Don’s Cabinet makes history
Highest fed office for gay man
President Trump made history this week with the appointment of Richard Grenell as acting director of national intelligence.
The job, a Cabinet-level position, makes Grenell the highest serving openly gay man to hold federal office in United States history.
“He is a faithful patriot and an extraordinary student of our national security apparatus and foreign policy. He has led at the UN, the Foreign Service and for several presidential campaigns. He is unabashed and completely qualified for the DNI,” Billy White, a former president of the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in Manhattan who has known Grenell for three decades, told The Post.
“I know I speak for so many in the LGBT community who love and support this courageous appointment by President Trump,” added White, who is gay.
President Barack Obama never appointed an openly gay Cabinet member, a source of bitterness for LGBT activists at the time.
Grenell is taking the job in an acting capacity from Joseph Maguire, so he will not require what would no doubt be a bruising Senate confirmation.
Trump has said he will nominate a full-time candidate “very soon.”
The DNI, a title created after 9/11, oversees all the intelligence agencies.
In his current role as America’s top envoy to Germany, Grenell, 53, has been called America’s “Trumpiest ambassador.” The Republican operativeturned-diplomat has long been a lightning rod online.
Once an adviser to thenGov. George Pataki, Grenell has in the past been blocked on Twitter by at least four New York Times reporters, including their former Frankfurt Bureau chief Mark Landler.
His most eyebrow-raising tweets included comments about the physical appearance of women. “Rachel Maddow needs to take a breath and put on a necklace,” he wrote in 2011.
Grenell has been a longtime advocate of the cause of global LGBT rights and has pushed the Trump administration to tackle the issue publicly.
Last December, just hours before his boss was impeached by the House of Representatives, Grenell led the United Nations in condemning 69 countries which still outlaw homosexuality.
“I want them to understand that you cannot put someone in jail or kill someone simply for being gay,” he told assembled representatives, some from nations where LGBTQ people are targeted.
Grenell insists Donald Trump is a good friend to the LGBTQ community.
“After thirty years in American politics it has been by far the most welcoming administration in my lifetime,” he said.