ANThe core of the administration that Joe Biden is building is a trusted circle of employees, who are united by many years of working together in a united team in the Obama administration, by a shared faith or, in some cases, by a tie with their deceased son from Biden, Beau.
It is the totally opposite approach to that adopted by Donald Trump, who has assembled a “team of rivals” with sharp elbows – powerful men from different walks of life, whom he never met but thought he seemed to be up to. Biden values the cool guy’s familiarity and collegiality, and warned the new nominees on Wednesday that if they don’t treat each other with respect, “I’ll fire him on the spot.”
Tony Blinken
The nominee for State Secretary worked alongside Biden for almost two decades. He was his foreign policy adviser in the Senate and as national security adviser to the vice president in the Obama administration. Those who know them speak of a mental fusion between them about foreign policy and more. Just as Biden is the anti-Trump, Blinken is the anti-Pompeo: he speaks softly, discreetly and collegially. At his confirmation hearing, he asked for American confidence and humility on the world stage, a contrast to Pompeo’s “arrogance”. Unlike his predecessor, Blinken is an instinctive multilateralist, having grown up in France and being bilingual.
Jake Sullivan
Sullivan, at 43 the youngest national security advisor in 60 years, it is also a quantity fully known by the president. Former Rhodes fellow, who has a master’s degree in international relations at Oxford, succeeded Blinken as Biden’s national security adviser in the Obama administration and was at his side in that role for 18 months.
He is best known for having initiated secret talks with Iranian officials that led to the 2015 nuclear deal, but his broader philosophy, which he developed at Yale after leaving Obama’s White House, is closely in line with Biden’s: strength America abroad is based on social cohesion and prosperity in the heart of America.
Lloyd Austin
Biden nominee for defense secretary he was described as “the silent general” for his record of avoiding the press, but he is said to have strong political views behind the closed doors of the Pentagon – and those views closely align with those of Biden. He has a strong preference for diplomacy over military strength, especially in the Middle East. He vehemently opposed US support for Saudi intervention in Yemen, where the US Central Command cooperated with the Houthis in fighting Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
Just as important, Austin had met Beau Biden in Iraq ten years ago, when the general was chief of US forces in that country and young Biden was a major in the general body of lawyers for judges. The two attended Catholic services together, and Catholicism is another important area of common private land with the new president.
Avril Haines
Haines, the new national intelligence director which was Biden’s first choice to be confirmed by the Senate, also has a long history with Biden. She worked for him in his Senate days and informed him almost daily when he was deputy director of the CIA and deputy national security adviser in the Obama administration. Senior officials on that national security council are the primary recruiting group for leadership positions in the Biden administration. As with Blinken, most of the people who worked with Haines emphasize her kindness and hard work, but she faces skepticism on the left for her previous involvement in the Obama administration, coding rules and procedures for targeting suspected terrorists for drone attacks and her role in writing CIA documents on torture and overriding a general inspector’s recommendation to discipline officials who had participated.
Kamala Harris
Harris’ choice for Biden as a running mate involved overcoming some injuries inflicted during the primaries when she tried to stand out from the Democratic crowd with a violent attack on the leader in debates, on business and racial integration. But the vice presidents the roots with the Biden family are deep. When she was Attorney General in California, Beau Biden was doing the same job in Delaware, and they joined forces during the real estate and financial crisis, pushing for real banking regulation. They remained close friends until his death in 2015, at the age of 46. “There were periods, when I was in heat, when Beau and I talked every day, sometimes several times a day,” she said in her memoirs.
Ron Klain
Klain has three attributes that made him an obvious choice as chief of staff in the new White House. He knows the president very well, as he was Biden’s chief of staff in the early years of the Obama administration and worked on three of Biden’s election campaigns. He worked very closely, and apparently harmoniously, with Jake Sullivan. And he has a lot of experience with pandemics, having coordinated Obama’s response to the Ebola outbreak in 2014 and 2015 – highly relevant credentials in a presidency that is likely to be dominated by the coronavirus in its first year.
John Kerry
Kerry and Biden worked together in the Senate for decades in a natural partnership – two senators from the Northeast, practicing Catholics with Irish roots and deep interest in foreign policy. Kerry was one of the first endorsers of Biden’s third presidential candidacy and joined him in the election campaign. When he made Kerry his climate envoy, Biden said that the former secretary of state was “one of my closest friends” so that the world would know that he would be speaking for the president. Biden added that there is: “No one I trust more”.
Jill Biden
This is not quite true. The president’s wife for 43 years, Jill Biden, is a close and fierce protector, along the lines of Barack and Michele Obama, and the opposite of the cold and distant partnership in the White House of Donald and Melania Trump. In the campaign, she intervened physically to protect her husband from protesters and journalists who got too close during the pandemic. She is the stepmother to her surviving son, Hunter, and they have a daughter, Ashley, born in 1981. Jill Biden will break the mold of the first ladies, however, by continuing her career while living in the White House, teaching writing at Northern Virginia Community College part-time.