President-elect Donald Trump is busy finalising his team, and many are watching with trepidation. His nominations of ultra-conservatives like retired general Michael Flynn as national security adviser, Congressman Michael Pompeo as CIA director and Senator Jeff Sessions as attorney-general have stirred a hornet’s nest across the world. An appointment that has led to even greater heartache is of Steve Bannon as chief strategist, whose alt-right website Breitbart ran white nationalist headlines in the campaign that Mr Trump ran.
His core team, with a chequered past on race relations and civil liberties, reveals clear signs of xenophobia and Islamophobia, with Mr Sessions known to be fiercely opposed to H-1B visas, with which Indian techies work in the US for American companies. Mr Flynn is notorious for inflammatory anti-Muslim comments and Mr Pompeo is an India baiter. If all that wasn’t troubling enough for America watchers after a bruising race where diversity had taken a backseat, it’s the possible role his son-in-law Jared Kushner may play as head of the Trump kitchen cabinet that could be most unsettling.
Mr Kushner and wife Ivanka were seen at a meeting that the President-elect had with Japanese PM Shinzo Abe, indicating the lines are going to get increasingly blurred between Trump the billionaire tycoon and Trump the US President. His meeting with three Indian real estate partners has also raised tricky questions of conflict of interest. It appears the nominations have thus far stemmed from the Trump reality show Apprentice kind of tests and home influences, though the President-elect offered an olive branch to Republicans by including Reince Priebus as his chief of staff.
As President-elect, Mr Trump had made the right public pronouncements, specially after his meeting with Barack Obama at the White House helping to douse the fires of suspicion, and holding out the promise that President Trump would be different from Candidate Trump. It is possible that, being a businessman, Mr Trump would be a pragmatist at the Oval Office, not a right-wing ideologue to be feared, even if he was a candidate who had the backing of the Ku Klux Klan during the campaign.
Mr Trump’s promised economic policies of lower taxes, that will obviously help the rich far more than the working class, and greater infra spending could lead to a revival in the short term that could be a shot in the arm for the Republicans, who have had cause to make up with their candidate after the election. The world awaits with bated breath key developments in the run-up to the handover date of January 20, as it tries to deconstruct Donald Trump’s character to figure how he would behave in the White House.
