Trump’s Inner Circle Implodes: How McMahon and Rollins Tried to Oust Wiles

As the votes were counted on election night, an inmate at the Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility in Tutwiler, Mississippi, lay on the floor of his prison cell. He pressed his ear against the crack under the heavy metal door, straining to hear the sound emanating from a television in the nearby guard station. There were few people in the world who had more personally riding on the results of the election than this inmate. His name: Enrique Tarrio. A leader of the Proud Boys militia group, Tarrio was less than two years into the twenty‑two‑year prison sentence he received after being convicted of seditious conspiracy against the United States for his role in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.

There were hundreds of January 6 defendants, but prosecutors considered Tarrio to be the worst of the worst—and he was sentenced accordingly. Although he wasn’t on the Capitol grounds that day—he had been arrested forty‑eight hours earlier on unrelated charges and ordered to leave Washington—the Justice Department said he organized and inspired the most violent of the men who charged into the building wearing body armor and tactical gear, smashing windows, and beating police officers along the way. As Tarrio lay on the floor straining to hear the election night coverage, he believed the results would determine whether he would spend the next two decades of his life in prison or be set free.

“If Trump won, I was one hundred percent certain he would give me a pardon,” Tarrio later told me.

Tarrio had been listening to the election returns on a small transistor radio he had bought from the prison commissary, but its single AAA battery died sometime around 11 p.m., before it became clear who would win. Tarrio called out to the nearby prison guards and pleaded with them to turn up the sound on the television they were watching, and one of them—“one hundred percent MAGA,” Tarrio told me—obliged. Before long, the voices of CNN anchors could be heard echoing down the concrete hall of his cellblock.

At 2:05 a.m., CNN projected Donald Trump as the winner of Pennsylvania, and Tarrio knew the election was effectively over (in fact, although Tarrio had no way to know it, Fox News had already declared Trump the president-elect). He leapt to his feet and began banging on the door of his cell in celebration, quickly joined by his fellow inmates in the cellblock who had come to know him as one of the ringleaders of the January 6 attack. Within minutes, the prison was erupting with the noise of inmates hollering and pounding on their doors of their prison cells to mark Donald Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris.

As Enrique Tarrio celebrated Trump’s victory in prison, the incoming Trump administration was already taking shape at Donald Trump’s private club in Palm Beach, Florida.

The Trump transition team’s official office was situated a few miles away from Mar‑a‑Lago—in what had been the campaign’s headquarters—but the key decisions that would shape the incoming administration were being made within the ornate and gold‑accented walls of Trump’s private club. As virtually everyone looking to influence the president‑elect or get a top job knew, proximity to Trump mattered more than anything else. The key was to be the last person to speak with him before he made a decision. Take, for example, Trump’s first personnel announcement: the selection of Susie Wiles as his chief of staff.

While the president‑elect was meeting with Wiles on November 7 to offer her the job, two other contenders, Linda McMahon and Brooke Rollins, rushed over to Mar‑a‑Lago in a last‑ditch effort to derail the pick. Various Trump aides, most of whom had worked for Wiles during the campaign, managed to impede the two women on their way to see Trump. They even orchestrated a phone call with Vice President–elect JD Vance to delay the two aspiring chiefs of staff on their way to Trump’s office. By the time McMahon and Rollins got in to see Trump, it was too late. He had already asked Wiles to be chief of staff. They would have to settle instead for secretary of education and secretary of agriculture, respectively.

Another Trump ally who quickly realized he’d need to prioritize time at Mar‑a‑Lago during the transition was Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The day after the election, Kennedy and his entourage—far‑right pundit Tucker Carlson, former Democratic Representative Tulsi Gabbard, and Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, his daughter‑in‑law and former campaign manager—spent at least eight hours at Trump’s club. Joe Biden was still the president, but for all intents and purpose 1100 South Ocean Boulevard in Palm Beach was the center of the political universe.

Among the first to make his way to Mar-a-Lago after the election was Howard Lutnick, Trump’s billionaire friend from New York. Lutnick had been a Democrat for most of his life – he hosted a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign – but Trump had named him the co‑chair of his presidential transition team after the Republican Convention, a role he would share with Linda McMahon, a fellow billionaire and co‑founder of World Wrestling Entertainment.

