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You're Hired: Tracking the Trump Administration Transition - December 6, 2016
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Trump Administration (first term)  Vice President Mike Pence Cabinet • White House staff • Transition team • Trump's second term |
Domestic affairs: Abortion • Crime and justice • Education • Energy and the environment • Federal courts • Firearms policy • First Amendment • Healthcare • Immigration • Infrastructure • LGBTQ issues • Marijuana • Puerto Rico • Social welfare programs • Veterans • Voting issues Economic affairs and regulations: Agriculture and food policy • Budget • Financial regulation • Jobs • Social Security • Taxes • Trade Foreign affairs and national security: Afghanistan • Arab states of the Persian Gulf • China • Cuba • Iran • Iran nuclear deal • Islamic State and terrorism • Israel and Palestine • Latin America • Military • NATO • North Korea • Puerto Rico • Russia • Syria • Syrian refugees • Technology, privacy, and cybersecurity |
| Polling indexes: Opinion polling during the Trump administration |
This is the December 6, 2016, edition of a daily email sent from November 2016 to September 2017 that covered Donald Trump's presidential transition team, potential cabinet appointees, and the different policy positions of those individuals who may have had an effect on the new administration. Previous editions of "You're Hired" can be found here.
Possible nominations
Secretary of state roundup
Whoever the next secretary of state is, he or she will be four heartbeats away from the presidency in the line of presidential succession and responsible for crafting American foreign policy and representing the U.S. on the international stage. For these reasons, the selection of a nominee for secretary of state is often one of the most debated, complex, and anticipated decisions that president-elects make. Donald Trump’s selection of a secretary of state to serve in his new administration is proving to be no exception. Over the weekend, it was reported that he had expanded his search from four potential nominees to eight. Below, we take a quick look at the known contenders and some of their views on key foreign policy issues such as Russia, China, the Iran nuclear deal, ISIS, Syria, and international trade.
- Rudy Giuliani is the former mayor of New York City and a lawyer with the firm Greenberg Traurig, where he heads the cybersecurity, privacy, and crisis management practice. In January 2002, he founded Giuliani Partners, a global security firm. In a speech last month, Giuliani stated that ISIS, in the “short-term,” is the greatest international threat that the U.S. is currently facing. He has suggested that the Iran nuclear deal should be renegotiated. He does not see Russia as a significant military threat to U.S. interests, saying last month, “Russia thinks it’s a military competitor, it really isn’t. It’s our unwillingness under Obama to even threaten the use of our military that makes Russia so powerful.”
- Bob Corker is a Republican member of the U.S. Senate from the state of Tennessee and is the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Corker has been a critic of the Iran nuclear deal but was instrumental in allowing it to receive an “up-or-down” vote in the Senate in September 2015. His involvement attracted criticism from organizations opposed to the deal like the alt-right website Breitbart.com, which supported Trump throughout the 2016 campaign. He has called the Obama administration “a failed presidency as it relates to foreign policy,” adding, “[There is] an unwillingness to roll up sleeves and deal with the tough issues that we have to deal with.” Republican and Democratic senators on the Foreign Relations Committee have been supportive of Corker’s potential nomination.
- David Petraeus is a retired four-star general in the U.S. Army. He has served as the director of the CIA (2011 to 2012) and as the commander of the U.S. Central Command (2008 to 2010). He played major roles in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and holds a PhD in international relations from Princeton University. In 2015, Petraeus pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of mishandling classified information while he was head of the CIA and is currently under probation. In a recent interview with Al Jazeera, Petraeus voiced support for America’s commitment to NATO member states and has pushed back against Trump’s suggestions that the U.S. should renegotiate its involvement with NATO. He also argued that the U.S. should continue to take a leadership position in the Middle East and—reflecting an argument Trump made on the campaign trail—said that defeating ISIS should be prioritized over dealing with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Last year, he advocated for increased American involvement in Syria and voiced support for resettling Syrian refugees in the U.S. He has expressed reservations about the Iran nuclear deal, arguing in 2015 that, while there are benefits to the agreement in the short-term, “the deal places no limits on how much the Iranians can build or expand their nuclear infrastructure after 15 years.”
- Mitt Romney was the Republican nominee for president in 2012 and previously served as the governor of Massachusetts. He and Trump have had a rocky relationship and have not always seen eye-to-eye on foreign policy. In 2012, for example, Romney called Russia “our number one geopolitical foe” and said “they fight every cause for the world’s worst actors.” Trump, on the other hand, has said that he would like to work with Russia to fight ISIS. Romney has been a harsh critic of foreign policy under the Obama administration, saying last year, “The results of the Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama foreign policy have been devastating. The world is not safer.” As a presidential candidate in 2012, Romney called for cutting the U.S. foreign aid budget, speeding up the passage of international trade deals, and following Israel’s lead in the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Romney echoed Trump’s criticisms of China’s trade practices and economic policies in 2012.
