Former Kansas Sen. and presidential candidate Bob Dole has been named vice chair of president-elect Donald Trump’s transition team, Trump spokesman Sean Spicer said Monday.
Dole, 93, was the only former Republican presidential nominee to attend the party’s July convention in Cleveland, where Trump accepted the nomination.
Dole, who served in Congress for more than three decades and led his party’s presidential ticket in 1996, warmed up to Trump after initially supporting other candidates.
“I can’t vote for George Washington,” he told NPR in June. “So I’m supporting Donald Trump.”
Even when some Republicans abandoned Trump or distanced themselves from him after a recording of the candidate making lewd remarks about women surfaced in October, Dole stood by him.
“I think we are going to know in six months where we are headed, and in my opinion a lot of people are going to be pleasantly surprised,” he told CNN in November after Trump’s election victory.
Dole is special counsel at Alston & Bird, a Washington law firm. Dole had orchestrated a dialogue between Taiwanese officials and Trump’s staff, leading to a December phone call between Trump and Taiwan’s president. That move broke with diplomatic protocol since the United States does not officially recognize Taiwan as separate from China.
Dole’s firm was paid $140,000 for the work, according to disclosures.
In recent years, Dole, a World War II veteran, has led an effort to build a memorial to Dwight Eisenhower, the former president and supreme allied commander of the allies in the war, in the nation’s capital.
Curtis Tate: 202-383-6018, @tatecurtis
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