The silent force behind the Trump transition

In mid-August, on the day that the Trump campaign announced the chairs of its long-awaited presidential transition team, former Trump aide Brooke Rollins appeared on Fox Business to weigh in on the selections. Her reviews were glowing: Linda McMahon, the World Wrestling Entertainment executive turned head of Trump’s Small Business Administration, was “remarkable,” Rollins told Fox viewers. Howard Lutnick, the billionaire Wall Street magnate and Trump megadonor, had “the trust of the president.” Their selection, Rollins gushed, marked “a great day for America,” especially for the ongoing efforts to “[reclaim] the country from the hands of the socialists.”

“If you put those two [people] together,” said Rollins, knitting her well-manicured fingers into an interlocking pattern in front of her chest, “it’s magic.”

The real magic of the moment, though, belonged to Rollins. Though she didn’t say so on air, Trump’s announcement represented a major victory for her. McMahon, a close friend and ally, is the chair of the America First Policy Institute, the pro-Trump think tank that Rollins co-founded in 2021. (AFPI’s other co-founder? Larry Kudlow, the former chair of Trump’s National Economic Council and Rollins’ host on Fox that day.) Trump’s selection of McMahon had sent an unambiguous message across the MAGA universe: AFPI — and, by extension, Rollins — had won the contest for influence over preparations for a second Trump administration.

But even during this moment of apparent triumph, Rollins did something unusual for most Washington insiders: She deflected credit away from herself, showering it on McMahon and Lutnick instead. This wasn’t some spontaneous display of humility. To the contrary, it was a tactic that people who know Rollins say she has used to uncanny effect in her rise from a little-known aide in the Trump White House to the driving force behind the Trump transition effort. Like every good sleight-of-hand artist, Rollins seemed to know that in order to work her magic, she first had to fix her audience’s gaze somewhere else.

This skill helps explain how Rollins has become one of the most important Republican operatives you’ve probably never heard of. Through careful maneuvering, Rollins has positioned herself and her organization, AFPI, at the center of the Trump universe without attracting the sort of public scrutiny or Mar-a-Lago melodrama that has torpedoed the careers of so many other ambitious Trump operatives. If Trump wins in November, Rollins will immediately become one of the most powerful conservatives in the country, wielding outsized influence over the shape of Trump’s agenda and the composition of his administration.

Although AFPI remains formally independent of Trump’s official transition team, it’s widely understood among conservative insiders in Washington that Rollins and AFPI hold the reins of the transition, having outmaneuvered other conservative groups — most notably the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 — for influence. Rollins has reportedly discussed AFPI’s plans with Trump, and at least two people affiliated with AFPI — former Trump administration officials Michael Rigas and Doug Hoelscher — are working directly with the transition. Meanwhile, conservative lobbyists are busy directing clients to meet with AFPI and reviewing the group’s plans for a second Trump administration. As a person familiar with the transition told POLITICO in August, “AFPI and the transition may be a distinction without a difference.”

But Rollins’ influence may not end with the transition. Though she has publicly disclaimed any desire to hold a senior position in a possible second Trump White House, her name is increasingly being whispered about in conservative circles as a leading candidate for Trump’s chief-of-staff post — a position that would allow her to exert unparalleled influence over personnel and policies of a second Trump administration. She is reportedly in the running for the top West Wing job along with Susie Wiles, Trump’s de facto campaign manager, and former House speaker Kevin McCarthy.

“President Trump thinks very highly of Brooke,” a senior Trump adviser told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the former president’s thinking. “He has said, ‘She could run any company in the country.’”

Despite her growing influence, Rollins remains a polarizing figure within the broader MAGA universe.

Among the nationalist-populist wing of the GOP, Rollins and her allies at AFPI are viewed as the rump faction of the old Republican establishment, dedicated to preserving the pre-Trump political orthodoxy that prioritizes free trade, deregulation, business-friendly economic policies and an expansive role for the U.S. on the global stage. During her stint in the Trump White House — which Rollins joined in 2018 as director of the little-known Office of American Innovation before becoming acting director of the Domestic Policy Council in 2020 — Rollins allied herself with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who was widely viewed as the leader of the White House’s more centrist and corporatist faction. With Kushner’s support, Rollins elevated criminal justice reform as a major issue within the Trump White House, putting her at odds with Trump’s more hardline advisers.

