Trump builds no-nonsense team as pollster predicts he could rival

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Donald Trump sent an unmistakable message with his first few personnel choices for his second term, dispatching to the halls of power players like Elise Stefanik, Tom Homan, Lee Zeldin and Stephen Miller who take a no-nonsense approach to their jobs and will focus on everyday Americans’ wants and needs rather than those of global elitists and Washington special interests.

And if the president-elect’s new team can stay focused on making America affordable again by defeating inflation, making the country secure again by fixing the border and rounding up criminals and restoring common sense to public policies from energy to transgenderism, one of the nation’s top pollsters believes he can cement a lofty place in history.

“Donald Trump now has the opportunity to become the most influential president since Ronald Reagan,” pollster Scott Rasmussen wrote Monday in a private report to clients of his Napolitan Institute.

“If over the next four years he and the Republican Congress can achieve the three main priorities established by the American people, he will have presided over a fundamental political realignment and paved the way for ongoing GOP success.”

You can read that memo here.

Rasmussen cautioned, however, that Trump’s legacy of impact will be determined by how well he can align a Congress that often finds excuses not to act behind executing his agenda.

“Trump’s lasting influence and the potential realignment are far from assured,” Rasmussen wrote. “They depend entirely upon whether or not the incoming administration can do what voters are hoping for: making the economy work, securing the border, and returning to common sense about gender identity. If they fail, voters will move on, and the Trump era will be just a blip in the nation’s history.”

The need for a GOP Congress to act in convincing ways in 2025 led one of Trump’s former advisers to urge the president-elect to intervene in Wednesday’s battle for Senate majority leader, which pits establishment Sens. John Thune and John Cornyn against Florida’s Rick Scott, who has increasingly become a MAGA favorite.

“I would like to see President Trump full throatedly say who he wants,” former White House aide Seb Gorka told the Just the News, No Noise television show Monday night. “And I would like that to be Scott because otherwise the swamp has that magnetic, huge, sucking vacuum power, and they’ll do what they normally do. So a public, you know, pro Scott action from the president is what we’ve got to see. That’s my humble request, Mr. President.”

No matter how the Senate leader race ends, Trump has already filled early positions on his team with get-it-done leaders who are more interested in execution than limelight.

That begins with his new White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, the first women ever to assume the job and who as campaign manager helped engineer Trump’s historic political comeback.

Wiles sent a powerful message to her future staff early last Wednesday when she declined to take the podium or take any credit when Trump asked her to speak at his victory speech.

Interpreted: Actions speak louder than words in the Trump 2.0 universe.

Those who have been invited onto Trump’s team so far share similar traits. They are tough. They have taken on Herculean battles and succeeded. And they focus more on executing plans than engineering television victory laps.

At just 40, Stefanik rose quickly inside the ranks of the House GOP to the No. 4 position of Conference chairwoman, winning accolades for recruiting more winning female candidates to the Republican ticket.

In the last year, she led the relentless crusade to kneecap Ivy League presidents for allowing antisemitism to rage on their campuses and creating a hostile environment for Jewish students.

Her prosecutorial-like questioning and firm actions led to the resignation of two of the university presidents and widespread reforms. She will likely flash more of that tenacity at the United Nations, an organization with similar antisemitism and anti-American sentiments that has had to admit some of its workers had allegiances to the terror group Hamas and may have aided in the Oct. 7, 2023, atrocities against Israel.

During his time in Congress, Zeldin was part of a small team of House Republicans that banded together to take on the FBI and intelligence community and its false narrative of Russia collusion. He then nearly pulled off the most improbable election win of 2022, falling just a few points short of winning the governorship in dark blue New York.

Over the last year, Zeldin played an unheralded but essential role in helping forge a coalition to will reluctant Republicans into the absentee and early voting game they had eschewed for years at their own peril. Backed by the late Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, Zeldin paired with America First Works to assemble a vote-chasing machine that got several million low-propensity voters to the polls early in a huge win for the Trump campaign and down ticket races.

Former Rep. Doug Collins told Just the News on Monday night that Zeldin is perfectly suited to be a transformational figure as the leader of the Environmental Protection Agency, taking over an agency that is a golden calf for liberal climate change activists and a pariah for conservatives and business advocates who argue its regulation is stifling the economy and freedom.

Zeldin will likely “start off by doing as best he can to slim down this organization and get it right sized,” Collins predicted. “You know, again, that’s going to be difficult. There’s a lot of government unions and other things to think about. But let’s, let’s say you don’t have to fund, you don’t have to fill positions. There are things that you can do to get this agency back into a right size.”

Miller was the architect of many of Trump’s first-term illegal immigration crackdowns and border initiatives, and during the four years Trump was out of office he turned America First Legal into a powerhouse that waged counter-lawfare against Democrats.

Miller’s group scored numerous legal wins that exposed or blocked Biden-Harris administration initiatives, including a ruling this month that blocked a Biden plan to grant administrative amnesty and a pathway to citizenship to hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens.

Homan is a no-nonsense lawman who served as Trump’s first term acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, where he oversaw the deportation of large numbers of illegal aliens let into the country under former President Barack Obama.

Over the last two years, Homan has worked to help families who lost loved ones to the fentanyl crisis while crafting blueprints to re-secure the southern border and deport the estimated 14 million illegal aliens believed to have entered the country under Biden and Harris.

In naming Homan border czar, Trump declared, “there is nobody better at policing and controlling our Borders.

“Likewise, Tom Homan will be in charge of all Deportation of Illegal Aliens back to their Country of Origin. Congratulations to Tom. I have no doubt he will do a fantastic, and long awaited for, job.”

In congressional hearings, Homan showed the steely grit that Trump likes in his inner circle, smacking down the likes of Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for suggesting illegal aliens weren’t criminals. And in a contentious interview with the CBS News show 60 Minutes last month, Homan gave a matter-of-fact answer when asked a gotcha question about whether there was a way to conduct mass deportations without separating families.

“Of course there is. Families can be deported together,” he answered.

Rasmussen, the pollster, said the key to success for a Trump second term is as simple as the three basic promises he made on the campaign trail: secure the border, defeat inflation and reverse the insanity of far left policies like allowing men in women’s sports.