President-elect’s staff picks alarm minorities
WASHINGTON: President-elect Donald Trump’s choices for leadership posts threaten national unity and promise to turn back the clock on progress for racial, religious and sexual minorities, civil rights leaders and others said on Friday after his nomination of Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions for attorney general.
Comments attributed to Trump’s picks, including Stephen Bannon as senior adviser and chief strategist and former army lieutenant Michael Flynn as national security adviser, serve to embolden Americans to lash out at members of minority groups, they said.
Sessions, a Republican, was denied a federal judgeship in 1986 after hearings in which he was accused of making racially-charged remarks as a United States attorney. According to transcripts, Sessions was accused, among other things, of joking that he thought the Ku Klux Klan “was OK” until he learnt its members smoked marijuana, and of calling a black assistant US attorney “boy”. During the hearing, Sessions denied making some of the comments and said others were jokes taken out of context.
Black Lives Matter activist and Campaign Zero co-founder DeRay Mckesson said Sessions’s “documented racism and previous ineligibility for public office make him unfit to be the standard-bearer for the nation’s justice system.”
“If Sessions were to become attorney-general, the freedom and liberty of the marginalised would be threatened,” said Mckesson.
“Sessions’s nomination would confirm Trump plans to govern as he campaigned — as a proponent of bigotry, racism and xenophobia.”
Aside from comments and actions attributed to the nominees, their lack of diversity worry civil rights leaders.
Washington attorney A. Scott Bolden said Trump was “0 for 4” on diversity: All his picks are white men.
“The scariest part of his potential administration will be how his political debts to the alt-right will manifest itself in his administration and policies.
“Jeff Sessions is one of those manifestations... to be in control not only of justice in America, but to bring injustice to America,” Bolden said.
Trump said he planned to reward loyalty, and he did so with his nomination of Sessions, who was the first senator to endorse him. AP