For the Record's week in Review: The Cabinet
Donald Trump’s Cabinet is starting to take shape, but some people would really like it to be unscrewed and reassembled with some different wood. On Friday, Trump announced three new picks — all related to national security — for his White House team, which brings the total number to five white men so far. Now, just because they’re nominated doesn’t mean they’ll all end up in his Cabinet — some still have to make it through a confirmation process — but here’s what happened during Trump’s first full week as president-elect.
Cabinet picks rounds 1 and 2: Loyalty: 2, racial sensitivity: 0
Trump has come under fire big league for at least three of the five people he’s chosen to help him lead.
Stephen Bannon, chief strategist
Bannon was the head of Breitbart News, a conservative site that has been pro-Trump from the beginning (it’s been anti-establishment and harsh on House Speaker Paul Ryan.) Critics say that his website traffics in racism and anti-Semitism.
In an interview with "The Hollywood Reporter" published Friday, Bannon insisted he wasn’t a white nationalist.
“I’m not a white nationalist, I’m a nationalist. I’m an economic nationalist,” Bannon said. But then he said this strange remark to back it up: “Darkness is good,” he said. “Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power.”
Sen. Jeff Sessions, attorney general
Sessions has been a senator for nearly two decades, and before that he was the attorney general of Alabama, but he was denied a federal judgeship by the Senate in the 1980s because he was accused of making racist remarks. Sessions still denies the accusations.
Gen. Mike Flynn, national security adviser
Flynn was fired from a top job at the Pentagon because of his combative style. He’s also been highly critical of Muslims. This summer, he gave a speech at an anti-Muslim rally where he said Islam was a "cancer" and “a political ideology” that hides behind “being a religion,”
He’s also operated a consulting business with foreign clients and made an appearance with Russian President Vladimir Putin at an event paid for by a state-run TV network.
All three of the controversial picks were early-endorsers of Trump’s and stayed involved in his campaign.
Here is some of the reaction to the choices.
Trump’s picks for chief of staff, Reince Priebus, and CIA director, Kansas Rep. Mike Pompeo, have both been relatively unopposed. Neither were thrilled by Trump during the primary. Pompeo had even endorsed his rival Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. Priebus and Trump got into it a bit when Trump called the primaries rigged against him, but all the bad blood seems to have gone away.
'Phony' Trump and 'choker' Romney to meet
On Friday, Trump’s transition team announced that Mitt Romney would meet Trump in Bedminster, N.J., on Saturday. Wait, wait, wait. You mean the Romney who gave an entire speech dedicated to bashing Trump? Yes, that Romney, because 2016 couldn’t get any weirder. But wait, it can. Romney’s name is being floated for the Cabinet. When Trump transition officials were asked if Trump would offer his former nemesis a job, they avoided it. Instead, spokesman Sean Spicer said that many of Trump's meetings have been to solicit advice and the "conversation with Mitt Romney is just that: an opportunity to hear his ideas and his thoughts."... So you’re saying there’s a chance?
2016 and the 'Post-Truth' world
Oxford Dictionaries announced the 2016 word of the year and it’s really depressing: “Post-truth.” The word, which was inspired by the presidential election and Brexit over in the United Kingdom, means “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”
What circumstances could have happened where objective facts were less influential than fake ones? Oh you know, when fake election news was getting more interactions than real election news.
BuzzFeed News did an analysis that found 20 top-performing stories from "hoax sites and hyperpartisan blogs" got over a million more Facebook interactions than stories from 19 major news outlets.
On Thursday in Berlin, Obama warned against fake news which he said is "packaged very well and it looks the same when you see it on a Facebook page or you turn on your television."
"If we are not serious about facts and what's true and what's not — and particularly in an age of social media where so many people are getting their information in soundbites and snippets off their phones — if we can't discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems," he continued.
Around the transition
Trump settles fraud case against Trump University for $25 million (USA TODAY)
Who is on Trump’s Cabinet list so far? (USA TODAY)
6 things to know about Jeff Sessions, Trump’s AG pick (USA TODAY)
Trump’s national security pick is “disruptive thinker” on intelligence (USA TODAY)
Civil rights groups brace to fight Congress and Trump (USA TODAY)
Naked Cowboy sings a song about Trump
Trump has been assembling his Cabinet and holding post-election meetings from the comfort of Trump Tower where he has both home and office — though he left the city for the weekend. So reporters have staked out the lobby during the week and made it their office. They've been covering who walks in, who walks out and what’s on the menu at the restaurant. On Friday, they had a special visitor: New York City’s infamous Naked Cowboy, apparently he was there for a photoshoot.
photo shoot.
Per the pool: “Naked Cowboy came over and sang a song about Trump that included lyrics about blue lives mattering and Trump putting thugs in jail. Also about how bad Obamacare is. And how Trump Tower is the greatest place on earth.
He then picked up a tourist, cradled her in his arms, and kissed her. There's not acid strong enough for this to be a hallucination, I assure you.”