Trump’s team of rivals: Discordant notes in the amen chorus

WASHINGTON — You can’t really call them “yes men.” Maybe we’re meeting Donald Trump’s “yes, but” men.

Some of the incoming president’s most important Cabinet choices are at odds with him on matters that were dear to his heart as a campaigner and central to his promises to supporters.

Trump says he doesn’t mind the disconnect. He wants his Cabinet members to be themselves, “say what you want to say,” he told reporters Friday in New York. “I may be right, they may be right.”

But despite that breezy dismissal, the differences laid bare in a week of confirmation hearings raise questions about whether Trump will roll over his Cabinet on immigration, Russia, national security and more, bend to his top advisers’ stated convictions or watch them backtrack from pronouncements that may be helping them win Senate approval.

The result is Trump is assembling a potentially discordant amen chorus at the dawn of his presidency.

Russian hacking

Trump’s nominees to run the CIA, State Department and Justice Department gave credence to U.S. intelligence assessments on Russian hacking that the president-elect ridiculed for weeks before he grudgingly accepted it Wednesday.

Kansas Republican Rep. Mike Pompeo, nominated as CIA director, said the report concluding that Russia interfered in the U.S. election trying to help Trump win was “an analytical product that is sound.” Rex Tillerson, nominated as secretary of state, told senators it’s a “fair assumption” the hacking couldn’t have happened without Russian President Vladimir Putin’s approval.

Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, chosen for attorney general, said “I have no reason to doubt” the report’s conclusions.

Trump has declared the focus on Russia and the election a “political witch hunt,” while acknowledging this week that Russia was probably behind the hacking of Democrats during the campaign.

Muslims

In the campaign, Trump proposed a temporary ban on foreign Muslims entering the U.S. and at one point suggested requiring Muslims already in the country to register. The proposals then evolved into one that would halt immigration from countries linked to terrorism, though Trump never explicitly took a Muslim ban off the table, nor renounced the registry advocated by some who supported him.

Tillerson told senators: “I do not support a blanket-type rejection of any particular group of people.”

Retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, nominated to lead the Homeland Security Department, also weighed in: “I don’t agree with registering people based on ethnic or religion or anything like that.” Nor should religion be a basis for criminal or counter terrorism investigations, he said.

Sessions also repudiated “the idea that Muslims, as a religious group, should be denied admission to the United States.”

Immigration

Tillerson dissociated himself from Trump’s inflammatory description of Mexicans crossing illegally into the U.S. as criminals and rapists. He contended he would “never characterize an entire population with any single term at all.” Mexico is a “long-standing friend and neighbor of this country,” he added, offering a diplomatic bow to a country that Trump says has been taking advantage of weak U.S. leadership.

For his part, Kelly stated that a border wall alone cannot be a cure-all for illegal crossings. “There has to be really a layered defense,” Kelly said. “If you are to build a wall from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico, you’d still have to back that wall up with patrolling by human beings, by sensors, by observation devices.”