s political beliefs and instincts. And their own positions reflect the desire for shakeups in Washington and in US global policy that motivated many of the tens of millions of voters in Trump’s election majority.

Most are also accomplished and – apart from Miller, who is regarded by critics as a hard-core extremist – within the parameters of people typically chosen for administrations. If they are all far to the right, they only parallel the movement of the GOP and its voters during the Trump era.

Rubio, a former presidential candidate, is well known around the world and serves on the Senate Foreign Relations and Intelligence Committees. Stefanik is a Harvard graduate, former George W. Bush West Wing aide and one of the highest-ranking Republican women ever to serve in the House. Waltz, who served multiple combat tours in Afghanistan, the Middle East and Africa, was awarded four bronze stars and worked for Defence Secretaries Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates. Homan, as former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is steeped in border issues, even if his opponents regard his manner as callous. Zeldin is an Army veteran and an ex-Congress member who waged a closer-than-expected bid for New York governor.

Alyssa Farah Griffin, who served as a Trump White House communications director, summed up his selections as far as “people who inarguably have the credentials to be there and you have a sense of what they are going to do.” Griffin, now a CNN commentator who has often criticized Trump, told CNN’s Erin Burnett that the rapidity of her former boss’ government-in-waiting selections struck a contrast with the personnel scramble of his first administration.

How far will Trump go?

Trump’s picks of Miller and Homan suggest there is no stepping back from his vows to launch a massive deportation of undocumented migrants, which was the foundation of the most extreme closing argument of any presidential candidate in recent memory. Homan was asked in a recent interview on CBS’ “60 Minutes” if there was an alternative to separating migrants tagged for deportation from their parents — a policy that caused uproar during the first Trump term. “Of course there is. Families can be deported together,” he said.

Miller was a powerful White House aide in Trump’s first term, authoring much of his most fiery scripted rhetoric as a speechwriter. His hardline ideology was on display at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February when he argued immigration policy was simple. “Seal the border. No illegals in, everyone that is here goes out — that is very straightforward.” Miller added that the next step was to grab undocumented migrants and move them to “large-scale staging grounds” where planes would be waiting.
Yet despite these draconian visions, there’s uncertainty about how far Trump will go in his deportation program and whether it matches his dystopian speeches. Homan, for example, said the idea that there would be “concentration camps” and mass sweeps through neighbourhoods is ridiculous.
The president-elect has the luxury of not running for re-election in 2028, so in theory he has got nothing to lose. But he has sometimes balked at taking steps that might result in extreme unpopularity. Stiff legal challenges that are being drawn up by civil liberties groups and immigrant advocates could, meanwhile, slow deportations. And expelling millions of undocumented migrants could be hugely expensive, could disrupt the labour market, anger big business and complicate supply chains – all of which could hurt the economy and weigh on the future president.
Many Democrats and Republicans could agree on Trump’s vow to start by deporting criminal undocumented migrants — the easiest part of his plan. But the next stages are where the politics could get dicey for Trump. Chad Wolf, a former acting Homeland Security secretary in the first Trump term, appeared to indicate that were still grey areas in the full extent of the president-elect’s intentions but that a far wider enforcement operation would be possible. “It may be a tough political position, but there are criminals here today that aren’t being removed,” Wolf told CNN’s Jake Tapper, complaining that the Biden administration had fallen short in this area.
“This idea that you are going to exempt whole classes of individuals from the law, I don’t think that should be the case,” Wolf said, allowing that there were other mechanisms for workers to come into the US economy legally or for some undocumented migrants to obtain legal status from outside the country if they are married to US citizens.

