President Trump: Whom Will He Appoint? Time to panic?

By Shlomo Maital

trump

President-elect Trump. Never thought I would write those words. A great many people I know are stunned, shocked, and almost in panic.

   No need to panic.   The White House has ways of changing the DNA of its occupants fairly quickly.  

   Who will Trump appoint?   The Financial Times has some ideas, and they are at least a bit reassuring…

   * Steve Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs executive frequently mentioned as a possible Treasury secretary, and Wilbur Ross, a distressed asset investor.   OK, the Trump administration will be pro-wealthy, even though the blue-collar guys elected him. But what did you expect?

   *   ….conservative columnist Lawrence Kudlow, a former official in the Reagan White House who once worked as chief economist at Bear Stearns, is another senior member of the campaign team, as is Steve Moore, an economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation who helped draw up Mr Trump’s tax plans.

*   Trump has said: “Guys like [former General Electric chief executive] Jack Welch. I like guys like Henry Kravis [the co-founder of KKR, the private equity group]. I’d love to bring my friend [billionaire investor] Carl Icahn. I mean, we have people that are great.”

*     National security:   Michael Flynn, a former head of the Defence Intelligence Agency, who has been a regular analyst on Russia Today, the Russian-backed television network, as well as Keith Kellogg, who has worked in the private sector since helping run the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad after the 2003 invasion of Iraq.  Among his other advisers are Walid Phares, a Middle East analyst who has come in for criticism for his ties to a Christian armed faction in Lebanon’s civil war in the 1980s.

* ….attorney-general: Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who has been a vocal backer and close Trump adviser since the summer.

*   “ economic platform: Peter Navarro of the University of California’s Paul Merage School of Business, an economist who produced the film Death by China, a documentary featuring animated Chinese aircraft bombing the US.

       On second thought, after writing the above: Not reassuring.

        It’s time to panic. All together now… Yikes!