“She is a Bush conservative,” said a former Trump administration official, who was granted anonymity to discuss their experience working with Rollins. “She’s an unrepentant H.W. [Bush], Rick Perry [conservative] — that’s her ideology.”

This report is based on information from an extensive review of Rollins’ public statements, dozens of conversations with insiders and a half dozen interviews with people who have worked directly with Rollins — including some of her closest allies — most of whom agreed to be interviewed as long as they were not identified by name because of Rollins’ growing influence. In a written statement, a spokesperson for AFPI declined to comment directly on whether she would accept the chief of staff position and emphasized Rollins’ loyalty to Trump, writing, “In an administration where the weakly committed did not last, Brooke was on the team until the very end of term one.” A spokesperson for the Trump transition responded to a set of questions about Rollins’ role with a generic statement saying that “formal discussions about who will serve in a second Trump Administration is [sic] premature.”

To a degree, AFPI’s plans for a second Trump administration reflect Rollins’ more conventional orientation. Although the group’s policy agenda flicks at Trump-y issues like restricting immigration and “draining the swamp,” the bulk of its policy plans are devoted to traditional Republican priorities like slashing government regulation, extending business-friendly tax cuts and pursuing a foreign policy based around the Reaganite mandate of “peace through strength.” AFPI’s roster of staffers and advisers also reflects Rollins’ more pre-Trump leanings: Kudlow is a self-avowed proponent of free trade who has expressed skepticism about Trump’s more aggressive trade and tariff policies, and Chad Wolf, executive director of AFPI and the former acting director of the Department of Homeland Security under Trump, is viewed by some conservatives as a less effective advocate for immigration restriction than hardline Trump aides like Stephen Miller.

Rollins’ more conventional posture has raised questions about the motives behind her rise through the Trumpian ranks. In the eyes of her allies, her ascent been fueled by her managerial competence and unwavering loyalty the former president. To her skeptics, she’s pursuing something more elemental: “Power,” as one conservative insider familiar with the transition put it.

It has also raised questions about what Rollins’ influence could mean for the shape of a second Trump administration. To many conservatives, Trump’s selection of Ohio Sen. JD Vance as his running mate signaled that the former president was going all-in on Vance’s aggressive brand of populist-nationalist conservatism, most closely associated with the “national conservative” wing of the GOP. But Rollins’ influence over the transition suggests that more conventional conservatives — whom many national conservatives are quick to disparage as remnants of a “dead conservative consensus” — would still play a prominent role in a second Trump administration.

That doesn’t mean that a second Trump administration would perfectly reflect Rollins and AFPI’s vision. But it does suggest that personal loyalty to Trump — the glue that keeps the MAGA coalition together — continues to paper over deeper ideological divides within the institutional GOP. Trump’s defenders have suggested that a second Trump White House would be free from the sort of factional infighting that plagued the first one, but his simultaneous elevation of figures like Rollins and Vance all but guarantees that those ideological conflicts will persist.

Rollins, for her own part, has described her rise through Trump world as little more than a happy accident: “I’ve never angled for anything in my entire life,” she told Real Clear Politics in 2022.

But perhaps the best evidence that Rollins is angling for her next big act is the fact that, since Trump named his transition team in August, she has strategically avoided the spotlight, growing her influence behind the scenes while other groups have alienated Trump by publicly jockeying for influence. Rollins’ strategy has paid off: she is now one of the most influential operatives in Trump world, despite being virtually unknown outside of elite political circles.

And now at this moment of peak influence, Rollins — who declined multiple requests to be interviewed for this article — is trying to keep it that way.

