“President-elect Donald Trump announced on Friday that he had chosen Steven Cheung, his chief campaign spokesman, to be his White House communications director,” the New York Times reports.

“Donald Trump just announced that, in addition to formally naming Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota as his choice for interior secretary, he would appoint him as the chairman of a new National Energy Council overseeing American energy policy,” the New York Times reports.

“Trump has made repeated promises to slash energy costs in half as a bid to fight inflation.”

“When President Joe Biden relinquishes power in January, some parts of his legacy will be secure, while others may be undone by President-elect Donald Trump and a new Republican-controlled Congress,” NBC News reports.

“The pieces of Biden’s legacy go into four buckets. Trump can easily undo executive actions on matters like immigration and transgender rights, while a Republican Congress can unravel spending programs passed by Democrats on a partisan basis. But it will be difficult for Trump to undo bipartisan legislation, such as measures about infrastructure and preventing gun violence, and the judges Biden appointed can’t be unseated.”

Elaine Godfrey: “Gaetz has always sought political relevance and power. Dismissed by many, including GOP colleagues, as a self-promoter, Gaetz’s superpower has been understanding far more clearly than they do how power works in the Trumposphere. And that insight has enabled him to become consigliere to the former and soon-to-be president.”

Said Democratic consultant Steve Schale: “For all the things people say about Gaetz that are true, the one thing about Matt that people don’t fully respect is that the guy is not an idiot.”

“Now is when Gaetz’s hard work starts to pay off—even if the Senate declines to confirm him.”

Franklin Foer: “The U.S. government is more than an array of marble buildings. It’s an aggregation of expertise, a collection of individuals who have inherited an ethos and a set of practices handed down through the decades. Ever since Trump’s second victory last week, these long-standing denizens of the bureaucracy, a tier of career employees who occupy their job regardless of the partisan affiliation of the president, have mulled leaving the government.”

“How could they not? Some of them are on purge lists drawn up by right-wing think tanks, named as enemies marked for retribution. They all know of Trump’s plans to strip them of the tenured status that traditionally protects the civil service from the whims of political bosses. And they have read Project 2025, in which the theorists behind the incoming administration write plainly about the necessity of destroying agencies.”

“The outgoing Biden administration knew this assault might eventually come, and it spent four years preparing for it. At the Justice Department, to take one example, Merrick Garland had his own theory for how to build a bureaucracy capable of withstanding such a crisis. He spent his days bucking up the career lawyers who worked for him, and earnestly sought to model his own commitment to the rule of law by studiously resisting for more than two years the political pressure to indict Trump, hoping his example would instill the permanent employees of his department with the fortitude to stay true to their constitutional commitments.”

“In the end, Garland not only failed to bring Trump to justice, but he also erected a rather flimsy bulwark against his return, because he probably never imagined that Matt Gaetz would be his successor.”

“Donald Trump is considering tapping Fox Business Network host Larry Kudlow for a senior economic policy role in his administration, amid the president-elect’s mounting frustration with jockeying for top jobs,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“Kudlow met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, the president-elect’s private Florida club, late this week, the people said. Trump’s advisers see Kudlow as a contender to lead the National Economic Council and possibly the Treasury Department.”

“Kudlow has made regular appearances on Fox Business since leaving the White House. On his weekday show, Kudlow regularly touts Trump’s economic policy proposals. His allies have made appeals directly to Trump to bring him back into the administration.”

Former Rep. Mike Rogers, the 2024 Republican Senate nominee in Michigan who lost his election last week by a razor-thin margin, met with President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team regarding potentially serving as FBI director, Fox News reports.

“After Republicans did better than expected in winning the White House, the House and the Senate in 2004, President George W. Bush famously claimed a mandate,” the New York Times reports.

Said Bush: “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and I intend to spend it.”

“Two years later, after Mr. Bush’s bid to privatize Social Security imploded without ever even coming up in Congress and exhaustion with the Iraq war set in, it was instead the president who was spent. Democrats took back Congress, and the governing trifecta Mr. Bush had trumpeted was gone.”

“The same thing then happened to Barack Obama, Donald J. Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr. as they gained supremacy in Washington only to see it slip away after two years of aggressively pressing their agenda, with mixed results.”

Garrett Graff: “I think this week’s nominations are best thought of in the vein of the scene in Jurassic Park when the scientists explain how Velociraptors are able to learn: ‘They were testing the fences for weaknesses, systematically. They remember.'”

“This is Donald Trump testing his limits. This is Trump seeing just how much he can get away with.”

“The sheer insanity of appointing an actually corrupt and unqualified person like Matt Gaetz, a man literally investigated by that same Justice Department in recent years for sex trafficking, to a vital post like attorney general — or appointing Tulsi Gabbard to lead the nation’s $80 billion-a-year intelligence community after years of concern that she was more closely aligned toward Russia than she is the United States — underscores how much Donald Trump is viewing this presidency as a war on the professional federal government.”

The New York Post editorial board slammed President-elect Donald Trump’s pick of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be Health and Human Service Secretary:

“The overriding rule of medicine is: First, do no harm.”

“We’re certain installing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head Health and Human Services breaks this rule.”

“When Scott Bessent left President-elect Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago compound in Palm Beach, Florida, last Friday, his allies were optimistic that the hedge fund executive was virtually certain to be named the next treasury secretary,” the Washington Post reports.

“On Thursday, however, Bessent again flew to Florida with his bid for the Cabinet post still hanging in the balance. Bessent is expected to be interviewed by Trump on Friday — as a rival contender for the post, the Trump transition co-chair and Wall Street banker Howard Lutnick, makes his own bid to become the most senior economic official in the U.S. government.”

An Axios focus group of swing voters found none thinks President-elect Donald Trump’s super-close relationship with Elon Musk is a good idea.

Key findings: “12 of 14 participants in this week’s sessions said they were familiar with Musk’s advising Trump. Of those, five said it’s a bad thing, seven didn’t know what to say and none would say it was good.”

“It’s a given Trump’s going to beat us into submission.”

— A House Republican, quoted by the Washington Post.

Elon Musk is trying to recruit “super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting.”

Musk then added that this work will be unpaid.

“Sen. Lindsey Graham is pushing for fellow South Carolinian Scott Bessent to be Donald Trump’s next Treasury secretary, which would fend off a late charge by Howard Lutnick and end a waiting game on Wall Street,” Semafor reports.

Michael Schaffer: “The first Trump administration sparked waves of public activism and aggressive media coverage. This time, not so much.”