The Battle of the Trump Transition

Nationalists, misfits, Reaganites, and dorks jockey for position.

- Sam Adler-Bell

THE PRESIDENTIAL TRANSITION is a curious ritual. Obviously, the stakes are high. Personnel is policy: Cabinet and staffing picks signal the administration's real priorities. And yet because these decisions take place during the interregnum, an uncanny period when the outgoing president is still in office (in body, if not in mind), a sense of pageantry and weightlessness attends the whole thing, as if the incoming president were merely casting a film about the White House.