Donald Trump is wasting no time in putting his team together.  On Sunday, he announced that Reince Priebus will be his chief strategist, while serving as his Chief of Staff.  Priebus is the one who engineered the takeover of both the House and the Senate.  He also stood by Trump every step of the way after the convention.  He is also a phenomenal fundraiser, which will buy Trump a lot of good will among republicans.  And Priebus has an uncanny way of getting people who disagree with him to like him.

The choice signals Trump’s willingness to work within the very establishment he assailed on the campaign trail. Priebus, a lawyer and longtime Wisconsin political operative, has been head of the RNC since 2011 and is well liked within Washington after years of forging ties with Republican leaders and lawmakers. He will undoubtedly start to smooth over residual friction from a campaign during which a number of Republicans refused to endorse Trump, reversed their endorsements or stepped away from him after a 2005 tape surfaced in which Trump is heard saying that he could force himself on women because he was a “star.”

Trump had the chance to go in the opposite direction in picking his chief of staff: His antagonistic campaign chief executive and head of Brietbart News, Steve Bannon, also was said to be in the running for the job. Bannon will serve as chief strategist and senior counselor instead. As head of Breitbart News, Bannon launched political attacks against Ryan and other Republican leaders, assailing them as weak and ineffective, during the campaign. Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s first campaign manager, also was believed to be in the running.

Newt Gingrich, a former House speaker who is on Trump’s transition team, said the president-elect can work with both sides of the aisle in Congress — something Priebus will no doubt help smooth.

“Trump has got to be the salesman,” Gingrich said on CBS’s “Face the Nation. “Take something big like infrastructure. He can work with [Senate Democratic leader] Chuck Schumer on infrastructure. He can find a bipartisan path that allows us to dramatically improve infrastructure, something Trump knows an immense amount about.”