WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald J. Trump’s
trio of hard-line selections on Friday served notice that he intends
not only to reverse eight years of liberal domestic policies but also to
overturn decades of bipartisan consensus on the United States’ proper
role in world affairs.
Mr.
Trump is moving quickly to realize his campaign’s promise of a nation
that relentlessly enforces immigration and drug laws; views Muslims with
deep suspicion; second-guesses post-World War II alliances; and sends
suspected terrorists to Guantánamo Bay or C.I.A. secret prisons to be
interrogated with methods that have been banned as torture.
At
a time when American cities have been inflamed by racial tensions,
police shootings and fears over homegrown terrorism, Mr. Trump made no
conciliatory gestures toward Muslims, Mexicans or residents of
African-American neighborhoods, all of whom he disparaged during his
campaign.
In
his first major national security selections so far — Senator Jeff
Sessions, Republican of Alabama, for attorney general; Representative
Mike Pompeo, Republican of Kansas, for C.I.A. director; and Lt. Gen.
Michael T. Flynn for national security adviser — Mr. Trump sent a clear
message that he does not intend to use these personnel choices to build
bridges to Democrats or the moderate and traditionally conservative
Republicans who opposed the nationalist overtones of his presidential
campaign.
The
reaction from Democrats was swift and sulfurous. Senator Elizabeth
Warren of Massachusetts demanded that Mr. Trump withdraw Mr. Sessions,
while Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey charged that some of Mr. Trump’s
choices had “degraded and demeaned Americans.” “The president-elect has
created a White House leadership that embodies the most divisive
rhetoric of his campaign,” Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon said.
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Mr.
Trump swept into office promising to dispense with the political
correctness of Washington’s establishment, and his choices reflect that.
President George W. Bush assembled a Republican cabinet with a variety
of shades of conservative ideology, including some members who
challenged the president. Mr. Trump’s early decisions suggest he favors a
cabinet that will echo his opinions.
Graphic
Donald Trump Is Choosing His Cabinet. Here’s the Latest Shortlist.
A list of possibilities for key posts in the new administration.
The
choices also suggest that on the perennially vexing question of how the
government should balance security and civil liberties, Mr. Trump will
throw his weight firmly behind security, in matters of both
counterterrorism and traditional law enforcement.
Mr.
Sessions, one of the Senate’s most conservative members, defended Mr.
Bush’s authority to conduct wiretapping without a warrant after the
Sept. 11 attacks. He has been a vocal supporter of military detention at
Guantánamo Bay and sharply criticized the Obama administration for
assigning lawyers to suspected terrorists and giving them the right to
remain silent, even when arrested on American soil.
He
has said the United States should keep waterboarding — a banned
technique that the Obama administration considered to be torture — as an
interrogation option because it works.
A
former prosecutor with a history of racially tinged remarks, Mr.
Sessions has voted against laws that protect gay people and guarantee
equal pay for women. He has also supported efforts to roll back the Voting Rights Act.
He has shown over two decades in the Senate that he believes the
Justice Department should do more to crack down on illegal immigration.
And he has supported strict enforcement of drug laws and opposed the
détente that Washington reached with states that legalized marijuana.
While
the Obama administration has used the Justice Department to expand the
definition of civil rights — to cover gays, lesbians and transgender
people, for example — Mr. Sessions says the government should not be “a
sword to assert inappropriate claims that have the effect of promoting
political agendas.”
“Jeff
Sessions has a decades-long record — from his early days as a
prosecutor to his present role as a senator — of opposing civil rights
and equality,” Sherrilyn Ifill, the president and director-counsel of
the N.A.A.C.P.’s Legal Defense Fund, said in a statement. “It is
unimaginable that he could be entrusted to serve as the chief law
enforcement officer for this nation’s civil rights laws.”
As
one of Mr. Trump’s earliest, most vocal supporters, Mr. Sessions has
supported Mr. Trump’s call for a temporary ban on immigration from
Muslim countries. As the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, Mr.
Sessions would be in position to help put that ban into effect.
“We
have no duty to morally or legally admit people,” he said this year.
“We need to use common sense with the who-what-where of the threat. It
is the toxic ideology of Islam.”
Along
with Mr. Pompeo and General Flynn, he will thrust the charged phrase
“radical Islamic terrorism” to the center of American foreign policy in a
way that blurs the lines between a war on terrorism and a war on Islam.
General Flynn, in particular, has used anti-Muslim language that even
the most strident Republicans have avoided.
“Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL,” he posted on Twitter
in February. He has described Islam as a political ideology that has
turned into a “malignant cancer.” Like Mr. Sessions, General Flynn
favors an immigration ban and has expressed support for the idea of
forcing Muslims in the United States to register with the government. He
once erroneously wrote on Twitter that Shariah, or Islamic law, was in danger of taking over the country.
Both
Mr. Bush and President Obama believed that such assertions inflamed
anti-American sentiment, served as a recruiting tool for terrorists and
antagonized countries in the Middle East that the United States needed
as allies in the fight against violent extremism.
Since
Sept. 11, 2001, there has been bipartisan consensus that the best way
to combat terrorism was to dismantle Al Qaeda and other networks while
avoiding being seen as attacking Islam. Mr. Trump has shown no such
qualms.
Graphic
20 Things Donald Trump Said He Wanted to Get Rid of as President
Some of the parts of the government that Mr. Trump promised to dismantle if he was elected.
Mr.
Pompeo has said Muslim leaders contribute to the threat of terrorism by
refusing to repudiate it, although Islamic leaders and advocacy groups
have done so repeatedly, and often. “Silence has made these Islamic
leaders across America potentially complicit in these acts and, more
importantly still, in those that may well follow,” Mr. Pompeo said in
2013.
William
McCants, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of
“The ISIS Apocalypse,” said Mr. Pompeo and other Trump allies “are
operating on the assumption that it’s something going on in the religion
itself.”
“It is a sea change,” he said, “and it really changes the terms of the discussion about what to do.”
Should
the Trump administration shape its counterterrorism strategy and
broader foreign policy around these ideas, Mr. McCants predicted the
United States would find itself at odds with its allies in Europe and
the Middle East, which have long sought to separate violent extremists
from the billions of peaceful mainstream Muslims. “This kind of rhetoric
pushes them together and in a way creates a self-fulfilling prophecy,”
he said.
Some
analysts said they believed that Friday’s selections were intended to
reward loyalty and appeal to Mr. Trump’s base. They held out hope that
the next set of selections — for secretary of state and secretary of
defense — would go to more moderate figures, much as Mr. Trump balanced
out the selection of Stephen K. Bannon at the White House by naming
Reince Priebus as chief of staff.
On
Saturday, Mr. Trump will meet with Mitt Romney in Bedminster, N.J., to
discuss, among other things, the top post at the State Department,
according to people close to the transition. Last week, he held similar
discussions with Gov. Nikki R. Haley of South Carolina.
“From
the beginning,” said Peter D. Feaver, a political science professor at
Duke who served in Mr. Bush’s National Security Council, “the challenge
for Trump is that he can’t do all the work he needs to do, with the
caliber of people he needs, just from within his core of supporters.”
Nixon. Even Eisenhower was much more moderate than these appointments and this was the 1950s.
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