Will Egyptian-American Dina Powell be Trump’s pick to replace Nikki Haley at UN?
US President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he would consider selecting Goldman Sachs executive and former White House adviser Dina Powell as the next US ambassador to the United Nations.
Trump spoke to reporters at the White House before departing for an event in Iowa, hours after announcing that current U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley would step down at the end of the year. He said Haley would help him make the final pick for her replacement.
Cairo-born Powell served in the first year of the Trump administration as the Deputy National Security Adviser for strategy, and was a key player in diplomatic efforts in the Middle East.
She returned to Goldman Sachs, where she worked for more than a decade, earlier this year.
She also was a high-ranking official in the State Department of the previous Republican president, George W. Bush, according to the Harvard Kennedy School, where she is a senior fellow.
Powell, born in Cairo in 1973 as Dina Habib, is fluent in Arabic, the only language she knew before her parents immigrated to the US in 1977.
Her father, a former captain in the Egyptian Army, worked as a bus driver and ran a convenience store, while her mother, Huda Suleiman, was a graduate of the American University of Cairo and sometimes pursued a career in social work.
(With Reuters)
