As President-elect Trump begins to settle into his new reality as the leader of the free world, that very world has been anxiously awaiting indicators as to what a Trump administration might actually look and feel like. This past weekend began to provide some answers.
Last night, President-elect Trump gave his first interview since winning the election, sitting with 60 Minutes’ Leslie Stahl for a conversation circling back on some of his campaign’s more controversial pledges. In the final analysis, Trump suggested he’d appoint Supreme Court justices to roll back abortion rights, while showing deference for gay marriage being settled federal law, saying he was “fine with that.” The President-elect also made clear he planned to begin deporting two to three million undocumented immigrants, but restricted that initial pool of deportations to those with criminal records. (As for the non-criminal undocumented, Trump called them “terrific people” but that a determination as to their fate would have to wait.) Trump also issued a message to those of his supporters making headlines for harassing Muslims, Latinos, women and the like: “I say ‘Stop it,’ if it helps. I will say this right to the cameras: Stop it.”
The staffing of Trump’s administration has also been the subject of intense interest for it being a window into the tone and posture the President-elect intends to take with his tenure. And to that end, Trump’s received criticism on all sides: By choosing RNC Chairman Reince Priebus for the all-important Chief Of Staff role, Trump has upset the hard-right leaning, anti-establishment voters who expected Trump to “drain the swamp” of Washington; instead, they see him rewarding the top dog of the GOP’s status quo.
But Trump’s appointment of Stephen Bannon as White House Chief Strategist has proven even more controversial. Bannon is a Harvard-educated former Naval officer who rose to prominence as the executive chairman of Breitbart, an “alt-right”, conservative news service, whose headlines have come under fire by the likes of the hate-watch institutions like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Council on American-Islamic Relations for views that stoke white nationalism, anti-Muslimism and anti-semitism. Both the SPLC and the CAIR have called for Trump to “rescind this hire,” meanwhile Trump spokesperson Kellyanne Conway has defended Bannon, saying “I’m personally offended that you think I would manage a campaign where that would be one of the going philosophies.”
More appointments are expected this week. We are just getting started.