Mike Pence to play key role in Trump’s transition team

For most of his insurgent campaign, Donald Trump was a one-man show. He dominated the airwaves and the Twittersphere, casting himself as the strongman who could fix Washington and Make America Great Again.

But in the run-up to his historic upset, a few key players have been helping the candidate prepare for government, chief among them his vice-presidential running mate Mike Pence, the Indiana governor, two-term Republican congressman and born-again Christian.

Mr Pence has Irish connections; his great-grandmother came from Doonbeg, Co Clare, home to Mr Trump’s Irish golf resort.

Mr Pence's grandfather, Richard Michael Cawley, emigrated to the US from Tubercurry, Co Sligo. He passed through the immigration station at Ellis Island in New York on April 11th, 1923. Growing up, Mr Pence was reportedly close to his grandfather, who worked as a bus driver in Chicago.

Trump insiders predict Mr Pence will play a dominant role on Mr Trump's transition team, picking key personnel to fill top spots in the new administration and building bridges with Congress to pass future legislation.

“Mike Pence will be a very powerful vice-president,” a longtime associate of Mr Trump said.

Mr Pence, occasionally embarrassed by Mr Trump’s outbursts and revelations of his lewd conduct, helped steady the campaign, with a self-deprecating, Midwestern manner. His reasonable policy stances matched both those of mainstream Republicans and the Christian right.

Crucially, Mr Pence is also seen as close to Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan, who clashed publicly with Mr Trump but who will play a vital role in whether the president-elect's platform can translate into policy and law.

"Pence is one of the best legislative (politicians) in history and so you have natural partnership. . . he is key," said Thomas Barrack, the founder of Colony Capital and one of Mr Trump's economic advisers.

‘Drain the swamp’

As an outsider with no previous political experience, Mr Trump sold himself as the only candidate who could “drain the swamp” of Washington. But to achieve his ambitious agenda of change, he will rely on seasoned Republican operatives.

Rounding out the top-three loyalists are Rudy Giuliani, the mayor of New York during the September 11 terrorist attacks, and Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House of Representatives who led the calls for impeachment against Bill Clinton.

Mr Giuliani, a hard-edged former prosecutor, is seen as a potential attorney-general. Mr Gingrich, a bookish but bombastic TV personality, is considered a possible future secretary of state, however some Trump allies say senator Bob Corker is now the leading candidate.

While it is still early days, there are other clues emerging about the identities of the people likely to shape a President Trump’s views and policies after a campaign dominated by character assassination and scandal.

Beyond political heavyweights such as Mr Gingrich and Mr Giuliani, Mr Trump also relies on his family, notably his daughter Ivanka, and her husband Jared Kushner who at critical junctures intervened to encourage Mr Trump to shake up his campaign, and get rid of troublesome managers and operatives.

They also encouraged him to hire Kellyanne Conway, as his third and final campaign manager, the woman who many say is largely responsible for humanising Mr Trump and tempering his outbursts.

Reince Priebus, the 44 year-old chairman of the Republican National Committee and a staunch backer of Mr Trump during the election, was on stage with Mr Trump on Wednesday morning and is also expected to remain closely involved.

Although Mr Trump regularly railed against Wall Street big business, he is likely to draw heavily on conservative finance and business figures.

Among those touted for top economic positions are Steve Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs executive frequently mentioned by Trump allies as a possible Treasury secretary, and Wilbur Ross, a distressed asset investor.

White House

The conservative columnist Lawrence Kudlow, a former official in the Reagan White House who once worked as chief economist at Bear Stearns, is another senior member of the campaign team, as is Steve Moore, an economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation who helped draw up Mr Trump's tax plans.

“I think Mr Trump’s going to be open to anybody who is open to him,” said Dan DiMicco, former chief executive of steelmaker Nucor and one of Mr Trump’s senior advisers. “People are going to want to go back to getting things done for the country.”

The make-up of Mr Trump's foreign policy team is a lot less clear. Throughout his campaign, Mr Trump lashed out at US allies, questioned the value of Nato and pushed for softer policies towards Russia. This led several dozen top national security experts to publicly denounce his candidacy.

So far on national security, he has turned to Michael Flynn, a former head of the Defence Intelligence Agency, who has been a regular analyst on Russia Today, the Russian-backed television network, as well as Keith Kellogg, who has worked in the private sector since helping run the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad after the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

But he has also relied on heavily on fringe figures, such as Walid Phares, a Middle East analyst who has come in for criticism for his ties to a Christian armed faction in Lebanon's civil war in the 1980s, and Carter Page, a former investment banker in Moscow who is said to have shaped Mr Trump's softer policies towards the Kremlin.

Economics

On economic policy, Mr Trump and Mr Pence share an affection for the brand of supply-side economics championed by Jack Kemp, the late Republican congressman and acolyte of Ronald Reagan's gospel of deregulation and small government.

Stephen Moore, an economic adviser to Mr Trump and president of the Club For Growth, said slashing regulation and pushing through a tax Bill would be among the administration’s early priorities, and predicted that business tax reform, which include proposed cuts to the headline rate to make the US more competitive internationally, would be easier to achieve in Congress than planned income tax cuts. Mr Trump’s tax proposals would lower rates for a range of income groups including the wealthy, with the top earners set to rank among the chief beneficiaries.

“The tax plan is the heart of the economic recovery agenda for Donald Trump,” Mr Moore said.

Mr Trump drew on a wide-ranging array of conservative figures to pull together his economic platform. Among the other important players has been Peter Navarro of the University of California's Paul Merage School of Business, an economist who produced the film Death by China, a documentary featuring animated Chinese aircraft bombing the US.

Mr Navarro argued in a September analysis with Mr Ross that Mr Trump’s trade, regulatory and energy reforms would be so positive for growth that his tax-cutting plans would be fiscally neutral.

This assertion, disputed by other economists, is likely to provoke unease among Republican fiscal conservatives. An analysis by the independent Tax Policy Center recently estimated Mr Trump’s tax cuts would drive a $7.2tn increase in the federal debt over a decade.

- Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2016