Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Tina Nguyen.

The Trump campaign has spent months swatting down rumors about who would be staffing his potential second administration, even openly threatening to shame and exile people and projects floating their names for jobs. But it’s hard to ignore the speculation when there is so much money pouring into the coffers of the competing think tanks and other assorted entities promising to prefabricate an entire federal government for Trump, and to help fill all the top administrative roles. Of course, Trump would probably rather make the top contenders fight for it.

As always, send thoughts, tips, and hot goss my way, but this week I’ma shake it up a bit: If you’re likely to watch or attend WrestleMania this weekend—which, judging from our specific crossover readership of entertainment executives and senior Republican staffers, is not a small number—hit me up with your predictions of how that Night One tag team match will go. (If you know, you know.) I don’t have Puck hats to give out. But you will win an even greater prize: my admiration.

But first, here’s Abby Livingston with the latest from Capitol Hill, by way of Sin City…

• The comps: The Toss Up rating puts Rosen’s reelection chances on the same tier as Jon Tester’s in Montana and Sherrod Brown’s in Ohio. The open-seat race to replace retiring Arizona independent Kyrsten Sinema is also a Toss Up. What separates Rosen’s race from the other two incumbents, however, is that while Biden is largely not contesting Montana and Ohio, Nevada will be at the epicenter of the Electoral College battle. There are also three Las Vegas-area House seats held by Democrats—Dina Titus, Steven Horsford, and Susie Lee—that are rated at least mildly competitive. The ad traffic jam that’s coming to Sin City is already making strategists tear their hair out over skyrocketing rates and scant inventory.
• The cash dynamic: Sam Brown officially entered the race only a few weeks ago, but he’s been raising money for months, reporting $1.7 million in cash on hand in December, compared with Rosen’s $10.6 million. Rosen’s current advantage is especially important in the television-spending context because federal candidates can secure lower ad rates than outside groups—which are sure to spend big in Nevada as well.

  To be fair, though, these are ancient fundraising numbers—dating back to December 31. We will get up-to-date F.E.C. reports on April 15, the deadline for reporting first-quarter numbers.

• The Biden of it all…: Taylor also implied that the remaining senators in Lean Democratic races could see their rating shift to Toss Up if Biden’s political standing does not improve. Those senators include Pennsylvania’s Bob Casey Jr., Wisconsin’s Tammy Baldwin, and Michigan’s open race to replace retiring Democrat Debbie Stabenow.

But the real action of staffing a Trump White House will be occurring closer to Trump himself. Presidential candidates typically establish transition teams in Washington, where they are separate from the campaign, and where staffers can meet and evaluate the thousands of potential employees required to run the federal government. Trump, however, plans to establish his transition directly from the comfort of Mar-a-Lago, according to three people in the know. Also unlike previous transition teams, I’m told, staffers on the committee will have direct access to Trump, too. As a result, whomever ultimately chairs the group is more likely to be a gatekeeper than a true decision-maker—though gatekeeping is a tall order given the fates of his four White House chiefs of staff. “They’ve learned nothing,” sighed a former Trump administration official, predicting more 2016-style mayhem.

Trump allies remember well the chaos of that first transition, led first by Chris Christie, then tossed to Mike Pence, and then hastily taken up by Jared Kushner when Trump actually won, surprising even members of his campaign. Infighting and division were rampant, and by the second day of his presidency, Trump had filled only 500 of the thousands of open positions. The result was a first-year revolving door of firings and defenestrations (Flynn, Comey, Dubke, Spicer, Priebus, Bannon, Scaramucci, Gorka, and a dozen others) and ineffective policy-making, too. The latter is the raison d’être of the dueling turnkey staffing outfits, both of which believe a fully vetted and prefabricated MAGA government—staffers, policy playbooks, and all—can truly effectuate the Trump vision.

Nevertheless, there’s plenty of interest in the top job, such as it is. Over the past week, I’ve heard numerous names floated for the position: AFPI’s Brooke Rollins; 2020 campaign C.O.O. Michael Glassner; even MAGA dauphin Don Jr. Another name I heard, not surprisingly, is Trump co-campaign manager Susie Wiles, who has already proven herself adept at the delicate task of professionalizing the Trump operation without overstepping or upsetting the principal. “Whoever they pick to run the transition is a good indication of where the administration is heading,” the former Trump official told me. “If it’s a more establishment person, the administration is heading in an establishment direction. But if it’s someone with no experience in government, they probably won’t be successful because they won’t know what they’re doing.”

“Any speculation about [the] transition is totally fake, coming from misinformed sources who have no idea what is going on,” a Trump campaign spokesperson told me. “Announcements will be done on our time and choosing, when we are ready. We are keeping track of those individuals who are purposefully making their names public for positions they hope to get.”

Previous transition efforts for George Bush, Barack Obama, and Mitt Romney were staffed and run by people who either had extensive Washington connections or experience running major operations in the private sector. (Boston Consulting Group, in fact, put together a 271-page guide for finding the right people to staff a transition.) But one person’s extensive experience is another person’s establishment swampiness, especially when the “ideal candidate” knows better than to tell Trump that a desired action would be improper, illegal, or unconstitutional. “He doesn’t want somebody who’s gonna do a completely—I hate to say it—professional job of putting together a transition,” a Republican insider put it. “He wants somebody to be closely in communication with him to basically do what he wants, day to day, all the time. And personnel-wise, he wants people whose only mantra is: Whatever the president wants, we’re gonna do.”

The irony is that, for all the preparations Project 2025 and AFPI took, and for all their sniping with each other, each group is now uniquely handicapped. “Heritage ostensibly is an independent think tank,” explained the Republican insider. “They have donors and a board, and they have at least some layer of independence. They’re gonna want to be helpful to Trump. But they’re not, like, obliged to be helpful to Trump.” AFPI, on the other hand, was built by ex-Trump officials “100 percent beholden” to him, the insider said, but given how young the group is, their talent bench is thin compared to the staffers involved in Project 2025. “AFPI has a leg up in the loyalty piece,” he joked, “but in the robustness of finding some person that can handle [leading], like, the Bureau of Labor Statistics at the Department of Labor, Heritage is going to find the person.”

Right-wing ideologues with immense knowledge but diminished power clashing with malleable sycophants who can whisper in Trump’s ear but have limited policy experience—this already sounds like a disaster in the making. And then there’s the plutocratic billionaire clique wooing Trump for cabinet positions, as my partner Tara Palmeri recently reported. Those titans might be straight from central casting and make Trump look better, but they also inevitably harbor an aversion to the dowdy conservative think tankers of Washington (who, in turn, despise billionaires muscling in on their territory out of principle), and likely couldn’t staff the other 5,500-plus jobs that require intense specialization and insane hours for government-scheduled pay. (“That’s real work,” joked the insider.)

The key reason to keep the transition at Mar-a-Lago, however, has little to do with what exactly a potential appointee could bring to the administration, and more to do with weeding out people who are likely to directly contradict Trump—whether out of disobedience, self-righteousness, or self-preservation. “Trump’s overall thing that he has learned from his last go-round as president is that he’s like, ‘I don’t want people who are going to tell me no, and I don’t want people who are gonna say, ‘This is not feasible, Mr. President,’” the insider told me. “Like, ‘When I want to have a military parade in Washington, D.C., I don’t want Jim Mattis saying, “We can’t have tanks going down Constitution Avenue because it’s gonna tear up the streets and it’s just gonna be too expensive.” I don’t want that. I want yes.’”