Brooke rollins is sitting at her desk in Fort Worth, Texas, at the back of an anonymous, low-rise building. It looks uncannily like an office in the White House, with its lemony cream wallpaper, dark wood furniture and photographs of the president signing bills as admirers look on. Only one detail jars: the 18th-century rifle leaning against the wall.
The resemblance is not a coincidence. Mrs Rollins worked in the White House under Donald Trump and briefly ran his Domestic Policy Council. She purchased her West Wing furniture when she left. Towards the end of Mr Trump’s first term, she was in charge of putting together a policy agenda for his second one. After Mr Trump lost his bid for re-election in 2020, she set up a think-tank to continue that work, the America First Policy Institute (afpi).
afpi aspires to be an administration-in-waiting. Its staff of 172 includes eight former cabinet secretaries from the Trump administration and 20 other political appointees. “I will leave things ready for the next Republican president,” Mrs Rollins says. Campaign-finance laws prevent her from saying so, but she means Mr Trump.
afpi is the newest think-tank preparing for a second term for Mr Trump, but it is not the biggest. The Heritage Foundation, which prides itself on having done the preparatory work for Ronald Reagan’s “revolution”, has its own presidential transition project. This is led by Paul Dans, a lawyer who worked in the White House’s Office of Personnel Management during Mr Trump’s presidency. In 1981 copies of a manual for government produced by Heritage were placed on the chairs of each of Reagan’s cabinet members before their first meeting. Heritage is updating that idea, co-ordinating an effort by 350 conservative wonks and former administration officials to write a plan for government in time for the Republican primaries next year. Those who have criticised Mr Trump or his agenda will not be part of it.
As well as drafting policies for each department, Mr Dans and his colleagues are building a list of potential recruits to serve in the next Republican administration. He likes to describe the effort as a conservative LinkedIn. Fully staffing an administration requires about 4,000 political appointees, 1,200 of whom must be approved by the Senate. Heritage and its allied think-tanks are vetting the people to fill those jobs now.
Dismiss that which insults What would prove disqualifying? “If you kind of have shown yourself to have fought against the Trump administration, or there are issues where you’ve actually been counter to it,” says Mr Dans. “You know where people stand by where they sit, so to speak. Their postings and social media, their allegiances over time can give people a pretty good picture.” Blaming Mr Trump for the ransacking of the Capitol in 2021, or supporting his impeachment in the days that followed, for example, would be enough to keep someone off the list.
Thanks to these efforts, the next Trump administration, if there is one, will have fleshed-out plans and the know-how to advance them. That would make it very different from Mr Trump’s first term. “We didn’t have the people because nobody thought we would win,” says Steve Bannon, who managed Mr Trump’s campaign and was an influential figure at the beginning of his presidency. (Mr Trump fired Mr Bannon, but later stopped him being tried for misuse of funds from a non-profit group he headed by pardoning him.)
Mr Bannon mentions the National Security Council (nsc) as an example of the staffing problems the Trump administration faced. It struggled to come up with half the necessary number of political appointees, he says. They were an odd mixture of people like Michael Anton, a corporate pr man and apocalyptic political commentator, and old foreign-policy hands who turned out to be queasy about Mr Trump’s courting of North Korea’s dictator and his hostility to American allies.
What was true of the nsc applies to other agencies, too. “You have got to hit the beach with three or four thousand guys,” Mr Bannon says. Mr Dans agrees. “In Hollywood they like to describe things as ‘this meets that meets the other’. This is the Manhattan Project meets the Empire State Building meets d-Day.”
The initial objective for this invading force is to capture the civil service. One lesson that Mr Trump’s backers drew from his first term is that no policy matters more than control of the bureaucracy, because no policies can be implemented without it.