One week after winning the presidency in a stunning upset, Donald Trump is already botching the transition, insiders say.

The daunting task of filling top Cabinet posts appears to be a chaotic scramble inside Trump Tower, with competing power centers jockeying for position and influence as a steady stream of names both realistic and not gets floated to a baffled media.


“It’s an absolute knife fight,” said one Trump insider.

Through it all, Trump has remained uncharacteristically quiet, secluded in his penthouse apartment and office space on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. His only public comments came in the form of a "60 Minutes" interview on Sunday night. And the one time he has emerged — to hit up the 21 Club on West 52nd Street for dinner with his family — he ditched the pool of reporters who traditionally are allowed to track the president-elect's every move.

But as a narrative starts to take hold of a transition effort in disarray, Trump is mounting a fierce pushback campaign on Twitter. It started Tuesday night, with Trump writing, "Very organized process taking place as I decide on Cabinet and many other positions. I am the only one who knows who the finalists are!"

By Wednesday morning, he appeared particularly irked by reporting in The New York Times that he is taking a haphazard approach to his calls with world leaders. The report, which covered the overall disorder of Trump's transition, suggested that he's upending traditions such as having the British prime minister be among the very first calls so as to reassure longtime allies of the U.S.'s commitment to the relationship.

"The failing @nytimes story is so totally wrong on transition. It is going so smoothly. Also, I have spoken to many foreign leaders," Trump tweeted first, followed up by, "I have recieved [sic] and taken calls from many foreign leaders despite what the failing @nytimes said. Russia, U.K., China, Saudi Arabia, Japan."

He continued, "Australia, New Zealand, and more. I am always available to them. @nytimes is just upset that they looked like fools in their coverage of me."

Jason Miller, Trump's spokesman, also sought to tamp down the notion that the transition effort was in any way hobbled.

"In the six days since the election our team has made significant progress and we are not going to rush these important decisions," Miller said Tuesday night. "The American people voted for change and they can have confidence that PE Trump and VPE Pence are assembling an administration of passionate and successful leaders committed to putting America First always."

And on Wednesday morning, Miller went on CNN to try to further knock down reports of infighting. "This whole description of the knife fight, or this internal fighting. Nothing could be further from the truth," he said.

Controversy, meanwhile, continues to swirl. Republicans and Democrats alike sounded the alarms about both of Trump’s finalists to serve as his secretary of state.

Rudy Giuliani, rumored to be Trump’s top choice, is facing new scrutiny following a POLITICO report detailing his paid consulting work for foreign governments that would create a massive conflict of interest should he be confirmed as the country’s top diplomat.

And John Bolton, a hawkish neoconservative also in the running, has triggered a promise from GOP Sen. Rand Paul, a foreign policy isolationist, to fight his possible nomination.

“I’ll do whatever it takes to stop someone like John Bolton being secretary of state,” Paul told POLITICO.

In another sign that Trump was caught flat-footed by winning, his transition team has been slow to engage with the outgoing administration. Although Defense Secretary Ash Carter has said he is eager to meet with the Trump transition team this week, a spokesman, Gordon Trowbridge, said Tuesday morning that no one had reached out yet.

Late Tuesday, Trump’s team delivered a key document to the White House that will allow for more coordination between the current administration and the next one, but the White House had been still waiting for paperwork on the transition team's code of conduct, which needs to be finalized before Trump's team can start visiting and working with federal agencies.

In the early days of his tenure as president-elect, Trump is continuing to build his administration as he did his corporation and then his drama-heavy but ultimately successful campaign: with warring factions that will guarantee that the constant chaos and palace intrigue will continue in the White House. The idea of a ‘team of rivals’ isn’t exactly a novel approach for a president filling out a cabinet. But this one may prove to be less of a team than a viper pit.

In a move that provided a glimpse into the tumult, Mike Rogers, a former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and one of the most knowledgeable foreign policy hands advising Trump, resigned Tuesday morning after reportedly being forced out over his ties to Chris Christie, who was relieved of his role heading up the transition team over the weekend.

It was another illustration of the influence of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who undermined Christie, the prosecutor who put his father in prison a decade ago, throughout the campaign. Kushner, who is likely to maintain his influence in an unofficial role outside the West Wing, also flexed his muscle over the weekend as Trump was deciding on his chief of staff.

According to two sources inside Trump Tower, the president-elect himself was leaning toward naming Bannon as chief of staff—until Kushner stepped in, raising concerns about putting the anti-establishment, alt-right figure in a position that holds so much symbolic and strategic importance.

Although Trump listened to his son-in-law and went with Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus to run day-to-day operations inside his White House, he elevated Bannon as senior counselor and chief strategist, even listing him above Priebus on the press release announcing the new roles. When he gathered both men to explain their jobs before sending that release out, Trump spoke for more than 30 minutes and “laid out a very unstructured chain of command,” a source said.

