Notice anything similar about all of these Donald Trump cabinet picks?
If they’re confirmed by the Senate, Donald Trump‘s four top Cabinet officials will all be white men, which would make him the first president in decades to earn that distinction. Yes, it’s true: the man who boasted about sexual assault and thanked black people for not voting has a super-white, super-male crew.
This week, Trump announced big oil tycoon Rex Tillerson as his pick for secretary of state, joining Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions as his nominee for Attorney General, retired Gen. James Mattis as his pick to run the Defense Department, and Steve Mnuchin, an ex-Goldman Sachs banker, Trump’s nominee to run the Treasury. The last time that all four of the country’s most influential departments were run by white men was in 1989, when George H.W. Bush’s Cabinet was confirmed, as CNN pointed out.
The problem doesn’t stop with those four officials, as the vast majority of the rest of Trump’s Cabinet picks are also white men. In fact, it’s an incredibly unrepresentative group! Of the 18 announced members of Trump’s Cabinet, a staggering 14 are white and 12 are male, CNN reported.
When you combine it with the other top officials in Washington, you get a sea of male-shaped snow.
In President Obama’s administration, 11 of the corresponding positions were held by white officials, seven men and four women, who were joined by two Latinx top officials and three African Americans, two of whom were women. Among Obama’s top appointments were Attorney General Eric Holder, who is black, and Hillary Clinton. Even President George W. Bush, who had two black secretaries of state and a Latinx Attorney General, was an improvement over Trump.
Ben Carson, the president-elect’s pick to run the Department of Housing and Urban Development, is the administration’s lone black Cabinet member so far. There are no Latinx people to be found.
There are three women of color slated to hold lower-ranking positions under the new administration: South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Trump’s pick for United Nations ambassador; Elaine Chao, who was the first Asian-American women to hold a Cabinet position under George W. Bush, as secretary of transportation; and Seema Verma, who is slated to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.