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Kathleen McFarland and her husband
Alan.
Although President-elect Donald Trump did not tap the Hamptons summer set to fill his campaign coffers quite as much as other past presidential candidates have, he has turned to it with gusto to fill cabinet posts now that he is set to take office.
The president-elect won the election championing the decline of working-class America but has mostly turned to well-heeled businessmen with roots in big business to fill his cabinet posts. As might be expected, the Hamptons’ posh summer colony is well represented, with three major appointments.
Kathleen McFarland, Wilbur Ross and Steven Mnuchin, all Southampton homeowners, are all in line to assume top White House roles when Mr. Trump’s administration takes over in January.
Mr. Ross was announced on Wednesday, November 30, as Mr. Trump’s pick to be the next U.S. Secretary of Commerce. The billionaire investor, who has made most of his fortune investing in the sort of industrial companies that Mr. Trump pledged on the campaign trail to revitalize, hosted one of just two relatively small-scale fundraisers held locally for Mr. Trump during last summer’s campaign at his home on Ox Pasture Lane.
Mr. Mnuchin is an investment banker and film producer and was announced on Wednesday to be Mr. Trump’s pick for U.S. Treasury Secretary. He was a longtime partner at the investment bank Goldman Sachs before founding Dune Entertainment, a film production company that has played a roll in the production of numerous successful movies like “The Devil Wears Prada” and “Marley & Me.”
During the presidential campaign Mr. Mnuchin, whose wife Heather’s family have been summer residents in Southampton for many decades, served as Mr. Trump’s campaign finance chairman.
Unlike Mr. Ross and Mr. Mnuchin, Ms. McFarland has been in the government and political world for some time.
Ms. McFarland, who goes by K.T. publicly, ran unsuccessfully for one of the New York seats on the U.S. Senate against then Senator Hillary Clinton in 2006.
A graduate of Oxford and George Washington University and a former doctoral student at M.I.T., Ms. McFarland was principal Assistant Secretary of Defense during the Reagan administration and served as a national security analyst for FOXNews in recent years.
Her husband, Alan, an investment banker, is a member of the Southampton Village Planning Board, the president of the St. Andrew’s Dune Church board of trustees and a longtime member of the governing board of the Meadow Club.
