“President-elect Donald Trump plans to fire the entire team that worked with special counsel Jack Smith to pursue two federal prosecutions against the former president, including career attorneys typically protected from political retribution,” the Washington Post reports.

“Trump is also planning to assemble investigative teams within the Justice Department to hunt for evidence in battleground states that fraud tainted the 2020 election.”

President-elect Donald Trump has selected hedge-fund manager Scott Bessent to lead the Treasury Department, “elevating one of the finance world’s most vocal supporters of the president-elect to a crucial position overseeing the incoming administration’s economic agenda,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“Bessent in recent months has become a key economic adviser to Trump and his team. He has defended Trump’s economic proposals in the midst of opposition from some on Wall Street, who worry that the president-elect’s pledge to impose sweeping tariffs will trigger trade wars and ultimately lead to higher prices for American consumers.”

“Tulsi Gabbard, Donald Trump’s pick to lead the intelligence community, was briefly placed on a Transportation Security Administration list that prompts additional security screening before flights after her overseas travel patterns and foreign connections triggered a government algorithm earlier this year,” CNN reports.

President-elect Donald Trump is expected to name former Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) to serve as secretary of Agriculture, The Hill reports.

Punchbowl News: “Republican senators have privately discussed their interest in viewing Gabbard’s FBI file… This is done for each Cabinet nominee, but the implication is that the documents could reveal previously unknown information about Gabbard, including possible foreign contacts.”

Facing a MAGA backlash over the prospect of former Rep. Mike Rogers leading the FBI, Trump adviser Dan Scavino announced today that the president-elect told him Rogers won’t be chosen.

Scavino says Trump said he’s “never even given it a thought.”

Just this morning, Rogers was on Fox News pitching himself as the right man for the job.

“For the first 53 years of his life, Elon Musk barely spent any time with Donald Trump. Then, beginning on the night of Nov. 5, he spent basically no time without him,” the New York Times reports.

“And so Mr. Musk, more than any other key player in the presidential transition, finds himself in a cram session to learn the courtier politics of Mr. Trump’s inner circle. For the world’s richest person — not known for his humility or patience — it is a social engineering challenge far trickier and less familiar than heavy manufacturing or rocket science.”

“Doubts abound as to whether he will graduate in 2028 with a four-year degree in Trumpism: It is now a parlor game in Washington and Silicon Valley to speculate just how long the Musk-Trump relationship will last. The answer, as discarded aides from Mr. Trump’s first term will tell you, may depend on Mr. Musk’s ability to placate the boss and keep a relatively low profile — but also to shiv a rival when the time comes.”

Financial Times: “In 1972, Henry Kissinger called Time’s editor-in-chief and ‘begged’ to have his name removed as the magazine’s joint ‘men of the year’ — the other being his boss, Richard M Nixon.”

Recalled Kissinger: “To be given equal treatment with the president of the United States was for me almost suicidal.”

“The magazine brushed aside Kissinger’s desperate entreaties. The two men duly shared the cover. The German-born national security adviser’s role in a highly consequential administration was too central to be ignored.”

“Eight weeks before Donald Trump takes office for a second time, that role now belongs to Elon Musk. Trump’s vice-president, JD Vance, has almost dropped out of view. Musk, on the other hand, is everywhere to be seen.”

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Elon Musk has cozied into Trump’s White House. How long will this bromance last?

The Economist: “Using artificial intelligence to trawl through his 38,358 posts between December 2013 and November 2024, we found that he is posting far more often and with a far more political bent. Climate change and clean energy used to be the realm of policy on which he opined the most, but he now bangs on much more about immigration and free speech.”

President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team “is turning to Project 2025 to help staff the next administration,” NBC News reports.

“Already, transition officials are taking suggestions for potential hires from the extensive personnel database created by Project 2025.”

“While Project 2025’s massive book of conservative policy recommendations received most of the attention from Democrats, a central part of the effort was putting together a database that officials had framed as a conservative LinkedIn to help staff an incoming Republican administration.”

