Three weeks after his surprising victory in the highly contested US presidential elections, New York billionaire Donald Trump continued to scramble to fill key positions in his new administration that will take over 20 January from outgoing US President Barack Obama. Despite some shocking appointments of top advisers and his national security team, the upcoming heads of the vital departments of state, Defense and Homeland Security remain unknown. On Monday, Trump met former CIA director and decorated retired army general David Petraeus as a possible candidate for secretary of state, a position once filled by recent rival Democrat Hillary Clinton. The former general who was credited for his role in cutting down the number of US troops in occupied Iraq, and later rewarded by his appointment as CIA director in 2011, was obviously keen to take on the job. His term at the CIA was among the shortest, as he was removed a year later following a scandal that involved sharing classified information during an extramarital affair. “He basically walked us around the world, showed a great grasp of a variety of the challenges that are out there and some of the opportunities as well. Very good conversation, and we'll see where it goes from here,” Petraeus told reporters after the one-hour meeting with Trump. Trump confidantes told several US media outlets that former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney was personally favoured by the upcoming US president to become the next secretary of state. But that was faced with strong opposition by campaign leaders as Romney had refused to support Trump during the hectic election year. Brent Bozell, a conservative media critic, said in a statement, “The very idea of Mitt Romney as secretary of state — or any other cabinet position in a Trump administration — is a slap to his supporters. Plenty of people (myself included) opposed the president-elect, but virtually all endorsed him once he was the nominee. Not so Romney and the DC elites.” Nevertheless, Trump and Romney, who already met a week ago to discuss cooperation, met for a second time over dinner Tuesday, 29 November. Besides Petreaus and Romney, Trump also met Tuesday with Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, as a possible candidate for secretary of state. Trump has already appointed several controversial figures as close advisers, topped with Stephen Bannon, executive editor of Breitbart News, one of the most extreme right-wing news websites that openly supports white supremacy, racist ideas and is sharply critical of Muslims and Islam as a religion. Bannon was appointed as top White House adviser, and the pick was sharply attacked by Democrats and human rights groups. Among the few who welcomed Bannon's appointment was David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader. “You have an individual, Mr Bannon, who's basically creating the ideological aspects of where we're going,” Duke told CNN. “And ideology ultimately is the most important aspect of any government,” he added. Trump also picked Michael Flynn as national security adviser. As a former intelligence officer who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, and former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Flynn sharply clashed with Obama. In his 2016 book, The Field of Fight, Flynn characterised US counter-terrorism efforts as “a world war against a messianic mass movement of evil people”. In a speech earlier this year, he called Islam “a cancer” and “a political ideology”, adding, “It definitely hides behind this notion of it being a religion.” When Trump's pick for chief of staff, Reince Priebus, was recently asked whether the president's-elect views on Islam were in line with those of Flynn, he replied, “I think so. Clearly there are some aspects of that faith that are problematic. And we know them. We've seen it.” Trump himself has seldom distinguished between Islam and “radical Islam,” which he has called an “ideology of death that must be extinguished”. The upcoming president's pick for CIA director, Mike Pompeo, is not any less worrying for human rights groups and those who fear the consequences of an extremely right-wing team surrounding Trump. Pompeo, who represented a district in Kansas for three terms in the US House of Representatives, is a fierce critic of the Iran nuclear deal and wants to restore surveillance programmes stopped after the Edward Snowden revelations. The hawkish member of the House Republican caucus on foreign affairs was one of the harshest critics of Clinton over the 2012 attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Despite the lengthy schedule of meetings with candidates for cabinet positions, Trump still had the time to pick up a harsh fight with Clinton after she decided to support Green Party candidate Jill Stein's push to force recounts in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan. Trump narrowly carried those Democratic strongholds. Clinton led the national popular vote by close to two million votes, but Trump won 290 electoral votes to Clinton's 232. Michigan officially certified its results on Monday: Mr Trump beat Mrs Clinton by 10,704 votes, or 0.2 percentage points. Wisconsin officials are moving forward with the first presidential recount in state history following Stein's formal request. Stein, who drew one per cent of the vote nationally, is raising millions of dollars to pay for the effort. “Because we had not uncovered any actionable evidence of hacking or outside attempts to alter the voting technology, we had not planned to exercise this option ourselves,” Clinton campaign attorney Marc Elias wrote Saturday in a blog post. “But now that a recount has been initiated in Wisconsin, we intend to participate in order to ensure the process proceeds in a manner that is fair to all sides.” Elias said Clinton would take the same approach in Pennsylvania and Michigan if Stein were to follow through with recount requests in those states, even though that was highly unlikely to change the election outcome. “Regardless of the potential to change the outcome in any of the states, we feel it is important, on principle, to ensure our campaign is legally represented in any court proceedings and represented on the ground in order to monitor the recount process itself,” Elias wrote. Trump reacted angrily to claims that the elections were not free and fair in a series of tweets. “Hillary Clinton conceded the election when she called me just prior to the victory speech and after the results were in. Nothing will change,” he tweeted Sunday. Later on Sunday, the 70-year-old president-elect bizarrely claimed that he won the Electoral College “in a landslide” and would take the popular vote “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” despite there being no evidence of illegal voting. He followed up his tweets Monday by claiming that there was “serious voter fraud” in Virginia, New Hampshire and California — all of which were called for Clinton. Again, the president-elect did not back up his claims with facts or evidence. “Serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California — so why isn't the media reporting on this? Serious bias — big problem!” Trump tweeted Monday. California's top election official, Alex Padilla, asserted that there was no evidence for the president-elect's claim. “It appears that Mr Trump is troubled by the fact that a growing majority of Americans did not vote for him,” Padilla said. “His unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud in California and elsewhere are absurd. His reckless tweets are inappropriate and unbecoming of a resident-elect,” he said.
