President-elect Donald Trump announced on November 12 that he would nominate Fox News host and military veteran Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense and former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe to lead the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Mr. Trump also said he had chosen former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel and selected longtime friend Steven Witkoff as special envoy to the Middle East.
The president-elect will also nominate South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem to run the Department of Homeland Security and appoint Bill McGinley, his first Cabinet secretary, as White House counsel.
Mr. Hegseth, 44, is a co-host of Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends Weekend” and has been a contributor to the network since 2014. There, he developed a relationship with Mr. Trump, a frequent guest on the show.
The Pentagon is a key position in the administration. During Trump’s first term, five people served as US defense secretaries in four years. Only two of them were confirmed by the Senate.
South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem is a prominent conservative and former member of Congress. She herself was considered a potential Republican presidential candidate, but refused to challenge Mr. Trump and publicly expressed her desire to be his vice president during the election, but Mr. Trump chose JD Vance.
If confirmed, Noem would head an agency at the center of Trump’s sweeping immigration plans. The Department of Homeland Security is a sprawling 260,000-person agency created after the September 11 attacks. Trump’s campaign has vowed to carry out mass deportations of immigrants in the U.S. illegally. There are an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S.
John Ratcliffe, a former Republican congressman from Texas who served as director of national intelligence during the final months of Trump's first term, led the US government's intelligence agencies during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Mr Huckabee is a supporter of Israel and his nomination comes as President-elect Donald Trump pledges to align US foreign policy more closely with Israel's interests.
Mr Witkoff, a Florida real estate developer who serves as chairman of Mr Trump’s inaugural committee, is also a golfing buddy of the president-elect and was at Mr Trump’s side when he was the target of a second assassination attempt at his club in West Palm Beach, Florida, in September.
The selection of Mr. Witkoff shows Mr. Trump is sticking to his old ways of placing close associates in key Middle East posts. Eight years ago, he appointed former corporate lawyer Jason Greenbalt as his special representative for international negotiations and made his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, his personal envoy for negotiations in the region.
