WASHINGTON – United States president-elect Joe Biden will name his first cabinet picks tomorrow, his chief of staff said, even as Donald Trump clung to unsubstantiated claims of fraud despite growing dissent from within his own party.
Biden has pushed ahead with preparations to assume the presidency on January 20, regardless of Trump’s bid to undo the results of the November vote.
“You are going to see the first of the president-elect’s cabinet picks on Tuesday,” Biden's chief of staff, Ron Klain, told ABC's "This Week" yesterday.
Several US news organisations, including Bloomberg and The New York Times, reported that the president-elect will nominate seasoned diplomat and long-time aide Antony Blinken as secretary of state.
Biden also said last week he had already decided his pick for the key position of treasury secretary.
US media also widely reported he will name Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who served as assistant secretary of state for Africa under President Barack Obama, as his United Nations ambassador.
A growing number of Republicans have either recognized Biden’s victory or at least urged the General Services Administration – the usually low-profile agency that manages the federal bureaucracy – to release federal funds for the Biden transition.
With Trump refusing to acknowledge the election outcome, Biden and his top aides have been denied briefings on sensitive domestic and foreign policy issues – most urgently the coronavirus pandemic battering the country.
Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who in 2016 advised the Trump transition, said on ABC that the president’s legal team was a “national embarrassment”.
Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, another prominent Republican, told CNN that Trump was making the country look like a “banana republic”, later tweeting the president should “stop golfing and concede”.
Trump has golfed on every weekend day since the election, though he took part virtually in the conference of the G20 leading economies this weekend – skipping a Saturday session on the pandemic.
And even Representative Devin Nunes, an ardent Trump loyalist, conceded backhandedly on Fox News that Biden had “run a successful campaign from a basement”. – AFP, November 23, 2020