“Many of President-elect Donald Trump’s picks to fill his Cabinet boast resumes that are thin on the kind of subject matter the agencies they would helm oversee,” ABC News reports.

“But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re politically unqualified.”

“The ongoing battle on Capitol Hill over Trump’s selections underscores how outsider bona fides and shake-it-up attitudes now imbue would-be secretaries with credibility. That’s in contrast to steady-as-she-goes mantras and beefy résumés in a government bureaucracy that voters believe has failed them.”

Jonathan Chait: “For a few hours, Pete Hegseth’s nomination as secretary of defense was the most disturbing act of Donald Trump’s presidential transition. Surely the Senate wouldn’t confirm an angry Fox News talking head with no serious managerial experience, best known for publicly defending war criminals, to run the largest department in the federal government. Then, in rapid succession, Trump announced appointments for Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The appearance of these newer and even more aberrant characters, like a television show introducing a more villainous heel in its second season, muted the indignation over Hegseth.”

“Obscured in this flurry of shocking appointments is the fact that Hegseth’s drawbacks are not limited to his light résumé or to the sexual-assault allegation made against him. Inexperienced though he may be at managing bureaucracies, Hegseth has devoted a great deal of time to documenting his worldview, including three books published in the past four years.”

“I spent the previous week reading them: The man who emerges from the page appears to have sunk deeply into conspiracy theories that are bizarre even by contemporary Republican standards but that have attracted strangely little attention. He considers himself to be at war with basically everybody to Trump’s left, and it is by no means clear that he means war metaphorically.”

Adam Serwer: “Members of Donald Trump’s inner circle understandably wish to interpret the election results as a mandate for the most extreme right-wing policies, which include conducting mass deportations and crushing their political enemies.”

“But how many Trump supporters think that’s what they voted for?”

“Many seem not to—persisting in their denial of not only Trump’s negative qualities and the extremism of his advisers, but the idea that he would implement policies they disagreed with.”

Axios: “Trump won’t be inaugurated for another two months, but MAGA mayhem is already dominating the news cycle in the same ways it did throughout his first term…”

“If past is prologue, the pace of chaos is unlikely to relent even after Trump gets his Cabinet in place.”

Semafor: “On top of their small majority, Republicans may also have two troublesome tasks to handle next year: funding the government for the rest of the fiscal year and raising the debt limit.”

“President-elect Donald Trump has floated selecting the financier Kevin Warsh as his Treasury secretary with the understanding that he could later be nominated to lead the Federal Reserve when Jerome Powell’s term as chair ends in 2026,“ the Wall Street Journal reports.

“Trump discussed the potential arrangement with Warsh during a meeting Wednesday at Mar-a-Lago, the president-elect’s private club in Florida.”

“Warsh is a front-runner to lead the Treasury Department… Trump is thinking about appointing the investor Scott Bessent to lead the National Economic Council with an eye toward nominating him as Treasury secretary later in his term if Warsh becomes Fed chair.”

“Ben Carson — the former neurosurgeon who helmed the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the first Trump administration — is a favorite to return to the role if he wants it,” Politico reports.

Politico: “Rather than showcasing Trump’s absolute power over his GOP allies, it revealed his limits. The doomed nomination lasted just eight days — and its failure is an unwelcome lesson for the president-elect, who has been projecting invincibility and claiming a historic mandate despite his reed-thin popular vote victory.”

Playbook: “Gaetz’s path to helm the DOJ was based on one calculation: That, yes, his nomination would be painful for Senate Republicans to swallow, but that they would ultimately capitulate to Trump. Sure, they might trash Gaetz to reporters on background, but they’d either hold their nose and vote for him, or skip town and allow Trump to make a recess appointment.”

“That calculation was incorrect.”

Wall Street Journal: Botched Gaetz nomination shows limits of Trump’s hold over GOP.