Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani might be in line to take over as secretary of state in President-elect Trump’s first term, according to reports.
Giuliani, who ran for president in 2008 after leading New York City through the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, was a staunch Trump ally throughout the presidential election season. He’s now “the favorite” to take over the State Department, one of the plum positions of any presidential administration, according to the Associated Press.
John Bolton, a former ambassador to the United Nations under George W. Bush, is also in the running, according to the Wall Street Journal.
“You can’t believe everything you read,” Jason Miller, a spokesman for the transition team, told reporters when asked about Bolton and Giuliani. “I don’t want to play the speculation game as far as names. There’s a thorough, detailed process that the Vice President-elect and the transition team are going through and the President-elect will make the decision and let us know.”
Bolton is known as a hawkish foreign policy expert, though not one of the ideological neoconservatives most closely associated with Bush’s presidency. Bolton avoided endorsing Trump during the primaries, but backed him as the nominee at a a time when many other GOP foreign policy experts refused to fall in line.
“I think he’s been saying things like building up the American military, in ways that are very, very important, and I’m going to support him for president,” Bolton said in May during an interview with Breitbart’s Stephen Bannon — who is now a senior adviser to Trump.
Either pick would be a shock to the career diplomats at the State Department. Bolton’s hawkishness won him the enmity of congressional Democrats during the Bush years, and he was a forceful critic of a State Department bureaucracy that he thought resisted reform.
Giuliani’s experience as New York City mayor required him to deal with national security issues, especially after Sept. 11, but he is better known for his law enforcement policies than his foreign policy expertise. He was a member of the Iraq Study Group that chronicled the “grave and deteriorating” situation in the country in 2006, but he stepped down after missing the first pair of two-day meetings that the group held.
His political rivals used that against him when he ran for president in 2008.
“[Giuliani] has no national security experience that I know of,” Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who won the GOP nomination that year, said in a 2007 interview. “He’s never been to Iraq. He was a member of the Iraq Study Group and was either fired or quit from a very important commission that was trying to figure out the way forward in Iraq.”
