The Trump campaign is preparing for a possible presidential transition by creating a list of banned staffers, according to a report by Politico.
The top priority is keeping out the architects of Project 2025, a conservative presidential playbook that Democrats have called extreme and Donald Trump has sought to distance himself from.
A source told Politico that Donald Trump Jr. is the one who’s leading the charge on the ban. Trump Jr. echoed a similar sentiment to The Wall Street Journal. “My job is to prevent those guys, more so than actually picking people,” he said.
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Trump Jr. said he’s looking for “people who are actually going to follow the president,” not people who “act as sort of unelected officials that know better, because they don’t know better.”
Trump transition co-chair Howard Lutnik told the New York Post earlier this month that Project 2025 is “radioactive” and he won’t be considering any people associated with the group.
Myron Ebell, who led the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency transition in 2016, said that he kept a list called ‘Over my dead body’ with names of people that shouldn’t be hired.
On that list, Ebell said, were people who worked for George W. Bush and people who Ebell knew were “anti-Trump, even if they weren’t publicly so.” Ebell told Politico that he had heard of a similar list of banned appointees for Trump’s possible 2025 transition, but not from the campaign itself.
Selecting superstars and weeding out unsuitable candidates is standard in politics. “It’s not uncommon in D.C. to have a naughty and nice list,” a source who worked for Trump’s 2016 transition told Politico. Now, the transition may have a Project 2025-sized problem, which is a coalition of over 100 conservative organizations.
Filling out an administration is a massive undertaking: around 4,000 people need to be appointed. This could make boycotting conservatives tied to Project 2025 difficult in practice. For its part, Project 2025 has been gathering resumes of people who want to work for a Trump administration.
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