Politics and Pagentry

The seeds of Brooke Rollins’ success are discernible in her two early passions: politics and pageantry. As an undergraduate at the University of Texas A&M in the early 1990s, Rollins — a native of the small town of Glen Rose, Texas (population 2,800) — made a name for herself on the university’s beauty pageant circuit, claiming fourth place in the 1993 Miss Texas A&M pageant and serving as Cotton Bowl Queen for the gridiron showdown between Texas A&M and the University of Notre Dame. (The Fighting Irish trounced Rollins’ beloved Aggies, 28-3.)

Rollins also carved a path for herself in campus politics, earning a seat in the university Senate and eventually ascending to speaker pro tempore and chair of the campus judicial board. In 1994, she ran for — and won — the position of student body president, becoming the first woman in the history of the university to hold the position.

Reflecting on her victory, Rollins displayed a beauty queen’s attentiveness to her public image.

“I do not want to be remembered as the first woman president,” Rollins told the Texas A&M school newspaper for an article about her victory, printed alongside a picture of a beaming Rollins being hosted aloft on her classmates’ shoulders. “I want to be remembered as the best student body president ever.”

Rollins soon left pageantry behind, opting for a career in politics. After attending law school and doing a stint in private legal practice, Rollins joined the office of then-Governor Rick Perry, working her way up to become the governor’s policy director. In 2003, Perry recommended that Rollins, then 29 years old, take a job as the head of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a small, free-market think tank run by Perry’s conservative allies. Despite having the backing of the conservative billionaire James Leininger, the organization was operating on a shoestring budget and struggling to find a foothold in Austin’s political establishment.

As TPPF’s president, Rollins found that foothold — and then kept climbing. By 2011, she had turned the TPPF into “a bedrock institution of the Texas right,” as a profile in Texas Observer put it at the time, “with 40 employees, an annual budget of $4.5 million, and the fealty of top-shelf conservative politicians.” The driving force behind TFPP’s turnaround was not Rollins’ policy expertise; she was never known among her colleagues as a particularly enthusiastic wonk. Instead, it was Rollins’ upbeat and ecumenical leadership style, which won TPPF allies among the stars of the Texas Republican Party, including senator John Cornyn and future senator Ted Cruz and, as well as deep-pocketed donors like Koch Industries, ExxonMobil and the Texas oil magnate Tim Dunn.

“Once you started listening to her, you would buy into [whatever she was saying], and you would want to do it,” a former colleague of Rollins’ at TPPF said.

Under Rollins, TFPP successfully melded the anti-government orthodoxy of mainstream conservativism with the populist fervor of the budding Tea Party movement. But Rollins — who was known for kicking off staff meetings with a twangy “Hey, y’all!” — never adopted the Tea Party movement’s sharper edge. Among her co-workers, she was known for rallying people behind a cause while leaving it to other people to figure out what that cause actually looked like.

“She was more of a happy warrior than a taskmaster,” the former TPPF employee recalled.

Rollins did, however, get more involved in one of TFPP’s policy issues: criminal justice reform. The issue tapped into two of the foundational principles of Rollins’ politics — fiscal conservatism and her Christian faith. In the early 2000s, Texas’ prison population was outgrowing its prison infrastructure at the very same moment that the Republican-led state legislature was trying to balance the budget. In response, the speaker of the Texas House of Representatives, Republican Tom Craddick, approached TPPF with a simple ask: Devise a strategy to keep the state from having to sink more money into expensive prisons. The task appealed both to Rollins, whose Christian faith placed a high moral premium on forgiveness and redemption, and to her conservative donors, whose libertarian outlook balked at the prospect of growing an already sprawling carceral state.

In 2007, TPPF joined forces with a handful of other right-leaning organizations to launch Right on Crime, a campaign for libertarian-minded criminal justice reform efforts. By 2011, the campaign had racked up a string of policy victories around the country and the support of a long list of prominent national Republicans, including Newt Gingrich and Jeb Bush. In Washington, the work earned her a reputation as a shrewd institution builder and a leading conservative voice on criminal justice reform — a reputation that would eventually serve as her ticket to the Trump White House.