Before the election, Trump had little interest in the transition, but Lutnick took the job seriously, methodically compiling lists of names to fill various cabinet positions and other key posts. The suggestions were strictly notional—Kevin McCarthy was listed as a potential secretary of state and Aileen Cannon, the Florida judge who had thrown out the classified documents case against Trump, was named as a potential attorney general—because Trump, a bit superstitious about making plans before winning the election, didn’t want anything to do with the transition until he was president‑elect.

“I don’t like to talk about transition until I win,” Trump told me in late October when I asked him about the planning that was underway. “When we win, you and I will talk about it. But until you win, I don’t like talking about transition.”

Now that the election was over, Trump was eager to quickly put together his White House team and Lutnick was determined to be by his side. Mar-a-Lago has very few workspaces, so Lutnick made a land grab—securing the club’s “Tea Room” as his new headquarters. Located next to the living room that operated as the main lobby and steps away from the outdoor pool, the Tea Room was added to the club after Trump purchased the property in 1985. It’s relatively modern and bland compared with the rest of the club, but it was the only place on the property that resembled a private meeting room.

Lutnick had a conference table installed in the Tea Room, as well as several large television screens that he used for presentations to Trump about potential nominees. One monitor would display bullet points—no more than five—describing a candidate’s qualifications, while a second screen would be loaded up with video clips of his or her recent TV appearances. A third monitor would feature a large photograph of the candidate—a headshot—so that Trump could visualize whether he or she looked the part; whether they were, in Trump’s mind, out of “central casting.”

Although he hadn’t wanted to think or talk much about the transition before the election, Trump clearly had more opinions about who would serve in his second administration than he’d had about who would serve in his first. In 2016, when he was still new to Republican politics, Trump was forced to rely on advice from others as he scrambled to staff the federal government. That’s how a number of people who were not ideologically aligned with Trump or unflinchingly loyal to him—James Mattis, Gary Cohn, Mike Pompeo, Rex Tillerson, Nikki Haley, John Kelly—ended up with top roles in his first administration.

Trump wasn’t going to let that happen again. “The difference between now and before is I know everybody now, and when I first came I knew nobody,” Trump told me during a phone conversation on October 21, 2024. “We had a lot of great people. But I didn’t know people. Had to rely on recommendations. Now I know people.” Days after that call, he would make a seemingly unprompted announcement on Truth Social: “I will not be inviting former Ambassador Nikki Haley, or former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, to join the Trump Administration, which is currently in formation.”

Although Trump was generally only selecting people he knew personally for high‑level roles, they still needed to be vetted. And without access to FBI background checks, Lutnick scrambled to cobble together a team of lawyers tasked with digging into the personal histories of potential candidates for high‑level positions in the incoming administration. The finalists would be summoned to Mar‑a‑Lago and meet with Trump for an in‑person interview in his office upstairs. In the weeks after the election, the Mar‑a‑Lago living room became the crossroads of the MAGA world.

On any given day, you could spot billionaire donors, Republican politicians, right‑wing pundits, pro‑Trump influencers, and other would‑be cabinet secretaries hustling in and out or just hanging around. Elon Musk arrived on election day and almost never left, literally moving into the place and staying until shortly before the inauguration. Actor Sylvester Stallone was often there too, invited by Trump to sit in on a meeting with at least one foreign dignitary who came to Mar-a-Lago to meet the president-elect.

Another person seen regularly at Mar‑a‑Lago in the weeks after the election was Kash Patel, a deeply committed Trump loyalist who served in the first administration and wrote three children’s books about Donald Trump’s battles with his political enemies (a trilogy titled The Plot Against the King). Patel would often be seen hanging around the club’s living room, ready whenever Trump walked by to make his pitch to be the director of the FBI. Paul Manafort, the former chairman of Trump’s 2016 campaign who did time in prison for tax and bank fraud, was spotted at the club, too, bringing his own candidate to be FBI director.

Some aspiring candidates for top jobs in Trump’s White House struggled with the president‑elect’s process. One prospective cabinet secretary, for example, flew to Palm Beach from Texas a few days after the election because he had been told to be ready to meet with Trump at any time. This person, a highly successful business owner and executive and major Republican donor who had served in the first Trump administration and who spoke to me on the condition that I not reveal his name, told me he stayed at a nearby hotel for two days before finally being invited to see Trump the following morning at 9:30 a.m. Upon showing up at Mar‑a‑Lago, he sat down on a couch in the living room next to a candidate for attorney general—and he waited. Several other potential nominees came and went over the next several hours, all waiting for an audience with the president‑elect.

