WASHINGTON — As Donald Trump fills out his Cabinet, it’s looking less like America’s population and more like the world Trump has always orbited: wealthy, white, male-dominated and business-minded.
Trump, who railed against what he called “politically correct crap” during his no-holds-barred presidential campaign, is on track to create the least diverse Cabinet in a quarter-century.
The uniformity is particularly striking in the president-elect’s picks for the highest-profile Cabinet and White House jobs. While he has selected a handful of women and minorities for lower-profile posts, his choices for the big four Cabinet slots — Treasury, State, Defense and Justice — and his top White House jobs — chief of staff, national security adviser and senior adviser — are all white men.
So, too, will white men run the departments of Commerce, Energy, Homeland Security and Health and Human Services as well as the Environmental Protection Agency.
Should Trump be unable to complete his term as president, the top eight people in the line of succession are white men from the Cabinet and Congress. That number could grow to 12 if he picks a white man for Agriculture secretary. North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, a Democrat, is the only woman believed to be in the mix.
Unlike recent predecessors in both parties, Trump so far has no Hispanics in the most prominent positions. Based on the current top contenders for remaining jobs, it appears unlikely he’ll have a Hispanic in his Cabinet or in any top White House job.
Trump spokesman Jason Miller has pledged that the president-elect’s team will be “very broad and diverse, both with the Cabinet and the administration.”
But Trump himself seems to have different priorities: “I want people that made a fortune! Because now they’re negotiating for you, OK?” he said, at a rally in Des Moines, Iowa, last week.
Obama was to hold a news conference at the White House this afternoon.
No proof was offered for any of the accusations, the latest to unsettle America’s uneasy transition from eight years under Obama to a new Republican administration led by Trump. The claims of Russian meddling in the election also have heightened already debilitating tensions between Washington and Moscow over Syria, Ukraine and a host of other disagreements.
In the NPR interview, Obama sough to contrast the current incident with “a traditional understanding that everybody’s trying to gather intelligence on everybody else.”
“One of the things we’re going to have to do over the next decade,” he said, is find an international understanding on rules involving what has become “a new game.” Obama said that U.S. officials should not let “the inter-family argument between Americans” obscure the need for people to “stand together” on this issue.
“My view is that this is not a partisan issue,” the president said, exhorting people to “take it out of election season and move it into governing season.”
Speaking to reporters earlier Thursday, presidential spokesman Josh Earnest said that “only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.”
Obama’s deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, connected the dots further, saying it was Putin who was responsible for the Russian government’s actions.
“I don’t think things happen in the Russian government of this consequence without Vladimir Putin knowing about it,” he told MSNBC.
The explosive accusation paints Putin, the leader of perhaps America’s greatest geopolitical foe, as having directly undermined U.S. democracy. U.S. officials have not contended, however, that Trump would have been defeated by Clinton on Nov. 8 if not for Russia’s assistance. Nor has there has been any indication of tampering with the vote-counting.
The Kremlin rejected the claim of Putin’s involvement, with Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissing it as “laughable nonsense.”
There has been no specific, persuasive evidence shared publicly about the extent of Putin’s role or knowledge of the hackings. That lack of proof undercuts Democrats’ strategy to portray Putin’s involvement as irrefutable evidence of a directed Russian government plot to undermine America’s democratic system.
The dispute over Russia’s role is fueling an increasingly public spat between Obama’s White House and Trump’s team that is threatening to spoil the delicate truce that Obama and Trump have forged since Election Day to smooth the billionaire businessman’s move to the White House in little over a month.
Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s senior transition adviser, said it was “breathtaking” and irresponsible that the White House had suggested Trump knew Russia was interfering to help his campaign.
That led Earnest to unload from the White House, arguing that Trump, who has dismissed the CIA’s assessment of Russian interference, should spend less time attacking the intelligence community and more time supporting the investigation that Obama has ordered.
Earnest said it was “obvious” Trump knew what Russia was doing during the campaign, pointing out that Trump had encouraged Moscow during a news conference to find Clinton’s missing emails, repeating the assertion Obama made in “The Daily Show” appearance.
Trump has said he was joking.
“I don’t think anybody at the White House thinks it’s funny that an adversary of the United States engaged in malicious cyber activity to destabilize our democracy,” Earnest said. “That’s not a joke.”
Trump struck back Friday morning, saying in a Twitter post, “Are we talking about the same cyberattack where it was revealed that head of DNC (Democratic National Committee) illegally gave Hillary the questions to the debate?” He was referring to a controversy centering on now-acting DNC chair Donna Brazile, who was accused of tipping off Clinton to questions that were to be asked in a debate hosted by CNN earlier this year. Brazile at the time was a CNN political analyst.
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