Washington — US President-elect Joe Biden on Monday named the deeply experienced Antony Blinken for secretary of state, also nominating the first female head of intelligence and a czar for climate issues, with a promise to a return to expertise after the turbulent years of Donald Trump..
As Trump continues to work hard to overturn the results of the election three weeks ago, Biden’s introduction of the cabinet name is his biggest move to date, which shows that he is ready to take over as president on January 20.
The list released by the Biden team before the official announcement on Tuesday indicated that the move was aimed at lowering the temperature in Washington and restoring the traditional leadership of the United States abroad.
“We have no time to lose when it comes to our national security and foreign policy,” Biden said in a statement.
“These individuals are equally as experienced and crisis-tested as they are innovative and imaginative.”
Blinken, a former number two of the State Department and a longtime advisor, will spearhead a fast-paced dismantling of Trump s disruptive “America first” policies, including rejoining the Paris climate agreement and the World Health Organization and resurrecting the Iran nuclear deal.
Biden named the first woman, Avril Haines, as director of national intelligence, and the first Latino, Alejandro Mayorkas, to head the Department of Homeland Security, whose policing of tough immigration restrictions under Trump was a frequent source of controversy.
Signaling the Democratic Party’s president-elect campaign promise to raise the threat of global warming on his personal homepage, he named the country’s former secretary of John Kerry’s new special envoy on climate issues.
In further information about the renewed contacts between the United States and the international community, Biden appointed professional diplomat Linda Thomas Greenfield as the UN ambassador. Jake Sullivan was appointed as the National Security Advisor, and he advised Biden when Barden Obama was the vice president.
The picks highlight professionals that Biden already knows well, and Trump White House officials are usually selected without a traditional work background, or they have proved incompatible with their jobs and resigned.
These announcements were made in the unprecedented context of Trump’s refusal to admit defeat and prevent Biden from entering the normal procedures of preparing a new administration.
So far, only a slowly growing handful of Republican leaders have condemned Trump’s conspiracy theories, even though there is no evidence that large-scale fraud won his victory.
Many of Biden’s cabinet picks need to be confirmed by the Senate, and the Republican Party is only a minority, although this will change if the Democrats win the two Georgia Senate elections.
Although his legal team has repeatedly failed to prove their allegations in court, Trump remains unyielding.
At the same time, the president has largely stopped at least his public work duties, and went to the golf course he owned in Virginia six times after the election.
On Monday, the White House announced again that Trump had not arranged any public events.
Since the election, he has not accepted questions from reporters-the silence that the President had never imagined before. During most of his tenure, daily conversations with the press have been very rare.
However, his options are rapidly diminishing.
With Biden having won a comfortable victory, Trump is seeking to disrupt the normally routine process of state-by-state certification of results, followed by the formal December 14 vote by the Electoral College.
The latest focus of his campaign is to seek to postpone the Michigan result certification for two weeks, which Biden won with 155,000 votes on November 3.
The Michigan State Assembly is scheduled to meet on Monday.
In another crucial state where Biden has won, Pennsylvania is expected to issue the certificate after a federal judge presented the latest unfounded challenge to Trump on Saturday.
Last weekend, more cracks appeared in the facade of the Republican Party’s unity. Trump’s confidant and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie called the president’s legal team a “national embarrassment.”
Senator Patrick Toomey, from Pennsylvania, said after the court ruling there that Trump had “exhausted all plausible legal options.”
And on Monday, Senator Rob Portman, another Republican, said it was “time to expeditiously resolve any outstanding questions and move forward.”
“There is no more sacred constitutional process in our great democracy than the orderly transfer of power after a presidential election,” he wrote in The Enquirer newspaper.
There was also a push from Trump s highest profile Wall Street backer, Stephen Schwarzman, who heads the Blackstone private equity group, who told Axios “the country should move on.”
