defined his presidency. Biden’s might, too.

7 min readNov 28, 2020

For many members of Generation Z, President’s Donald Trump defeat in the 2020 election was the first loss in their voting lives.
Business Insider recently spoke to the senior members of five college Republican groups across the country for their reaction.
They were all largely optimistic about the GOP’s future, with the party poised to keep control of the Senate and whittling down the Democrats’ House majority in the 2020 election.
But they also said the GOP needs to reassess its image and platform to win over their fellow Gen Zers, including getting serious about tackling climate change and making the economy fairer.
While they said they were pleased with some of Trump’s accomplishments in office, they were largely critical of his personality and had mixed feelings about Trump’s future in the GOP.
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One of the first things Donald Trump’s team did after winning the 2016 election was fire its transition staff and toss the binders of prepared materials into the trash.

In the coming weeks, the new transition team would name Cabinet picks without vetting them, knife each other over senior White House roles and not-so-privately spar over Trump’s agenda. It quickly became apparent that the only process for decision making was the incoming president dishing out impromptu directives on Twitter or from the Trump Tower lobby, the de facto transition offices.

In other words, it was exactly what the next four years would be like.

And it’s exactly the opposite of how President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team has operated thus far — with longtime aides picking predictable officials for top jobs and working to tamp down potential tensions between the moderate and progressive wings of the Democratic Party.

The lessons gleaned from Trump’s transition ended up providing a road map for the way his presidency would unfold — the off-the-cuff decision-making, the high turnover and the bitter internal battles over policy areas like immigration, trade and foreign policy. America saw previews of all of it during the period between his upset win and January 2017 inauguration.

So if Trump’s example is any guide, Biden’s approach could also be a blueprint for what to expect over the next four years.

“Trump famously thinks preparation is for losers, and the Biden team appears to be the opposite,” said one former Trump transition official. “Trump never wanted to prepare for a meeting because he thought he could wing it and that you only have to prepare if you are not naturally good or can’t think on your feet.”

Four years later, those around the outgoing president are still split over whether he set the right tone during the 2016 transition.

Many of his supporters argue Trump was right to eschew traditions, like worrying about quickly confirming every mid-level staffer at every agency, and focus instead on major policies like the 2017 Republican tax bill, the confirmation of a raft of conservative judges and nixing international agreements like the Paris climate deal or the Iran nuclear accord.

Yet to critics and even some allies, Trump’s failures to run a meaningful transition hurt his ability to govern in the first year and beyond.

“They still haven’t recovered,” said former Gov. Chris Christie, in a podcast released over the summer by the Partnership for Public Service, a non-partisan group. Christie was the original head of the Trump transition team, before being ousted after Trump’s win.

“The first year was almost over, and they still hadn’t recovered because you cannot recover from the loss of all of that work,” he said. “As you can see, in the beginning of the Trump White House there were either lots of empty seats or ones that were filled out with lots of Obama holdovers.”

The ramifications, he argued, were extensive.

“It just has impacted this administration in every substantive way you can imagine since they did that,” Christie said.

Trump’s transition out of office has been just as messy as his transition into the presidency. The president is still falsely proclaiming he won and spent several weeks barring his staff from having any contact with Biden’s incoming team, a long-held tradition.

“His transition in was marked as the same chaos as his transition out,” said one source familiar with the White House’s transition planning.

Part of the problem, said former Trump transition officials, originated with the different factions that were competing for dominance: Trump’s New York associates, the campaign, the conservative movement and the more establishment Republicans associated with the Republican National Committee. All of them converged during the transition.

“Trump had never held elected office. Even in his business, he did not have shareholders to report to, so he could run things as he wanted and hold information as he wanted,” said Martha Joynt Kumar, director of the White House Transition Project, which studies past presidential transitions and offers information to incoming administrations. “He was not used to a situation where power is shared.”

Close Trump aides like Hope Hicks, John McEntee, Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller and Kellyanne Conway spent most of their time in New York after the 2016 election working alongside the president. Meanwhile, the more policy-oriented or experienced D.C. staffers worked out of Washington.

defined his presidency. Biden’s might, too.

Written by Nuralom