- John Bolton was the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 2005 to 2006 and is now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he has written articles criticizing American foreign policy under the Obama administration. In August 2016, Bolton wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, commending Trump’s views on foreign policy. Bolton has described the threat of terrorism as “fundamentally ideological.” In an article titled “Next president’s foreign policy priorities” from last month, Bolton wrote that the chief foreign policy issues facing the U.S. are “radical Islamic terrorism and the Middle East’s spreading chaos.” Other critical issues that Bolton listed were nuclear proliferation, “Vladimir Putin’s Russia,” China, and “global governance.” Bolton supported the Iraq War. Last year, he said, “I still think the decision to overthrow Saddam was correct. I think decisions made after that decision were wrong.” Trump criticized the Iraq War throughout the 2016 campaign. The conservative magazine National Review endorsed Bolton for the secretary of state position and called him “an American internationalist who believes in the importance of American power.”
- Jon Huntsman is the former governor of Utah and has held ambassadorships to China and Singapore. He was a candidate for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. Huntsman—who is fluent in Mandarin—has argued against engaging in a trade war with China and has said that international trade deals bring about “economic and political goodwill” between participating countries. He also defended Trump’s call with the president of Taiwan over the weekend, which was the first known contact between a U.S. president or president-elect and the Taiwanese head of state since 1979. In discussing how to defeat ISIS, Huntsman advocated a combined military and diplomatic approach in a 2014 interview. “You have got to isolate ISIS politically. And you do that by bringing in a more unifying, inclusive government in Baghdad. … And then you have got to isolate ISIS from a military standpoint. And that would be by giving more in the way of support, both from an intelligence standpoint and equipment, along with the airstrikes, to those in the north, including the Kurds. It seems to me that if you don't have a strategy that speaks to political isolation of ISIS and military isolation of ISIS, you're not going to go anywhere,” said Huntsman.
- Rex Tillerson is the chairman and CEO of Exxon Mobil Corporation. In this capacity, Tillerson has negotiated international business deals with Russian President Vladimir Putin—with whom he reportedly has a close relationship—and the Russian government. In 2012, Russia awarded him the country’s “Order of Friendship” decoration, an award given to foreigners who have worked to foster the relationship between their country and Russia. Tillerson opposed sanctions against Russia in 2014. Tillerson is reportedly a supporter of international free-trade agreements, which Trump opposed throughout the 2016 campaign.
- Joe Manchin is a Democratic senator from West Virginia and is up for reelection in 2018. Manchin, known as a moderate in the Senate, sits on the Senate Armed Services and Energy committees. Last year, Manchin stated that the U.S. should be slower to use military force and to intervene in conflicts in the Middle East: “We’ve been pretty quick on declaring war. We declared on Iraq — that didn’t work real well. … We took out Moammar Gaddafi — that didn’t work too well. We’ve taken out Saddam Hussein — that sure didn’t work well. … With all of that, what do we do? I think we can find a middle ground.” Manchin, like Trump, has also criticised international trade deals like TPP and NAFTA, arguing that they “empower corporate America and Wall Street while suppressing America’s 99 percent and Main Street.” He has voiced opposition to the Iran nuclear deal.
The Trump administration and climate change
Yesterday former Vice President Al Gore met with Donald Trump and his daughter Ivanka to discuss the issue of climate change. Gore has spent much of his post-vice presidency raising awareness about climate change, and Ivanka Trump reportedly plans to advocate for climate change policies while her father is in the White House. Gore told reporters after his meetings, “I had a lengthy and very productive session with the president-elect. It was a sincere search for areas of common ground... I found it an extremely interesting conversation, and to be continued, and I'm just going to leave it at that.” Below we outline some of Trump’s past comments and positions on climate change.
- November 2016: In an interview with The New York Times, when asked if there is a link between human activity and climate change, Trump said, “I think there is some connectivity. Some, something. It depends on how much. It also depends on how much it’s going to cost our companies. You have to understand, our companies are noncompetitive right now.” In the same interview, when asked if he would pull the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Accord, he said, “I’m looking at it very closely. I have an open mind to it. We’re going to look very carefully. It’s one issue that’s interesting because there are few things where there’s more division than climate change.”
- October 2016: The Trump campaign released a statement on the Paris Climate Accord after it was announced on October 5, 2016, that the international climate change deal would go into effect on November 4, 2016. The Trump campaign called it a “bad deal” that would “impose enormous costs on American households through higher electricity prices and higher taxes.” The statement went on to say, "As our nation considers these issues, Mr. Trump and Gov. Pence appreciate that many scientists are concerned about greenhouse gas emissions. We need America's scientists to continue studying the scientific issues but without political agendas getting in the way. We also need to be vigilant to defend the interests of the American people in any efforts taken on this front."
- September 2016: Responding to a questionnaire published in Scientific American on September 13, 2016, Trump said, “There is still much that needs to be investigated in the field of 'climate change.' Perhaps the best use of our limited financial resources should be in dealing with making sure that every person in the world has clean water. Perhaps we should focus on eliminating lingering diseases around the world like malaria. Perhaps we should focus on efforts to increase food production to keep pace with an ever-growing world population. Perhaps we should be focused on developing energy sources and power production that alleviates the need for dependence on fossil fuels. We must decide on how best to proceed so that we can make lives better, safer and more prosperous.”
- January 2014: In an interview with Fox News, Trump called climate change “a hoax.”
- November 2012: Trump tweeted, “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”
See also
- You're Hired: Tracking the Trump Administration Transition
- Donald Trump presidential transition team
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