‘Pet Project’

Trump listens to Rollins as she speaks during a prison reform roundtable in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, on Jan. 11, 2018. | Carolyn Kaster/AP

On January 11, 2018, Rollins took a seat beside Trump in the White House’s Roosevelt Room, where Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, had convened a roundtable discussion on criminal justice reform. At the time, Kushner was lobbying Rollins, who had served as an economic adviser to Trump’s 2016 campaign, to join the White House and lead its criminal justice reform efforts. Rollins was holding out — but not for much longer.

One month later, in February 2018, she officially joined the White House as the director of the Office of American Innovation, an obscure and ill-defined office that Kushner had created in 2017 with the vague mandate of interfacing with the American tech sector. The move to the White House was technically a promotion, but not a straightforward one: Rollins had left the top job at an influential conservative think tank to lead a new White House office that the press was openly deriding as Kushner’s “pet project.”

Rollins had other designs for her new office. In private, Kushner had pitched her on turning the office into a kind of shadow Domestic Policy Council — a “limitless, around-the-clock [policy] shop that knows how to get things done,” as she later put it — and she set to work expanding the office’s portfolio.

It was not a cushy or high-visibility post, but it gave Rollins a chance to operate behind the scenes on her signature issue, criminal justice reform. Throughout 2018, Rollins worked closely with Kushner and policy adviser Ja’Ron Smith to build support on Capitol Hill for Kushner’s criminal justice reform package — as well as to beat back opposition from within the administration, led by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Kushner and Rollins eventually prevailed, with Trump signing a slate of bipartisan prison and sentencing reforms into law as the First Step Act in December 2018.

Yet even as Rollins plowed ahead on the criminal justice reform bill, some of her colleagues in the West Wing sensed that she was angling to climb the White House ladder — with an eye toward landing the top job on the Domestic Policy Council, which Kushner saw as a key to expanding his influence inside the West Wing. Among her colleagues, Rollins became famous for carrying around white binders containing stacks of memos on different policy issues, a sign to some of her colleagues that she was consciously — and somewhat ostentatiously — trying to expand her policy portfolio.

“Brooke was always growing her involvement in different issues,” the former Trump administration official said. “Suddenly it was like, ‘Well, Brooke’s involved in this, Brooke’s involved in that — maybe she should be DPC director.’”

And in May 2020, that’s exactly what happened. After blowback from conservatives scuttled the appointment of former Jeb Bush adviser Derek Lyons, Trump tapped Rollins as acting director instead.

Rollins’ ascension to her new role as Trump’s policy chief came at a particularly fraught moment for the administration. Having taken charge of the DPC in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, Rollins was immediately saddled with the impossible task of “opening” the country, even as the virus continued to rage through the population.

Her job was further complicated by the onset of the Black Lives Matter protests, which exacerbated a growing rift in the White House over Kushner’s criminal justice reform push. Ahead of the November elections, a group of Trump’s advisers had been urging Trump to distance himself from the First Step Act, arguing that the reform bill was “a total dud” politically. But as the protests spread, and a serious divide opened up among senior White House officials about how Trump should respond, Rollins struck a more conciliatory tone, acknowledging the existence of “potentially systemic injustice issues” in the United States and calling on Americans to “rise above the division and the divide and come together.” In mid-June, Trump signed an executive order — which Rollins helped draft — incentivizing a slate of police reforms at the local and state levels. (A spokesperson for AFPI denied Rollins’ involvement in drafting the executive order, which was widely reported at the time.) Trump’s decision to sign the order angered many of his allies, who blamed Rollins for what they saw as the White House’s insufficiently forceful response to the protests.

But amidst the tempestuous final months of Trump’s first term, the other part of Rollins’ portfolio as DPC director — creating a policy blueprint for a possible second Trump term — provided a lifeline of sorts. By the summer of 2020, Rollins, Kudlow and a group of other senior advisers were huddling in the West Wing to hash out a two-page document, titled “Vision 2025,” setting out 10 policy priorities.

