For a group of staffers, soon-to-be Cabinet-level officials and a president-elect who share a lack of government experience, practice and preparation are crucial. And practice is precisely the focus of activity in a sterile government building just a few blocks from the White House, where the incoming Trump administration is preparing behind closed doors to take the reins of power in a matter of days.
There's the mock James S. Brady briefing room, where incoming White House press secretary Sean Spicer has held two practice briefings with staffers posing as occasionally hostile reporters.
There's the fake Senate hearing room, where each Cabinet nominee has undergone multiple "murder boards" designed to mimic the circumstances of real confirmation hearings as closely as possible.
And on a sunny Friday morning when the Washington Examiner visited the facility, there was even a high-level transition exercise underway, in which soon-to-be White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus addressed members of President-elect Trump's future Cabinet members in a glass-doored conference room before the 30 officials headed over to the White House, sat down across a table from their Obama administration counterparts, and discussed the realities of taking over on Day One.
A new order for the White House press corps?
The Trump team has long promised to shake up the status quo at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and they might start with the way they handle the media.
While Spicer indicated Sunday that no decisions have been made yet as to the nature and location of daily press briefings, transition officials are mulling several potential changes that would allow more reporters to cover the Trump administration. One of those may involve moving the daily briefing from its current quarters, where just 49 reporters can have seats, although that proposal has alarmed veterans of the White House press corps.
But transition officials said Spicer, who will likely play the roles of press secretary and White House communications director simultaneously, doesn't want a contentious relationship with the media.
"In Sean, you have somebody who's looking to engage reporters," an official said.
Spicer has been rehearsing that engagement in the office space at transition headquarters that has been transformed into a replica of the Brady room, complete with a podium and rows of chairs bearing the names of the outlets that occupy them.
Behind the seats, the team even set up a mock riser for cameras and marked with duct-tape labels where each network's camera resides. Spicer will deliver at least one briefing this week from the fake Brady room in preparation for the press secretary job. In the two practice briefings Spicer had held prior to the Washington Examiner's visit, an official said staffers had mostly posed the type of serious questions that members of the White House press corps might ask, but they joked that some staffers had attempted to "screw with him" a few times by yelling joke questions in the hopes of getting him to laugh at the podium.
After Inauguration Day, however, Spicer will have much less time for laughter. The Republican National Committee spokesman is expected to merge the functions of the White House press secretary and communications director into one high-profile position — an arrangement, one transition official said, that reflects Trump's trust in Spicer.
"The only person I know who has more energy is Donald Trump, so I think he's a good match," the official said of Spicer.
His involvement in the transition process goes far beyond his role as its public face, staffers said. Along with other senior officials, Spicer has also helped shape the "war room" where roughly two dozen staffers man the phones and computers during every confirmation hearing to combat media attacks on Cabinet nominees and coordinate with congressional committees.
Transition 'war room' readies for confirmation fights
In the over-sized office space that houses the war room, aides as junior as a college intern and as senior as Spicer himself gather around a conference table and several desk clusters, plotting the next week's hearings as CNN plays softly on monitors on either side of the room.
Staffers tasked with tracking social media — who joked that they'll soon lose their eyesight from watching TweetDeck too much — said they monitor Twitter and Facebook to see "if the narrative is declining" before, during or after confirmation hearings. War room staffers are focused on "telling the story visually" with "stagecraft" like photos and an arsenal of ready-made graphics to deploy during hearings, an official said.
"If every Marine is a rifleman, then every Trump staffer is a TV producer," the official said.
Each day, war room staffers said they prepare a lengthy report that assesses the volume and quality of the stories gaining traction on social media about each nominee, and they distribute it widely among the transition team.
An integral component of the transition's rapid response efforts, the social media-focused staffers from the war room are even involved in preparing nominees for their hearings during the practice runs referred to as "murder boards." At least one war room aide sits in on each murder board, listening for responses that could inadvertently transform into memes or snarky tweets and reporting back to the larger war room staff afterward.
During a trial hearing for one nominee, which the Washington Examiner attended, eight Capitol Hill and administration alumni who pretended to be senators peppered the subject with questions ranging in specificity from minute policy details to larger philosophical debates related to that nominee's agency. Staffers said it was that particular nominee's second turn in the hot seat, noting each nominee submits to more than one murder board, regardless of his or her experience level or performance in the prior practice run.
The wood-paneled room where the murder boards occur is configured exactly like a Senate committee room, with senator stand-ins occupying seats at an elevated, V-shaped bench and an audience of staffers sitting in rows behind the nominee. Aides who enter the fake hearing are quickly asked to sign a half-page pledge agreeing not to record audio or video or else be "subject to dismissal or other penalties." And some staffers have even surprised nominees by posing as protesters who stand up and interrupt the hearings, requiring a fake security guard to remove them.
The surprisingly complex confirmation strategy — from interacting with the media, to preparing questionnaires for the committees, to mobilizing support from third-party groups — is coordinated across the board for each nominee by at least two designated staffers known as "sherpas."
Third-party outreach and local media engagement has been "organized from a strategic point of view," including efforts to reach out to media and groups in the home states of Democrats whose constituents voted mostly for Trump, one sherpa said. Sherpas have orchestrated more than 370 meetings between nominees and senators from both parties and have guided nominees through nearly 100 hours of practice hearings, a transition official said.
One sherpa noted the process has become far more politicized than it was in 2009, when President Obama secured confirmation for most of his nominees without much resistance from Republicans. But not every Trump nominee has inspired partisan rancor: Rep. Ryan Zinke, Trump's choice for interior secretary, will be introduced at his confirmation hearing by Democratic Sen. Jon Tester, a fellow Montana lawmaker. And Betsy DeVos, Trump's education secretary nominee, will be introduced at her hearing by former Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman.
At a meeting of the sherpas last week, transition officials discussed which strategies had worked best during the spate of hearings that occurred on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday as they prepared for the burst of hearings scheduled for this week.
One official advised sherpas to keep their staffers away from hot mics should they make the journey to Capitol Hill for the hearings. Another official warned sherpas to have their guard up when dealing with reporters, arguing that journalistic standards have gone "out the window." He told the room of aides a cautionary tale about an unnamed reporter who had, several days earlier, called the transition offices, declined to identify himself as a reporter, and then quoted the unsuspecting executive assistant who had answered the phones.
Although a 2013 change to the Senate rules has left Republicans with the ability to confirm each nominee without any help from their Democratic colleagues, a transition official said the team will continue their efforts until each Cabinet official's confirmation vote is final, not just through his or her hearings.
Several of Trump's top picks, such as Sen. Jeff Sessions for attorney general or Steven Mnuchin for treasury secretary, have inspired particularly bitter opposition from Democrats. Even so, transition officials said they hope to have seven nominees confirmed by Inauguration Day, which would equal the number of Cabinet officials Obama was able to put in place on the day of his own swearing-in ceremony in 2009.
That's put Republicans on a schedule that some Democratic lawmakers have criticized as too fast. While the minority members can't block the nominees outright, they could delay confirmation votes. An official pointed to that possibility as one reason why the team had crafted such a robust strategy to guide each nominee through his or her hearing, despite the relatively low risk that any nominee might not get confirmed.
The hundreds of people filling Trump's Washington transition offices are mostly volunteers, an official said. Some will join the staff in the West Wing or at federal agencies, but many will return to their regular jobs after the confirmation process has ended. For now, though, the offices are buzzing with ringing phones, marathon meetings and a mix of political newcomers and seasoned veterans, all putting the final touches on their preparations to take control of the United States government.