In the 48 hours since the announcement, the firestorm of criticism over the appointment of Breitbart News chief Steve Bannon—exactly what Kushner was worried about and attempted to blunt by giving him a title other than chief of staff—has dominated the nation’s airwaves, with a focus on Breitbart’s propagation of content that appeals to white supremacists and his own history of anti-Semitic statements.

Despite the controversy, several sources inside the Trump operation paint a harmonious picture of the Priebus-Bannon relationship and believe they’ll work well together, as they did during the final months of the campaign. And Gerry Gunster, the Washington strategist who led the successful Brexit effort and visited Trump Tower Saturday with Nigel Farage, also observed a relationship between Trump’s two top staffers that seemed “very cordial” and a president-elect focused on the task at hand.

“I was struck by how relaxed he was and how focused he seemed to be on making this transition smooth,” Gunster said. “His mindset was looking ahead. He didn’t really want to talk about the campaign anymore. Everyone seemed focused, really. I was there at 6 p.m. on a Sunday night and you could tell no one was going home any time soon.”

Trump's campaign also disputed the notion that Bannon's past comments are any reason for controversy.

"Here’s what folks need to know about Steve Bannon — he’s worked with people of all backgrounds and has embraced diversity throughout his career, not only as a Naval Officer, a VP at Goldman Sachs and the co-founder of a media empire — partnering with Andrew Breitbart, who was Jewish. Bannon is also one of the architects of President–elect Trump’s urban renewal policy agenda and a driving force behind the campaign trips to Flint and Mexico City," Miller, Trump's spokesman, said.

But even if Priebus and Bannon can foster a collaborative, functional West Wing environment, they represent two opposite poles of the current Republican Party—or, rather, the British-style coalition government that is now taking shape in Washington.

While Republicans broadly are exuberant about controlling the White House and both chambers of Congress, the GOP itself is not wielding all the power. That’s because the president-elect isn’t a traditional Republican but the leader of a populist movement that has often come into conflict with his party and who still disagrees broadly with congressional leaders on a host of important policy issues.

After more than a year of chatter about how the Trump brigade was swallowing up the Republican Party, both have emerged from last week’s election intact—stronger, even. Now comes the difficult part: governing together.

“I would give them 100 to 150 days before the wheels are off and they’re fighting about everything,” said one GOP operative familiar with the Trump transition operation.

House Speaker Paul Ryan, who waited more than a month before endorsing his party’s presumptive nominee, went out of his way with reporters Tuesday morning to emphasize how Republicans at opposite ends of Pennsylvania Avenue will be singing from the same sheet of music.

“Welcome to the dawn of a new unified Republican government,” Ryan said. "This will be a government focused on turning President-elect Trump's victory into real progress for the American people."

"At the same time we recognize that the task ahead of us is enormous," he continued. "If we are going to put our country back on the right track, we have got to be bold and we have to go big."

Hours later, with Trump’s official backing, he was re-nominated to serve as speaker. But the demonstration of party unity does not obscure the daylight between Ryan, as well as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, with Trump on a host of issues and the broader muddling of conservative ideology in this new coalition government.

While revising the nation’s tax code may be a shared priority that can be accomplished early on and allow Trump and the Republican Congress to put points on the board, other Trump priorities are likely to meet resistance. McConnell and Ryan, who have uniformly opposed new spending under Obama, are lukewarm about Trump’s $1 trillion infrastructure spending package, as well as the costly wall along the U.S.-Mexico border that Trump has promised to build.

Ryan and other free traders are resigned to letting the Trans-Pacific Partnership die, but it remains to be seen if they will go along with Trump should he attempt to follow through on his pledge to punish companies that move jobs overseas with 45 percent tariffs on imported goods. And Trump’s stated indifference to same-sex marriage, now the law of the land, could rankle some social conservatives who strongly support his candidacy.

For the most part, however, Trump’s ideological malleability and his reliance on conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, which formulated his short list of Supreme Court nominees, and on Ryan, the only player in government with a fully actionable, strategic policy plan, may ease some potential conflicts. Perhaps the most reassuring thing to establishment Republicans is math: roughly 4,000 jobs to fill in the administration and, as Trump himself pointed out in his interview Sunday when asked about the apparent hypocrisy of appointing lobbyists to his transition team, a glut of establishment resumes.

“You look at the folks on the transition team and with the exception of the people who will touch trade and foreign policy, where Trump has clear philosophical differences, they largely think like the people who could have made up a Bush team,” said Bruce Haynes, a GOP strategist in Washington. “It’s easy to be an anti-establishment candidate, harness that outsider momentum. But all the inertia in Washington is geared the other way.”

Bryan Bender contributed to this report.

