NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland — White House Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair outlined President Donald Trump’s pathway to finalize political realignment after taking the Oval Office back from Joe Biden, while speaking at the 2025 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Friday.
Blair, a former Trump 2024 presidential campaign adviser and Republican National Committee (RNC) political director who was named as a White House aide in November, told Breitbart News Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle the new administration has a “frenetic pace” as the president carries out a flurry of executive actions to reshape the government.
“I really oversee the external portfolio of the White House. There’s three main components to that — we have our Office of Legislative Affairs, which obviously is really the president’s lobbying arm on Capitol Hill. We have the Office of Political Affairs, which is just the political operations that come from the White House,” Blair told Boyle on stage at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center. “And then the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, which deals with interplay between federal, state and local governments and tribal governments.”
“It’s a frenetic pace, for sure, but you know, the president has thought deeply about what he wants to accomplish in the time he was not in the White House… and he’s been spending a lot of time planning and obviously asking his team to plan the actions that we’ve executed so far,” he continued.
According to the deputy chief of staff, many of the executive actions Trump has taken in his first month back in office, “if not most of it,” were planned in advance.
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“He’s thought deeply since he left the last time around, and he knows that he wants to accomplish a lot in a short period of time,” Blair explained. “So really, it’s all of us just playing catch up with the president.”
“It’s great to have an energetic leader,” he noted. “He runs circles around all of us. He doesn’t sleep. He works all the time, and he’s really committed to making this time in office very useful for saving the country. I mean, he’s just going to do what he said he was going to do.”
When Boyle asked how Trump managed to capture such significant portions of voting blocs that Republicans have not managed to get in decades, such as black and Hispanic Americans, Blair said the president’s plan was primarily “to capitalize on opportunities that existed within these different populations of voters that maybe have not traditionally voted Republican.”
“President Trump is not like every Republican politician, as we all know, for the last several decades,” he continued. “Particularly cuts against the mold of Washington, and I think that’s really important.”