Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), the No. 2 Senate Republican, said on Thursday that he would prefer incoming President Donald Trump not publicly endorse in the three-way race to succeed GOP Leader Mitch McConnell.

Thune, during an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” acknowledged that Trump “could exert a considerable amount of influence” on the race if he wanted to, but added: “My preference would be, and I think it’s probably in his best interest, to stay of that. These Senate secret ballot elections are probably best left to senators, and he’s got to work with all of us when it’s all said and done.”

Thune and Trump have a complicated history, but the South Dakota Republican has worked to repair their relationship. The two have spoken several times, and allies of the both men now believe they are in a good spot. Furthermore, Thune is echoing advice that several other GOP senators, including some of the former president’s allies, have said publicly: That he should stay out of the internal leadership race.

But some conservatives are pushing Trump to enter the race. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said Thursday that Trump should endorse Florida Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who has been actively courting Trump’s support.

Donald Trump will have some catch-up to do in filling his Cabinet.

In the throes of a tight campaign, he didn’t engage in formal conversations about Cabinet posts. But that didn’t stop him from spitballing potential contenders during his frequent plane rides to campaign events, or when he is impressed by one of his allies on television. So the starting point for him will be those conversations.

“He would be great at this,” or “She would be great at that,” Trump has said on recent occasions while watching surrogates on television, according to a person with knowledge of his comments who was granted anonymity to speak freely. And like with his monthslong search for a running mate, the TV circuit became an important venue for the aggressive jockeying underway by allies eager to secure a Cabinet job.

Some candidates for the Cabinet have even hired their own public relations teams.

Trump’s first Cabinet was confirmed at a slow pace, due to Democrats slow-walking the process, only to see high turnover in those top jobs during his four years in office.

Despite all the chatter, the Trump campaign said during the campaign that Trump isn’t touching the issue yet.

“There have been no discussions about who will serve in a second Trump administration,” his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said this fall. “President Trump is focused on winning the election and when he does, he will then choose the best people to help him make America great again.”

Here’s our guide on the leading contenders for Trump’s top jobs.

Vivian Jenna Wilson, the transgender daughter of Elon Musk, says she is leaving the U.S. over Donald Trump’s return to the White House.

“I’ve thought this for a while, but yesterday confirmed it for me. I don’t see my future being in the United States,” she said in a Threads post on Wednesday. “Even if he’s only in office for 4 years, even if the anti-trans regulations magically don’t happen, the people who willingly voted this in are not going anywhere anytime soon.”

Twenty-year-old Wilson is estranged from her father, who poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Trump’s campaign and has the ear of the president-elect.

Trump has said he would restrict gender-affirming care, bar transgender women from women’s sports teams and keep transgender people from using facilities that align with their gender identity as president.

Musk said in a July interview that Wilson was “killed by the woke mind virus,” and that he had been “tricked” into authorizing gender-affirming care for her. In response to Musk’s comments, Wilson described her father as “cold,” “very quick to anger” and “narcissistic” in an interview with NBC News.

Gov. JB Pritzker spoke to reporters Thursday for the first time since Donald Trump’s victory, saying he expects to work with the next administration, but he issued a warning.

“You come for my people, you come through me,” Pritzker said, referring to the minority and underserved communities of Illinois who remember the “chaos, retribution and disarray radiated from the White House the last time Donald Trump occupied.”

Pritzker, who served as a surrogate to Kamala Harris’ campaign, said his administration “was not unprepared” for a Trump win.

Pritzker said his administration has worked with the Democratic-led General Assembly to take “proactive steps” to shore up abortion rights and other laws that could draw scrutiny under a Trump White House. And he said Illinois would take action if the Trump administration were to circumvent government grants that were headed to Illinois. The governor said he’s had similar conversations with fellow Democratic governors around the country.

“We have like minds about protecting certain rights and making sure that we’re going to be able to withstand four years of a Donald Trump presidency and also the areas where we might work with the administration, whatever those may be,” he said.

Pritzker’s comments weren’t as inflammatory as they were on the campaign trail, when he was known to refer to Trump as racist, homophobic and xenophobic, but they were just as pointed.

