There is a minimum skills set that is required of the Commander-in-Chief and it involves making decisions of life and death in real and often hurried time, decisions about protecting America and its troops.
Long before the Afghanistan debacle many doubted President Biden’s ability to correctly make those decisions, including former Secretary of Defense Gates. Vice President Harris never gave a single interview in which she even attempted to demonstrate the skills set required which begins with thinking and talking on your feet even if only to filibuster effectively or provide cover for ongoing sidebar or secret negotiations.
The second skills set are the varied abilities required to assemble a team of 3,000 or more people to join you in the administration. Not surprisingly President Donald Trump’s first time as a "president-elect" had its share of "swings-and-misses" on personnel because he’d never been a politician, had no large, lifelong cadre of political and government professionals on which to draw for guidance and support.
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As a private sector, private company developer, the former and future president knew land development and television, and the promotional talents to succeed at both. His early success in Manhattan development branched out to his casinos and luxury golf course properties and far from New York City, but that successful set of developments included a standard number of projects that didn’t work out and went bust. Developers—I represented many large developers, both public and private, when I practiced law from 1989 to 2016—are all alike in some crucial ways, and none of them escaped recessions and the vagaries of the business. They are not at all risk averse and they are very much learning machines but not of the bookish sort. "Cut and fill" to "balance" a development site and "units per acre" are among the many terms of art in the business of residential planned community land and leisure development, but not many people make the jump from that to elected politics. The skills cross-over is limited.
So Trump spent quite a lot of time learning the traps and water hazards of D.C. in his first term. Trump knows he can rely on many people who were with him in the first term: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Ambassador Robert O’Brien, Ambassador Richard Grenell, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, and many more. His old diplomatic corps includes ambassadors he may well ask to return like Ambassador David Friedman who did so much for the U.S.-Israel partnership or Ambassador George Glass who was Trump’s first ambassador to a European country (Portugal.) Trump knows now on whom he can rely tomorrow.
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The Trump transition team(s) are both formal and informal, and the president-elect’s choices in the personnel arena many and varied. He will be much better at this process than he was the first time simply because it is the second time. If there is any important skill that isn’t improved by practice, I’m unaware of it.
Despite the incendiary rhetoric of cataclysm that came from over-wrought voices on both left and right as the election drew close, all will be well and the United States will soon be back on the world stage, led by a confident president and an experienced team. We will be fine.
What I hope most for is that President Trump finds a Cap Weinberger to run the Pentagon and leaves him or her to it, allows that person to staff the building and that those political appointees commit to serve for four years. We need talent and continuity at our most important department of government.
Wish as well for a wordsmith who can persuade the returning president to borrow from Lincoln’s First Inaugural for Trump’s second, especially these lines from its closing: "We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."
Hugh Hewitt is host of "The Hugh Hewitt Show," heard weekday mornings 6am to 9am ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh wakes up America on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.
