Testing Trump’s vise grip on the GOP

Testing Trump’s vise grip on the GOP Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the preparations, personnel decisions and policy deliberations of Donald Trump’s transition. The push to derail some of the president-elect’s appointees will stand as an early test of whether Trump-skeptical Republicans and anti-Trump actors will be able to, as former GOP Rep. JOE WALSH recently put it, “productively throw rocks” at the incoming administration and its allies on the Hill — or whether their already-limited influence has vanished entirely in the wake of Trump’s second win. Trump’s team quickly dismissed The Lincoln Project’s efforts, with STEVEN CHEUNG, Trump’s incoming White House communications director, casting the group as “stone-cold losers” who “are trying to keep their grift going by spreading lies and untruths about President Trump’s highly qualified nominees.” We’re already seeing limits to this strategy — and, more broadly, to pushback against Trump from within the Republican tent. Sen. LISA MURKOWSKI acknowledged at a No Labels conference in D.C. last week that standing up to Trump is “going to be hard in these next four years.” “You have an administration coming in that has had an opportunity to kind of see how things work, what didn’t work, and now they’ve had four years to think about it, she said, “and the approach is going to be: ‘Everybody toe the line.’” Irie Sentner contributed to this report. He’s joined by PAUL DABBAR, the undersecretary for science during the first Trump administration, and WELLS GRIFFITH, who held numerous roles at the Trump DOE and White House And our NICK NIEDZWIADEK reports that the DOL landing team includes Virginia Secretary of Labor BRYAN SLATER, former Equal Employment Opportunity Commission member KEITH SONDERLING and health care executive THOMAS BECK.