Former President Trump, if elected, would build a Cabinet and White House staff based on two imperatives: pre-vetted loyalty to him and a commitment to stretch legal and governance boundaries, sources who talk often with the leading GOP presidential candidate tell Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei.

• Why it matters: Trump would fill the most powerful jobs in government with men like Stephen Miller, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio and Kash Patel — with the possible return of Steve Bannon. If Trump won in 2024, he'd turn to loyalists who share his zeal to punish critics, purge non-believers, and take controversial legal and military action, the sources tell us.

Trump and his prospective top officials don't mince words about their plans:

• They want to target and jail critics, including government officials and journalists; deport undocumented immigrants or put them in detainment camps, and unleash the military to target drug cartels in Mexico, or possibly crack down on criminals or protesters at home.
• They want to scrap rules that limit their ability to purge government workers deemed disloyal.

What's happening: Trump hasn't settled on specific roles for specific figures, and hates it when his staff and friends speculate otherwise. It's not in his DNA to do detailed personnel planning, and a lot depends on the last few people he's talked to.

• But in rolling conversations with friends and advisers, he's been clear about the type of men — and they're almost all older, white men — he'd want to serve at his pleasure if he were to win a second term.

Between the lines: We wrote last month about the multimillion-dollar effort to vet loyalists for up to 50,000 lower-level government jobs in a Trump administration. This is about their potential bosses.

• It's unclear who would land where, but make no mistake: These are specific prototypes of Trump Republicans who would run his government. This is very different from the early days of his first term. This time, it'd be all loyalists, no restraints.

Here's our latest intelligence on what's being discussed among Trump and a small group of confidants:

Vice president: Those who'd be considered include J.D. Vance, the "Hillbilly Elegy" author and a MAGA favorite; Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders; Kari Lake, a leading election denier now running for U.S. Senate in Arizona, and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem. (Vance might prefer to remain in the Senate as "Trump's hammer," we're told.)

• Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), one of the few Black Republicans in Congress, has traveled with Trump on the campaign.

But here's an interesting twist: Melania Trump is an advocate for picking Tucker Carlson, the booted Fox News star. She thinks Carlson would make a powerful onstage extension of her husband, a source close to Trump told us.

• Column continues below.

Others likely to wield power in a second Trump term share a lot in common with Tucker Carlson. They're full, proud MAGA warriors, anti-GOP establishment zealots, and eager and willing to test the boundaries of executive power to get Trump's way, Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei write:

Stephen Miller: He could be your next attorney general and, if not that, get a Cabinet-level role to greatly influence immigration policy.

• He was the architect of Trump's most controversial immigration plans in the first term, and is eager to test the boundaries of what courts and the military can do to make this happen fast.
• A source close to the Trump campaign told us A.G. is the office where Trump is "most likely to make a shocking pick," with the defiant view: "You want to weaponize DOJ, mother----er?'"

Mike Davis: Donald Trump Jr. has floated Davis, the former chief counsel for nominations to then-Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), to be Trump's interim attorney general — saying it would be a "shot across the bow of the swamp."

Steve Bannon: In the early days of Trump's first term, he was arguably the most powerful man on staff, plotting personnel and policy decisions from his Capitol Hill townhouse. Then, he was ousted and frozen out. Now, thanks to his popular podcast and pro-Trump fervency, he's back.

• He could be the next White House chief of staff.

Kash Patel: A protege of former Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) who led efforts to discredit the Russia investigation, Patel came to be viewed as a political mercenary in Trump's war against the intelligence community. The former Pentagon official would be considered for a top national security job in the next administration, possibly even running the CIA or NSC.

• Patel told Bannon on his "War Room" podcast this week: "One thing we learned in the Trump administration the first go-round is we've got to put in all of our compatriots from top to bottom. ... Yes, we're going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens."

Johnny McEntee, Trump's loyalty vetter and enforcer, headed presidential personnel in the first term. McEntee might return to that role with even more power.

• The 33-year-old former UConn quarterback was empowered by the end of Trump's term in a way his predecessors never were — tasked with systematically purging officials deemed insufficiently loyal.

Jeffrey Clark — a former assistant attorney general for Trump who could get a top Justice Department slot — is the rare person to be considered for a future administration while under indictment.

Ric Grenell — former ambassador to Germany, and Trump's acting director of national intelligence — would be on the short list for secretary of state.

• Former Trump national security adviser Robert O'Brien would be a more confirmable pick for SecDef.

Susie Wiles: Some in Trumpworld assume the most likely chief of staff is Wiles, the longtime Florida political operative who's running Trump's campaign.

John Ratcliffe, the former Texas congressman who was Trump's final DNI, would be considered to head the CIA, for a return to DNI, for defense secretary or even for vice president.

Jamie Dimon: Trump is open to a few more mainstream picks if they bring celebrity or pizzazz. For example, Trump would consider JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, a Democrat, to head Treasury. "He wants a big name," a source close to the campaign said. "And he loves billionaires."