The document was designed to serve as a policy blueprint for Trump’s next term, but after Trump lost the election, it became a kind of mission statement for Rollins’ next project. This project was on Rollins’ mind on Jan. 6, 2021, as hordes of Trump supporters fought their way into the Capitol Building. “That was incredibly heartbreaking for me for a lot of reasons,” Rollins later said of Jan. 6, adding that she initially thought the attack would “take away from the policy fight and from the opportunity to really save the country.”

But her concerns about the attack only lasted for “a couple of hours.” After that, she saw Jan 6. and Trump’s subsequent exile from Washington as opportunity to continue her work out of the public eye.

“I realized, ‘You know what?’” she later told Real Clear Politics. “Now we just have to double down.”

America First

The America First Policy Institute launched in April 2021, with Rollins as its president, McMahon as its chair, and Kudlow as its vice-chair. On paper, AFPI promised to do the same thing as all the other Trump-aligned policy shops that were popping up around Washington — to carry on the work begun by the Trump administration and prepare the ground for another one. But Rollins and AFPI promised two things that the other newly created organizations couldn’t: money and votes. At the time of its launch, AFPI claimed to have a whopping $20 million in its war chest, which is used to set up headquarters in Washington. (Tax documents show that the group brought in just over $15 million across 2021. A spokesperson for AFPI said that $20 million was its anticipated budget for its first year.)

Rollins also signaled that she was willing to put those dollars to work on politics as well as policy. In November 2021, AFPI joined forces with America First Policies, the deep-pocketed political advocacy organization founded by Trump’s allies in 2016, to form America First Works, a new advocacy group dedicated to building a political strategy around Trump’s expected re-election effort. The marriage made AFPI a formidable presence in Washington: Trump’s former policy shop and his primary political outfit united under one roof. Later that month, AFPI hosted a black-tie gala — part policy summit, part fundraiser — at Mar-a-Lago, where a tuxedoed Trump exchanged pleasant pats-on-the-back with Rollins, granting the imprimatur of his endorsement to Rollins and AFPI.

But AFPI wasn’t the only well-connected conservative group making a bid for influence over a possible second Trump term. Across town at the Heritage Foundation, the foundation’s new president, Kevin Roberts, was busy putting together his own transition project, Project 2025, and building a sprawling coalition of conservative groups to support it. Behind the scenes, the ties between Roberts and Rollins ran deep: In 2016, Rollins hired Roberts as her deputy at TPPF, and Roberts had taken over as the organization’s president when Rollins left for the Trump White House in 2018. The two were long-time friends and colleagues, though they brought drastically different temperaments to their jobs: Brooke, the happy warrior, and Kevin, the firebrand.

But now the erstwhile colleagues were building rival pro-Trump power centers in Washington — and the conflict was heating up. Ahead of Project 2025’s official launch in April 2022, Roberts repeatedly extended offers for AFPI to join its coalition, and AFPI repeatedly turned them down, according to officials at both organizations. Heritage did not take AFPI’s rejection lying down: In September 2023, the month before AFPI planned to launch its own transition project, Roberts poached former Trump aide Troup Hemenway — who had been hired by AFPI to oversee its transition project — to serve as a lead staffer on Project 2025. The competition quickly took on “the flavor of a sibling rivalry,” as one observer put it, though one that occasionally shaded into outright hostility: “AFPI and Heritage hate each other with a passion,” a Trump operative told The Daily Beast in October 2023 “The Heritage people look down on the AFPI people like they’re a joke. And the AFPI people look at the Heritage people like they’re phony MAGA.”

Soon, the conflict was sucking up a significant amount of political oxygen — too much for the Trump campaign, which issued a statement in November 2023 distancing itself from both the AFPI and Heritage transition projects. In private, meanwhile, Trump fumed about the sums of money that AFPI had been raising using the America First brand, believing that the fundraising efforts were taking money away from the campaign. “It’s my fucking money!” Trump reportedly vented to his aides in October 2023, referring to the $23 million that AFPI had raised in 2022.

