Donald Trump owes his electoral victory to his campaign’s gains among Latino and Black voters. But the nominees for his historic second presidency largely reflect the overwhelmingly white makeup of Washington power.
Thus far, Trump has nominated one Black American to his 16-member Cabinet: Scott Turner for Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. He has also selected two Latino nominees: Lori Chavez-DeRemer for Secretary of Labor and Marco Rubio for Secretary of State.
When Trump was elected in 2016, his Cabinet included 19 white men, making it the least racially diverse group of the president’s closest advisers and heads of institutional power in more than 40 years.
At the time, he had also appointed only one Black nominee to his cabinet; Ben Carson, like Turner, was also tapped for housing secretary.
But out of the 26 nominees for top roles in Trump’s next Cabinet and Cabinet-level positions thus far, 19 are white.
Three positions have not yet been announced, and his Cabinet nominees still must face Senate confirmation, but there are more white men named Doug nominated for top positions in Trump’s Cabinet than there are Black nominees.
Trump is reportedly mulling potential candidates of color for deputy positions, which would be more responsible for day-to-day operations of the agencies, but the president-elect also is facing the fact that “there’s no bench” of Black candidates for those roles, Politico reported.
Former longtime GOP strategist Deanna Bass Williams, who worked with former Housing Secretary Ben Carson, said that “not everything is about race” but about the best candidates to fulfill Trump’s agenda.
“This group of Cabinet picks have the guts to actually do it,” she told Politico.
Instead, Trump’s wider effort has been to distance himself from perceived establishment figures and field experts while appealing to right-wing media figures and a chance to deliver shocking announcements to disrupt the press.
The president-elect has used Fox News as a casting couch for top roles in his administration, as well as figures who emerged from a COVID-19 conspiracy theory media environment.
His realignment of the White House stands in stark contrast to President Joe Biden’s immediate actions to establish the tenets of racial justice and equal opportunity as whole-of-government responsibility.
The president signed an executive order in his first day in office stating that the federal government “should have a workforce that reflects the diversity of the American people,” and that a “growing body of evidence demonstrates that diverse, equitable, inclusive, and accessible workplaces yield higher-performing organizations.”
Biden entered office in 2021 alongside the first-ever woman and first Black and Indian American to serve as vice president, and with several other Black nominees to his cabinet, including Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Housing Secretary Marcia Fudge. Other high-ranking Black nominees included United Nations ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, Environmental Protection Agency chief Michael Regan, and Office of Management and Budget director Shalanda Young.
Biden also appointed Deb Haaland as the nation’s first Native American Secretary of Interior, as well as Hispanic and Latino Americans Xavier Becerra as health secretary, Miguel Cardona as education secretary, and Alejandro Mayorkas for Secretary of State.
Trump, meanwhile, derided his Democratic opponent Kamala Harris as a “DEI hire” and questioned her racial heritage while making overt appeals to Black and Latino voters.
He repeatedly stated on the campaign trail that immigrants are taking “Black jobs,” comments at odds with the realities of the job market, drawing widespread backlash.
“I will tell you that coming from the border, are millions and millions of people that happen to be taking Black jobs,” he said during the National Association of Black Journalists in July.
Asked to define what that meant, he said that a “Black job is anybody that has a job. That’s what it is.”
Trump has improved with appointments for women; Susie Wiles was tapped as the first woman to serve as White House chief of staff, and he has picked Brooke Rollins as agriculture secretary, Linda McMahon for education secretary, Kristi Noem for Secretary of Homeland Security, and Pam Bondi for attorney general — his second choice for the role behind now-former congressman Matt Gaetz.
His first cabinet had only two women.
Scott Bessent would be the first openly gay Secretary of Treasury.
Trump has nominated people of color for other top roles in his administration, including Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence; she was previously the first American Samoan and Hindu elected to Congress. Alex Wong also was selected as deputy national security adviser.
Former Trump White House attorney May Mailman has defended the incoming administration’s lack of diversity.
“We are less interested in what somebody looks like or what their sex is, and we are far more interested in whether they’re going to execute the president’s agenda and whether they are going to unleash American businesses, whether they’re going to weaponize the Department of Justice against people who don’t agree with them politically and against businesses that don’t agree with them politically,” she told CNN earlier this month.
“If we are going to celebrate things on the basis of diversity, then you can’t gain the respect that you want and you deserve,” Mailman added. “If the president put someone somewhere it is because he trusts them, because he thinks that they are going to do a great job and that is empowering.”
Civil rights activists Rev Al Sharpton said Trump “spent this campaign selling himself to Black voters, especially men, by peddling sneakers and implying his criminal convictions would resonate with our community.”
“Right now, it appears that the self-proclaimed ‘best president for Black America since Abraham Lincoln’ has lost interest in us,” he said. “The president-elect needs to put his money where his mouth is if he actually wants to deliver for Black America.”