The Illinois governor who is also seen as a possible presidential candidate in 2028 said Americans should be “focused on a peaceful transition of power, even if Donald Trump didn’t afford that to his successor.”

Pritzker told reporters it was too early to offer an explanation as to why Democrats failed to win over swing-state voters, including in neighboring Wisconsin, where thousands of Illinois Democrats canvassed over the past two months on behalf of Harris’ campaign.

“I haven’t seen anybody show up with an analysis of the data. There are a lot of people with opinions, and certainly Republicans are spouting off their opinions about what Democrats have done wrong in order to lose an election,” Pritzker said. “But the reality is, it’s going to take a little while, I think, before we have real answers.”

Illinois remained a blue state after the election, but Trump even made inroads here, including in the Democratic enclave of Chicago.

Gail Slater and Michael Kratsios are handling tech policy during the Trump transition, according to a person familiar with the matter. The person said the decision was made roughly two months ago and that the two want to hear from a “diverse set of stakeholders” in their work.

Kratsios served as chief technology officer during president-elect Donald Trump’s first term. He was one of the authors of Trump’s 2020 artificial intelligence executive order, meant to supercharge AI research investment, federal computing and data resources, set technical standards, build up the American AI workforce and engage with international allies on the technology.

More recently, Kratsios has worked as managing director at Scale AI, an AI startup that has secured some notable Department of Defense contracts.

Slater serves as economic policy adviser to vice president-elect JD Vance. She previously held top executive roles at Roku, Fox Corp. and the now-defunct tech industry trade group The Internet Association.

Slater worked for Trump during his first term as a special assistant to the president on tech, telecom and cybersecurity issues. She was an ally of the wireless industry and advocated for a free-market approach to 5G wireless technology.

The Trump transition team did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Kratsios and Slater declined to comment.

John Hendel contributed to this report.

DNC Chair Jaime Harrison hit back at Sen. Bernie Sanders’ claim that the Democratic Party has “abandoned working-class people” as “straight up BS.”

“This is straight up BS … Biden was the most-pro worker President of my life time — saved Union pensions, created millions of good paying jobs and even marched in a picket line and some of MVP’s plans would have fundamentally transformed the quality of life and closed the racial wealth gap for working people across this country,” Harrison wrote on X Thursday.

“There are a lot of post election takes and this one ain’t a good one,” he continued.

Harrison’s remarks come after the progressive senator and former presidential primary candidate claimed the Democratic Party “defends the status quo” after Vice President Kamala Harris’ resounding loss to Donald Trump.

“Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign?” Sanders, a Vermont independent who caucuses with Democrats, said in a statement Wednesday.

President Joe Biden praised Vice President Kamala Harris for running “an inspiring campaign” and called on the country to unite behind a fair election during his first public remarks since President-elect Donald Trump’s victory.

“The will of the people always prevails,” Biden told a group of his staffers, Cabinet members and some family members in the Rose Garden Thursday. He added, “I’ve said many times: You can’t love your country only when you win. You can’t love your neighbor only when you agree.”

Biden, who spoke to Trump Wednesday to congratulate him on his victory and invite him to a White House meeting, commended Harris as having “a backbone like a ramrod” amid her decisive loss.

The president is already facing heat from fellow Democrats who blame him for not stepping aside from his reelection campaign soon enough, squandering Harris’ chances at winning.

But Biden praised his legacy as leaving behind “the strongest economy in the world” and called on members of his administration to “make every day count” before passing the torch in a peaceful transfer of power.

He also repeated his call for Americans to “bring down the temperature” amid deep political divisions.

“Setbacks are unavoidable, but giving up is unforgivable,” Biden stressed, adding, “We’re going to be okay, but we need to stay engaged.”

Donald Trump is leaning on many of the people who served in top positions in his first administration to help prepare an aggressive set of policies he plans to pursue right out of the gate. The result is an administration that will be better prepared than in 2016 to implement Trump’s priorities soon after the inauguration — especially on core agenda items like trade and tariffs.

The Trump transition is formally being led by former Trump Small Business Administration chief Linda McMahon, who is handling the policy side, and billionaire financier Howard Lutnick, who is overseeing the personnel vetting. Lutnick, one of the few members of the team who did not work for Trump’s White House, has been the public face of the operation thus far, while drawing scrutiny for his potential conflicts of interest and combative appearances on cable news.