It wasn’t until 12:30 p.m. that this potential cabinet member was called in to see Trump. The meeting went well, he later told me, but he was taken aback when the president‑elect started asking him questions about a different cabinet position than the one he had been talking to Howard Lutnick and the transition team about.

One of the people this cabinet finalist had been sitting near in the Mar‑a‑Lago living room downstairs was a Fox News weekend anchor, whom he assumed was in town to conduct a television interview with Trump. Like the rest of the world, he was stunned to hear later that night that the president‑elect would be nominating that Fox News weekend anchor—Pete Hegseth—to serve as secretary of defense. In fact, the only person involved with the Trump transition team who had been seriously considering Hegseth as a candidate to run the Pentagon seemed to be Trump himself.

Hegseth had served honorably in the Army—including combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan—and he had degrees from both Princeton and Harvard, but for most of the past decade, he had been a pro‑Trump talking head on Fox News, most recently as the co‑anchor of one of Trump’s favorite programs, Fox & Friends Weekend. He hadn’t been considered by the transition team for any senior government position, let alone for defense secretary. For that role, Lutnick’s operation had compiled a list of candidates that included Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and US Senator Joni Ernst from Iowa, a former commander in the US Army Reserve with more than twenty years of service under her belt and a widely respected member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Instead, Trump did what he so often does and went with his gut, selecting the guy he liked to watch on TV who would stand up to the military leaders Trump believed had undermined him in the final months of his first administration. The lack of any background check, however, created some serious complications for Trump and his team. Hegseth would eventually be confirmed by the Senate—barely, with Vice President JD Vance breaking a 50–50 tie—but not before a devastating string of allegations about his past came to light, almost all of them unknown by the Trump transition team.

Two days after Trump announced his intent to nominate Hegseth, Vanity Fair reported that the Trump transition team was scrambling to investigate a sexual assault allegation from several years earlier. Hegseth, who’d been married three times before turning forty years old, maintained the encounter was consensual, but local police who had investigated the incident at the time, and Hegseth’s own lawyer confirmed that Hegseth had paid the accuser a settlement as part of a nondisclosure agreement. Weeks later, The New Yorker published a story detailing Hegseth’s alleged financial mismanagement and struggles with alcohol while president of Concerned Veterans for America and as a host on Fox News.

In late November, The New York Times obtained an email that Hegseth’s own mother had sent him in 2018. “You are an abuser of women—that is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego,” it read. “On behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way, I say…get some help and take an honest look at yourself.”

Mrs. Hegseth told the Times that she had immediately followed up to apologize to her son, because she had fired off the original email “in anger, with emotion.”

The controversy surrounding Hegseth overshadowed another cabinet pick Trump had made earlier on the same day: South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem to be secretary of Homeland Security. Like Hegseth, Noem had not been on the transition team’s list of possible candidates and had not gone through vetting for the job. When a surprised Trump advisor asked the president‑elect why he had decided to nominate Noem to be secretary of Homeland Security, he had a simple answer.

‘Retribution’ by Jonathan Karl

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“I did it for Corey,” Trump said. “It’s the only thing Corey asked me for.”

Trump was referring to Corey Lewandowski, the Republican operative who had served as his first of three campaign managers during his 2016 run for the White House. Lewandowski was not well-liked among Trump’s advisors, but his loyalty to Trump had never wavered—and he had developed a close personal relationship with Governor Noem.

That Trump would offer Noem a high‑profile job was no surprise. She had long been a defender of his, and in 2020 she had gifted him a model of Mount Rushmore with five faces etched into the side: George Washington’s, Thomas Jefferson’s, Teddy Roosevelt’s, Abraham Lincoln’s, and . . . Donald Trump’s. The former president kept it on display in his Mar‑a‑Lago office for years.

But secretary of the Department of Homeland Security is one of the most consequential positions in any presidential administration, and it would only take on even more importance in Trump’s, given the agenda he was planning to pursue. And the reviews of Noem’s tenure as governor of South Dakota were mixed at best, marked by ethics concerns and allegations she used taxpayer resources to boost her national political profile. She had so alienated South Dakota’s Native American leaders that all nine of the nationally recognized tribes banned her from their lands, effectively forbidding the governor from entering approximately 17 percent of the state. And then there was the controversy surrounding a book she published in 2024, in which she wrote about shooting her family’s fourteen‑month‑old dog Cricket because she was misbehaving and stated that she had met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un (she later acknowledged no such meeting happened).

