When making plans for his potential presidential transition, Donald Trump is looking to a right-wing think tank staffed by former members of his administration and MAGA acolytes. No, not to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025—which has become the rock tied to the ankle of the Trump campaign—but the America First Policy Institute.
The group will create its own “America First Transition Project” to kick off Trump’s next term, according to a report from Politico published Thursday.
Earlier this month, Trump named Linda McMahon, the chair of the Trumpist think tank’s board, to co-lead his transition team—an announcement that came abnormally late in the election cycle. A former professional wrestling executive, McMahon previously served as the head of the Small Business Administration during Trump’s presidency, and then as chair of a pro-Trump super PAC that raised $83 million for Trump in 2020.
One lobbyist told Politico that AFPI was “in the driver’s seat” of the Trump team’s potential transition.
“AFPI is not becoming the transition,” another person familiar with the Trump team’s transition preparations told Politico. “But by virtue of how they are situated and that we are in a very late timeline for this work, AFPI and the transition may be a distinction without a difference.”
Kellyanne Conway, who chairs AFPI’s Center for the American Child, explained what the think tank had been working on since Trump’s last administration.
“For three and a half years, AFPI has focused on personnel and policy. It was formed by and is teeming with senior staffers from the first Trump Administration whose goal is to be ready on day one,” Conway explained. “Linda McMahon, Brooke Rollins and the team have planned with precision and executed with put-your-head-down type humility.”
Rollins previously served as Trump’s former Domestic Policy Council director.
According to an early memo, the group’s staffers have done extensive research on the “management, personnel, policy, financial, and administrative” strategies behind running the federal government and conducted more than one thousand interviews with former administration officials. The group has reportedly analyzed every one of Joe Biden’s executive actions and drafted more than a hundred of their own proposed ones, according to Politico.
Because the group has 501(c)(3) nonprofit status, it does not disclose its donors, but it is well-funded, raking in $23.6 million in 2022. As a nonprofit, AFPI cannot openly support a candidate for office, and thus far it has not directly claimed any influence in the Trump campaign—possibly learning from the mistakes of the Heritage Foundation, from which Trump has tried and failed to distance himself.
But at the end of the day, AFPI isn’t so different from the conservative think tanks that have crashed and burned before it. While the official plan is still being built out, the group’s broad agenda hits on many familiar conservative beats. The group advocates to finish building Trump’s border wall, to deregulate the federal government and limit spending, as well as to increase oil and gas production.
The vehemently anti-union AFPI has attacked unions at the Veterans Administration and the Transportation Security Administration. McMahon has previously advocated for right-to-work laws, which would bankrupt unions by allowing non-union workers to enjoy the benefits of collective bargaining without paying “fair share” fees.
AFPI has also aligned itself with election deniers in Georgia and is currently backing a lawsuit against Fulton County by its own election board official Julie Adams, who is seeking a court ruling on whether her duty to certify election results is “discretionary, not ministerial, in nature,” according to the suit.
