Trump works to keep Carrier jobs in U.S.
PALM BEACH, Fla. — President-elect Donald Trump didn’t take off all of Thanksgiving Day while enjoying a long holiday weekend with his family at his Mar-a-Lago estate, saying he was working to keep the makers of Carrier air conditioners from relocating from Indianapolis to Mexico.
Meanwhile, his transition team was stepping up its effort to raise money for inaugural festivities and Trump offered a holiday prayer for a politically divided nation, even as a controversy swirled around his consideration of onetime fierce critic Mitt Romney for his Cabinet.
After Thanksgiving Day, Trump and his transition team are expected to turn their attention back to building his administration. Two possible appointments loom: retired neurosurgeon and former presidential candidate Ben Carson as secretary of housing and urban development and billionaire investor Wilbur Ross Jr. as commerce secretary. But a top aide was thinking aloud about this on Thursday, seeming to highlight opposition among some Trump supporters to Romney’s selection as secretary of state.
In a pair of posts on her verified Twitter account @kellyannePolls Thursday, Trump spokesman Kellyanne Conway noted that she had been “receiving a deluge of social media & private concerns re Romney Some Trump loyalists war against Romney as sec of state.”
The former Massachusetts governor and 2012 GOP presidential nominee had vehemently opposed Trump’s nomination during the primary season, assailing the billionaire as a “phony.”
In a second Twitter post, Conway referred to former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Schultz, both Cabinet officers in previous Republican administrations, as men who “flew around the world less, counseled POTUS (president of the United States) close to home more. And were loyal. Good checklist.”
The most recent Trump Cabinet-level picks to be announced were South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley to serve as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and charter school advocate Betsy DeVos to lead the Education Department.
Trump talked of saving jobs on Thanksgiving in his own tweet.
During the presidential campaign he often cited Carrier’s decision last February to relocate some 1,400 jobs to its plant in Mexico as an example of jobs leaving the country — and how he as president would slap a tax on any units manufactured in Mexico and sold in the U.S.