Rollins knew what to do: retreat from the spotlight to protect her influence. For the next nine months, AFPI laid low, developing policy plans, drafting executive orders and putting together lists of key jobs to fill in the next administration. Heritage, meanwhile, inched back into the public eye in the spring of 2024, enticed by growing media scrutiny of Project 2025, attention it had initially encouraged. Democrats responded by turning “Project 2025” into a catch-all epithet for Republican extremism.

AFPI’s under-the-radar strategy paid off: In July 2024, on the tail end of another brutal news cycle about Project 2025’s extreme plans for a second Trump administration, Trump publicly denounced Heritage’s project, prompting the resignation of its director, Paul Dans. (Heritage has since said that Dans was fired for unrelated reasons, but Dans has disputed the foundation’s account.)

Even if Trump’s denunciation of Project 2025 was merely a political stunt, as many of Trump’s opponents have speculated, it was an unqualified victory for Rollins. Her main rival for influence over the Trump transition was now too politically toxic for the Trump campaign to associate with publicly. One month later, in August, the Trump campaign announced its official transition team with AFPI’s McMahon as its co-chair.

Appearing on Kudlow’s show on Fox Business, Rollins briefly stepped out of the shadows, if only long enough to direct the audience’s attention somewhere else.

‘She’s Irrelevant’

For nearly four years, AFPI has been busy working behind the scenes to prepare for Trump’s possible return to power. Working out of the office complex attached to the swanky Willard InterContinental Hotel in downtown D.C., the organization has interviewed over 1,000 former administration officials, drafted over 100 executive actions and compiled lists of key jobs to prioritize filling before Inauguration Day. More recently, the group has reached out to major Republican lobbyists, asking them to review proposed plans for federal departments and potential actions for the first 200 days of a second Trump administration. In another sign that the group is seeking to expand its footprint on Capitol Hill, APFI announced a new partnership in late September with the Senate Working Group, an organization founded in 2021 to coordinate between Republican Hill staff.

Rollins’ influence over the official transition effort has been mostly informal, with Rollins and various members of AFPI’s staff regularly participating in discussions with the Trump transition team. But the scope of AFPI’s influence has been greatly expanded in recent months due to McMahon’s role as co-chair. On paper, the Trump transition has adopted a two-pronged strategy, with McMahon taking the lead on policy planning and Lutnick managing personnel, but a person with direct knowledge of the transition said that AFPI is having input on both fronts. (A spokesperson for AFPI denied that they are involved in personnel planning, saying, “Our transition work always focused on what key roles to fill, not who would possibly fill them.”)

Its influence has been further augmented by the Trump campaign’s decision to wait until mid-August to appoint an official transition staff — much later than traditional transition efforts — meaning that the transition is relying heavily on AFPI’s work to make up for lost time.

“There just isn’t the time to recreate an entire transition project, so AFPI has their own Project 2025 that they can pull of the shelf and say, ‘See here!’” the former administration official said.

Rollins, meanwhile, has managed to remain where she does her best work: out of sight. Except for the occasional appearance on conservative cable news, she is not making major media appearances, and she rarely makes on-the-record comments to the press. In September, AFPI hosted a discussion on economic policy with House Speaker Mike Johnson, but Rollins only briefly popped onto the stage to introduce Johnson. She has appeared on the campaign trail only once, in mid-October, at a “Team Trump Bus Tour” stop in North Carolina, where she spoke alongside a handful of better known Trump surrogates including Rep. Elise Stefanik and former Trump adviser Kash Patel, who are both considered candidates for top jobs in a second administration.

One conservative insider suggested that Rollins has been able to avoid scrutiny because no one in Washington wants to cross the person who potentially holds the key to all the plum jobs in the next Trump administration. It’s a new kind of invisibility for someone who has made her career operating on the peripheries of power.

“Two months ago, you could throw a rock at somebody in Washington who would roll their eyes and be like, ‘Why are you talking about Brooke? She’s irrelevant,’” said the insider, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about the dynamics surrounding the transition. “But now, nobody’s going to talk [about her] because she and her team are part of the transition.”

Power is invisibility. Invisibility is power. For now, Rollins has the benefit of both.