US president-elect Donald Trump was subdued in his triumph on Wednesday, cloistering himself in New York City with a handful of aides and family members as he turned toward the enormous task of assembling a government.
For all his boisterousness during the campaign, Trump was more muted than exuberant in its aftermath, according to people who spoke with him throughout the day.
His victory over Democratic US presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton caught even him by surprise: Like Clinton, Trump tracked the race through private polling that indicated he was headed for defeat and he went all but silent in his apartment on Tuesday night as the returns from Florida turned in his favor.
Photo: AFP
Trump fielded conciliatory telephone calls from political dignitaries, including Republicans who resisted his candidacy, like former US presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, and from Democrats with whom he might clash in office, like Nancy Pelosi, the minority leader in the US House of Representatives.
However, Trump said nothing in public and as the political world reeled from his electoral success, the president-elect and his advisers did little to address the array of questions hanging over Trump Tower.
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a close ally of Trump’s who had been assigned to lead the transition process, emerged from the skyscraper at about 4:30pm, but rebuffed requests for comment.
“No interviews today,” he said.
US Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, emerging from meetings in the early evening, said Trump and his team would soon “move forward to a more specific agenda,” but did not elaborate.
“I’ll just say the team has done what transitions traditionally do at this point,” he added.
Up to now, aides to Trump said the team of advisers working on a potential transition has labored more or less in segregation from the campaign apparatus.
Over the summer, Trump collected a few practiced Washington hands to help him design an administration, including veterans of the first Bush administration and Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign.
Among them are Jamie Burke and William Hagerty, both former Romney advisers, and Ado Machida, a former aide to former US vice president Dick Cheney.
However, Trump remained preoccupied almost exclusively with the campaign and refused to discuss the transition with his aides out of superstition, according to two people briefed on the process.
He took few steps to recruit a conventional team of Washington veterans who might accompany him into government, after the fashion of past candidates like George W. Bush, who assembled something of a national security shadow Cabinet before the 2000 general election.
Trump held a few meetings on Wednesday to spur that process, huddling with a group that included his children; Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee; and Stephen Bannon, the chairman of Breitbart News Network, who helped steer Trump’s campaign.
Trump met separately with a group of aides to Indiana Governor Mike Pence, his running mate, along with Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
Michael Leavitt, a former governor of Utah who managed Romney’s transition team, said Trump’s transition would probably focus at first on a few key appointments, like naming a White House chief of staff.
Leavitt said he met several times with Trump’s team to discuss the mechanics of transition planning and described it as a “full-blown” operation.
“There are whole series of things that have to happen: getting a team on the field, beginning to lay out the how-to of the commitments the president-elect has made,” Leavitt said. “Right now, they’re going to be focused mostly on personnel and logistics.”
Yet the transition aides in Washington were given a limited mandate for mapping out an administration, people briefed on their efforts said.
They were asked to line up potential candidates for Cabinet-level offices, but not to fill out full staff rosters for federal departments and agencies, one person said.
There is no extensive process under way for vetting potential Trump appointees.
The names in circulation on Wednesday for the high offices of state were largely drawn from the tight circle of political true believers who surrounded Trump during the campaign: former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani; Steven Mnuchin, the chief fundraiser for Trump’s campaign; and Michael Flynn, a retired lieutenant general who struck up a friendship with Trump.
Within that group, Giuliani might be the most likely to receive a coveted appointment, as a reward for his slash-and-burn campaigning in the general election.
Christie, too, is seen as a candidate for the Cabinet, but his entanglement in a continuing political retribution scandal in New Jersey could make it difficult for him to be confirmed by the US Senate.
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