Trump’s critics and vulnerable undocumented migrants, however, will find little in the president-elect’s fresh staff picks to offer them comfort.
Trump’s new foreign policy begins to emerge.
Similar uncertainty surrounds Trump’s second-term foreign policy. Unlike Trump, Rubio has been no friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin, though he has lately defended the president-elect’s position that the war in Ukraine must end.
Waltz was an opponent of the Biden administration’s attempts to broker a ceasefire in Gaza between Israel and Hamas. These positions are far to the right of many boilerplate policies of America’s Western allies and some Democratic Party leaders. But they are in line with the orthodoxy of the GOP and millions of its voters.
And Rubio and Waltz are more conventional on foreign policy than some of the most isolationist members of the broader Trump coalition. On the critical question of Ukraine, Waltz criticized the Biden administration’s policy of arming President Volodymyr Zelensky’s forces to repel Russia’s invasion as “too little, too late.” But he also backed Trump’s positions this year that it was time for Europe to bear the burden of supporting Ukraine because the US needed to concentrate on its own borders.
In every incoming presidential administration, staffing is important and provides ideological clues to how a White House will act. Given Trump’s record of extraordinary turnover of aides, however, nothing may be permanent.

Mike Walz – National Security Advisor

President-elect Donald Trump has picked Rep. Mike Waltz, R-Fla., to be his national security adviser, according to informed sources. Waltz is a Green Beret veteran who served in Afghanistan, the Middle East and Africa. Since 2019, he has represented a congressional district in the House, where he is a member of the Armed Services, Foreign Affairs, and Intelligence committees.
The Wall Street Journal first reported Trump’s pick.

Waltz’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Waltz is a particularly hawkish member of Congress when it comes to China. He is a member of the House’s China Task Force and has argued that the U.S. is underprepared if there is a conflict in the region.
Like many congressional Republicans, Waltz has also criticized U.S. aid to Ukraine in its war against Russia. In an interview with NPR on Nov. 4, he said the U.S. had “leverage” to get Russian President Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table to negotiate a “diplomatic resolution” to end the war. The role of White House national security adviser does not require Senate confirmation.
Waltz joins Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York as the second House Republican Trump has tapped for posts in his new administration. He selected Stefanik to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
Trump expected to choose Sen. Marco Rubio for secretary of state.
Trump could still change his mind, the sources cautioned, noting that the decision would not be finalised until the president-elect makes a formal announcement. President-elect Donald Trump is likely to nominate Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida for secretary of state in his administration in the coming days, according to three sources familiar with the selection process.
The New York Times first reported Trump’s plans to select Rubio to be the country’s top diplomat.
Foreign policy is one of the few areas in which there is a deep philosophical disagreement among Trump’s bases. A main pitch from Trump during the campaign was that he would implement “America First” policies, a doctrine that emphasizes less foreign aid, trying to curtail U.S. involvement in current foreign conflicts and avoiding future ones. But there remains a different strain of foreign policy thinking among even prominent Trump supporters.
Even though Rubio is an avowed Trump supporter, the perception is that he was one of the “less MAGA” options, a Trump ally told NBC News. It is a position that requires appealing enough to Trump’s more isolationist political base but also carrying water for the less disruptive brand of foreign policy that those Trump backers oppose.

Rubio, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee and vice chair of the Select Committee on Intelligence, was seen as a potential pick able to thread the needle of appealing enough to Trump’s political base while not needlessly eroding relationships with foreign allies.

One Trump ally said Rubio was someone “Trump’s base could trust.”
FBI Director Christopher Wray is preparing for a possible forced exit under Trump.
One person under consideration for the job is Trump adviser Kash Patel, who is also being considered by Trump to lead the CIA, two sources familiar with the matter told NBC News.
Trump considers replacing FBI director Christopher Wray.

FBI Director Christopher Wray and Donald Trump’s team are planning for the possibility that the president-elect will replace Wray during the new administration, three people familiar with the matter told NBC News.
One person under consideration for Wray’s job is Trump adviser Kash Patel, who is also being considered to lead the CIA, according to two other sources. Wray, whom Trump appointed in 2017 to a 10-year term, enjoys leading the FBI and had intended to serve out his term, a source said. But he is also preparing for the possibility that Trump will seek to replace him, according to a separate source.
All the sources spoke on condition of anonymity to recount sensitive discussions., media reports said.

Source: CNN, ABC, and other media networks.