The transition team now moved into an office in downtown Washington, D.C., and went looking for people to occupy the top five hundred jobs in the federal government. They needed to fill all the cabinet positions, of course, but also a whole bunch of others that no-one in the Trump campaign even new existed. It’s not obvious how you find the next Secretary of State … never mind who should sit on the board of trustees of the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation.
-- The Author (Narration) (Prologue)

Importance: In this quote from the Prologue, author Lewis sums up a core challenge facing then-candidate Donald Trump and his advisors - specifically, those associated with planning a then-potential transition between the outgoing Obama administration and the potentially incoming Trump administration. The final sentence in the quote offers a specific example of how that challenge would manifest. It does so in a slightly sardonic...