• It's not clear Dimon would take the job — he's been talking privately with Nikki Haley about the global economy. Dimon told the N.Y. Times DealBook conference that Haley would be "a choice on the Republican side that might be better than Trump."

Jared Kushner, a huge power center in Trump's West Wing, might well return to the White House if his father-in-law wins again.

• Read the full column ... Zachary Basu and Sophia Cai contributed reporting.

The presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT are under heavy, bipartisan fire after they hedged when asked in a congressional hearing whether they would discipline students who called for a genocide of Jews.

• Why it matters: Rarely has a congressional hearing generated this much bipartisan rage.

On Tuesday, the three presidents were handling the usual questions in the usual way, and condemned Hamas' Oct. 7 attack on Israel — until Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) asked whether they would discipline students who called for the genocide of Jews.

• They evaded the question, answering legalistically and formulaically. They said it would depend on the context, and whether antisemitic words led to actions.

That prompted criticism from both sides of the aisle and from the schools' donors.

• Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) called the Penn president's equivocation "unacceptable" and "failed leadership."

White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in response to the hearing: "We just witnessed the worst massacre suffered by the Jewish people since the Holocaust, the latest atrocities in a heartbreaking, genocidal pattern that goes back thousands of years."

• "It's unbelievable that this needs to be said: calls for genocide are monstrous and antithetical to everything we represent as a country," his statement added.

The Harvard Crimson's headline: "Harvard President Gay Traveled to Washington to Quell the Backlash. Her Testimony Only Made It Worse."

• "The swift blowback to her testimony led Gay to issue a clarification [above] through Harvard's official social media channels Wednesday afternoon," the student paper reported.

Keep reading ... Go deeper: See the presidents' written testimony.

Obnoxious blowhard. Fascist neocon. Angry, bitter man. The final GOP debate of 2023 featured some of the most explosive exchanges yet, Axios' Zachary Basu writes.

• Why it matters: The Iowa caucuses are in 39 days.

Top takeaways:

1. Nikki Haley treated like front-runner.

• Viewers may be surprised to learn the former UN ambassador is actually polling in third behind Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, given the dogpile she faced from the very jump.
• But Haley has all the momentum, with a stream of billionaires and Wall Street mega-donors — plus the Koch political network — now lining up behind her as the most viable Trump alternative.

2. Chris Christie unleashed.

• Moderator Megyn Kelly's first question to the former New Jersey governor was the one on everyone's mind: Why are you still in the race with an approval rating of 25% among Republican voters?
• Christie responded by declaring himself "the only person on stage who is telling the truth" about Trump: "He's unfit to be president."

Keep reading.

🥊 Quote of the night ... Nikki Haley: "I love all the attention, fellas. Thank you for that!"

• Smart Brevity: Vivek Ramaswamy went Alex Jones, unloading false conspiracies. (N.Y. Times, CNN)

📊 New this morning: Democratic views on President Biden's handling of the Israel-Hamas war rebounded in AP-NORC polling:

• 59% of Dems approve of Biden's approach to the conflict — up from 50% in November. Biden's latest standing is equivalent to Dems' 57% approval for him on the Mideast in an August poll.

Keep reading.

Google unveiled details about Gemini, the next version of its large language model that will power Bard and other products, Axios' Ina Fried reports.

• Why it matters: Google is eager to show it can keep up with rivals, especially OpenAI and Microsoft.

Gemini is multimodal — recognizing video, images, text and voice.

• Keep reading ... Go deeper (60-page technical paper).

Restaurant workers' wage growth has slowed considerably since peak COVID, Axios' Alex Fitzpatrick writes from Square data.

• Why it matters: The slowdown is a sign that restaurants are no longer quite as desperate for workers.

🧮 By the numbers: Restaurant workers' wages grew 4.9% year over year in October.

• That's slowed from peak growth of 10.5% in December 2021, when the average base wage was $12.60 and average hourly earnings totaled $15.85.

Go deeper.

Efforts to keep former President Trump off the ballot next year in Colorado seemed to hit a wall yesterday in the state's Supreme Court, Axios Denver's John Frank reports.

⚖️ Catch up quick: The 14th Amendment says people who have "have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against" the U.S. cannot hold certain federal offices. But it's not clear:

• (a) Whether that clause applies to the president.
• (b) Whether Trump's role rose to the level of insurrection.

After oral arguments, the Colorado Supreme Court seemed inclined to rule that Trump can be on the ballot.

• Go deeper.

Media and VIPs got a sneak peek at Art Basel in Miami Beach, which is open tomorrow through Sunday.

• 🥂 The parties started even before that, with elaborate soirees all over the city. Members of "the NFT and crypto crowd" partied in "a setting that fuses Italian Renaissance architectural styles and Florida's unique, lush ecology," ARTnews reports.

Go deeper.