Skip to main content

Advertisement

Advertisement

Trump’s hires will set course of his presidency

​WASHINGTON — “Busy day planned in New York,” President-elect Donald Trump said on Twitter on Friday morning (Nov 10), two days after his astonishing victory. “Will soon be making some very important decisions on the people who will be running our government!” If anything, that understates the gravity of the personnel choices Mr Trump and his transition team are weighing.

President-elect Donald Trump, and House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wis., pose for photographers after a meeting in the Speaker's office on Capitol Hill. Photo: AP

President-elect Donald Trump, and House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wis., pose for photographers after a meeting in the Speaker's office on Capitol Hill. Photo: AP

Follow TODAY on WhatsApp

WASHINGTON — “Busy day planned in New York,” President-elect Donald Trump said on Twitter on Friday morning (Nov 10), two days after his astonishing victory. “Will soon be making some very important decisions on the people who will be running our government!”

If anything, that understates the gravity of the personnel choices Mr Trump and his transition team are weighing.

Rarely in the history of the American presidency has the exercise of choosing people to fill jobs had such a far-reaching impact on the nature and priorities of an incoming administration. Unlike most new presidents, Mr Trump comes into office with no elective-office experience, no coherent political agenda and no bulging binder of policy proposals. And he has left a trail of inflammatory, often contradictory, statements on issues from immigration and race to terrorism and geopolitics.

In such a chaotic environment, serving a president who is in many ways a tabula rasa, the appointees to key White House jobs like chief of staff and Cabinet posts like secretary of state, defense secretary and Treasury secretary could wield outsize influence. Their selection will help determine whether the Mr Trump administration governs like the firebrand Trump was on the campaign trail or the pragmatist he often appears to be behind closed doors.

“A new president is really vulnerable and open to all sorts of influence by strong-willed advisers,” said Mr Robert Dallek, a presidential historian. “Trump’s appointments over the next six weeks will be very significant because they can show whether he wants to create some unity in the country, or whether he really intends to deliver on his ideas.”

One of the influences on Mr Trump could come from an unlikely quarter: President Barack Obama. Meeting in the Oval Office on Thursday, Mr Trump said he looked forward “to dealing with the president in the future, including counsel”. A day later, in interviews with The Wall Street Journal and 60 Minutes, he said he had decided to retain elements of Obama’s landmark health care law after their conversation — a hint, at least, that he might govern less radically than he had campaigned.

White House officials expressed hope that Mr Obama would be able to impress on Trump the importance of other parts of his legacy, like the Paris climate accord and the Iran nuclear deal. The two will have the kind of peer-to-peer relationship that only fellow presidents can have — something that administration officials hope will appeal to Mr Trump’s pride, as well as his desire to succeed, and make him view Mr Obama less as a rival.

They conceded, though, that there was little historical precedent for such a relationship, especially when the incoming president had ousted the incumbent’s party after such an acrid campaign, and that Mr Trump and Mr Obama were never likely to become buddies.

Trump is drawing mainly from a pool of trusted aides and supporters, according to people familiar with the campaign. On Friday, he named three of his grown children — Ivanka, Donald Jr. and Eric — as well as his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to his transition team, an arrangement that rang alarm bells in Washington because they will also manage his businesses. The Trump family, it is clear, will wield unusual power in the composition of an administration that is already shaping up as remarkable for its clannishness.

Even within Trump’s tight circle, however, there are sharp differences in ideology, background and temperament that could play out in how the White House deals with Congress and how the United States deals with the rest of the world.

Perhaps the deepest schism is between Mr Stephen K. Bannon, the conservative provocateur and media entrepreneur who was Mr Trump’s campaign chairman, and Mr Reince Priebus, the Republican Party chairman who came to terms with Mr Trump’s candidacy. Both are on a short list for chief of staff, according to people close to the campaign, and whoever is chosen, the other is likely to get another senior White House post.

Each would bring a radically different approach to a job often called the second-most powerful in Washington — gatekeeper to the president and often the first and last person he sees in the Oval Office.

Mr Bannon, the executive chairman of the conservative website Breitbart News and one-time Goldman Sachs executive, is an avowed enemy of House Speaker Paul D Ryan. An anti-establishment verbal bomb thrower with ties to the alt-right movement, Mr Bannon may have little interest in compromising with the Republican-controlled Congress under its current leadership. He is an unabashed critic of the current immigration system and repeatedly encouraged Mr Trump to appeal to the party’s base in the closing days of the campaign with arguments against globalisation.

Mr Priebus, a party loyalist who tried to reconcile Republican leaders with their renegade nominee, would most likely build bridges to Mr Ryan and other Republican leaders. A Washington insider with a reputation for being easy to work with, Mr Priebus would operate a more traditional White House, though given Mr Trump’s flamboyant personality, traditional is a relative term.

In some ways, Mr Bannon and Mr Priebus are proxies for the larger battle over what kind of president Mr Trump will be. Some former Republican officials held out hope that Mr Trump would be receptive to moderating influences, but others worried that he would simply listen to the last person he spoke to.

“You always have that tension between what he said to get elected and what he actually believes,” said Mr John D Negroponte, a former director of national intelligence under President George W. Bush. “How selective will his amnesia be?”

But there could be a parallel battle for Trump’s soul in foreign policy. Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, a retired career intelligence officer who is Mr Trump’s closest foreign-policy adviser, is a candidate for national security adviser, according to an internal transition document obtained by the conservative news site The Daily Caller, as is Mr Stephen J. Hadley, who served in that capacity for Mr Bush.

Mr Hadley, who might also be considered for defense secretary, pushed Mr Bush to undertake the troop surge in Iraq and is closely identified with the military interventionism of that administration. A key figure in the Republican foreign-policy establishment, Mr Hadley had a hand in Mr Bush’s second inaugural address, in which he called for the United States to be an evangelist in spreading democracy — something Mr Trump has flatly rejected.

Mr Flynn, a registered Democrat, has criticised the neo-conservative policies of the Bush administration for leading the United States into quagmires like Iraq.

“They’ve gotten us into mess after mess for the wrong reasons,” he said, echoing Trump’s harsh criticism of Mr Bush during the Republican debates. And like Mr Trump, Mr Flynn is withering about the foreign-policy establishment of both parties.

Several of the candidates on Trump’s his short list for Treasury secretary come from Wall Street, including Mr Steven Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs partner who was the finance chairman of Mr Trump’s campaign; and Mr Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase. People close to Mr Dimon said he was not interested in the job.

Another candidate is a conservative Texas congressman, Mr Jeb Hensarling, who has called for the repeal the Dodd-Frank Act, the banking regulations passed after the financial crisis, during Obama’s first term.

With Trump lacking elective-office experience or the political coterie that accompanies establishment candidates to Washington, administration officials said Mr Obama would probably spend more time with him than was typical for other incoming and outgoing presidents.

And Mr Trump, some outsiders predicted, would respect the advice of a president 15 years younger, whose path to the White House was nearly as improbable as his.

“If you’re looking at things from a hiring point of view, as Trump does, Obama could have done anything he wanted,” Mr Douglas Brinkley, a professor of history at Rice University, said in reference to Mr Obama’s career options. “That has to impress Trump.” THE NEW YORK TIMES

Read more of the latest in

Advertisement

Advertisement

Stay in the know. Anytime. Anywhere.

Subscribe to get daily news updates, insights and must reads delivered straight to your inbox.

By clicking subscribe, I agree for my personal data to be used to send me TODAY newsletters, promotional offers and for research and analysis.