Was Noem really qualified to run the sprawling agency that includes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the Secret Service? Even some of Trump’s closest allies were uncomfortable with putting her in charge of all that.

“We still got the global war on terror,” an exasperated Steve Bannon told me two days after Trump made the announcement. “She runs the whole thing? She runs the fucking Secret Service? It’s all of it. It’s the global war on terror. It’s all that. What are you talking about? She’s never been in law enforcement!”

But Bannon didn’t put the blame on Trump for making what he considered a terrible choice. He blamed Lewandowski for convincing the president‑elect to do it.

“This motherfucker asked for somebody who’s obviously unqualified—and it’s dangerous,” Bannon said. “This is dangerous. What are you doing?”

Pete Hegseth was far from the only Fox News personality to be angling for a job in the second Trump administration—and far from the only one to eventually make it into government. Sean Duffy, a former Republican member of Congress and Fox Business anchor, was interested in a role, and Trump enjoyed watching him on television. More importantly, Trump was a big fan of Duffy’s wife, Rachel Campos‑Duffy, who had been working alongside Hegseth as the co‑host of Fox & Friends Weekend.

Duffy’s top choice for a cabinet role was US Ambassador to the United Nations. He had no foreign policy or diplomatic experience, but he found the job appealing for a completely unrelated, logistical reason: It was based in New York, due to the location of the UN headquarters. Not only would he not have to uproot his nine children and move to Washington, DC, but Rachel could continue anchoring Fox & Friends Weekend from the show’s studios in Manhattan.

Alas, Trump had already decided to offer the United Nations job to Representative Elise Stefanik.

Reince Priebus, Trump’s former White House chief of staff, suggested that Trump make Duffy secretary of transportation instead. This was an odd recommendation. Duffy had a colorful biography—in addition to his Fox Business experience, he had been a reality TV star on MTV’s Real World, served four terms in the House of Representatives, won three lumberjack world championships, and worked as a local prosecutor in Wisconsin and a lobbyist in Washington— but he had no relevant experience for the job.

When Trump asked a friend of Duffy’s if he knew anything about transportation, the friend answered, “Of course he does, he has nine kids!” Moving a family that large around, the friend joked, requires at least some transportation expertise.

Unsurprisingly, Duffy’s name had not been on the transition’s list of possible transportation secretaries. Lutnick had recommended a former senior executive at Uber named Emil Michael for the role, and Elon Musk had seconded that suggestion, believing Michael’s experience at a big tech company that had revolutionized urban transportation would make him an ideal candidate to shake up the federal agency. Trump, however, had never heard of the guy—and that made him a nonstarter.

When Lutnick found out Trump was leaning toward Duffy for the role, he tried to shut the idea down. Making a case against him on the lack of merits wasn’t working—sir, the man has no relevant experience—so Lutnick tried to appeal to the president‑elect’s ego instead, tasking his team with searching through Duffy’s hundreds of television appearances to find any criticism of Trump. It took a while, as Duffy and his wife, Rachel, were unabashed Trump enthusiasts and had been for years. Lutnick’s team had to go back nearly a decade—to the early days of the 2016 Republican presidential primary—to find anything Duffy had said that was remotely negative about Donald Trump.

Lutnick finally found a September 2015 interview in which the then‑congressman had said he didn’t believe Trump was a real conservative and didn’t think he would win the party’s nomination. But even back then, Duffy had praised Trump for “boldly speaking and saying things that the conservative wing wished that their leaders would say.”

As weak as Lutnick’s effort to dig up dirt turned out to be, that one stray comment from almost ten years earlier nearly cost Duffy the job. Trump, reconsidering the pick, called Duffy and his wife, Rachel, and they were able to convince the president‑elect that Sean had long since changed his views on Trump’s conservative bona fides. On November 18, Trump made his decision final: “The husband of a wonderful woman, Rachel Campos‑Duffy, a STAR on Fox News, and the father of nine incredible children, Sean knows how important it is for families to be able to travel safely, and with peace of mind.”