The policy preparations have been far lower-profile — by design, given the backlash the conservative Heritage Foundation attracted for its Project 2025 blueprint for a second Trump administration. But behind the scenes, the Trump transition is leaning on a diffuse roster of former Trump administration officials, according to conversations with 16 people familiar with Trump transition planning, who were granted anonymity to discuss confidential operations.

A small sample includes:

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, who is crafting trade and economic plans, along with Jamieson Greer, Lighthizer’s former chief of staff
Special envoy for Iran Brian Hook, who is involved with preparing a Trump State Department
Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, who is involved with national security personnel and policy planning
Office of Management and Budget general counsel Mark Paoletta, who is helping craft the policy playbook for the Justice Department

Interior Secretary David Bernhardt

A former Trump administration official with knowledge of the discussions said transition officials are mindful of the lessons from the 2016 transition, and are keen to avoid the same turmoil. “They’re being more confidential about it. … They don’t want distractions and personnel stories popping up.”
The Trump transition did not respond to requests for comment.

Another person familiar with transition policy planning confirmed Lighthizer is crafting economic policy for the Treasury Department, the National Economic Council, the U.S. Trade Representative’s office, as is former Trump speechwriter Vince Haley, who is also working for the Trump campaign. Those figures are preparing an aggressive trade agenda for the first 100 days, which will likely include some executive action on tariffs, though the details are still being debated.

Lighthizer is also expected to assume a top economic role in the Trump administration.

“There’s one policy area that’s going to be defining for the second Trump administration, and that’s tariffs,” said the person with direct knowledge of policy planning. “And there’s a very small group of people working on that and it’s the most important part of the policy planning for the second administration.”

President-elect Donald Trump has promised a sharp, dramatic about-face on the Biden administration’s energy policies — including “drill, baby, drill” and a sharp drop in Americans’ fuel prices.

Meeting some of those pledges won’t be easy. Or quick. Federal bureaucracy grinds slowly, and the energy markets don’t move at presidents’ whims.

These are among the energy promises Trump pledged for Day 1 — and his odds of delivering on them:

Cutting energy bills in half — in a year: “If you make doughnuts, if you make cars — whatever you make, energy is a big deal, and we’re going to get that — it’s my ambition to get your energy bill within 12 months down 50 percent,” Trump promised at a rally in September.

That’s essentially an impossible goal, energy experts say.

Oil prices move on a global market, and a president can do little to significantly change them. The U.S. is already producing oil at peak levels. And while Trump is certain to remove regulations and ease permitting on fuel production, that won’t dramatically cut prices, and producers certainly don’t want to see prices bottom out.

“It’s going to be a struggle for him to be able to bend the system enough to be anywhere in the ballpark of cutting energy prices in half,” said Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy.com. “I would call it virtually impossible, short of an economic collapse, or short of something else that’s difficult to imagine at this point.”

Axing all price-raising regulations: “On Day 1, I will sign an executive order directing every federal agency to immediately remove every single burdensome regulation driving up the cost of goods,” Trump said while campaigning in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

But rescinding regulations finished by a previous administration takes time.

A new administration must make a robust case for why it’s pulling back, issue a proposal, take public comment and respond to those comments. For complex rulemakings, the process typically takes two or three years.

And opponents can sue. Almost 80 percent of the first Trump administration’s regulatory actions were defeated in court, the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law estimated.

Tying disaster aid to bending to Trump’s will: Trump made this threat explicit during a rally in California rally, saying he would force Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom to increase water deliveries to agriculture if he wanted disaster relief money.

“We’ll force it down his throat, and we’ll say, ‘Gavin, if you don’t do it, we’re not giving you any of that fire money that we send you all the time for all the forest fires that you have,’” Trump vowed.

This threat is legitimate. Federal law gives the president sole authority to approve or deny a governor’s request to declare their state a “major disaster” and reimburse states for millions — or billions — in recovery costs.

Read this story from POLITICO’s E&E News for more of a reality check on Trump’s Day 1 energy pledges.