Haley, who was named ambassador to the United Nations, and DeVos, who was named education secretary, would be the first women in Trump’s Cabinet. Carson, whose selection as secretary of housing and urban development is expected to be announced Friday, would be the first African-American.

WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump moved swiftly Wednesday to diversify his Cabinet and try to heal lingering rifts in the Republican Party, recruiting Governor Nikki R. Haley of South Carolina and Betsy DeVos, a prominent Republican fund-raiser, both of whom opposed him during the campaign, as well as Ben Carson, who challenged Trump for the Republican nomination.


But none of these choices suggest a president-elect who is reaching beyond reliably conservative precincts to fill his administration.

Haley, 44, an Indian-American who is a rising star in Republican politics, pushed for the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the South Carolina State House after the deadly church shooting in Charleston in June 2015. During the Republican primary, she was a frequent and vocal critic of Trump and supported Florida Senator Marco Rubio.

On Wednesday, Trump rolled out their appointments with unstinting praise. Haley, he said in a statement, was “a proven deal maker, and we look to be making plenty of deals.” DeVos, he said, was a “brilliant and passionate education advocate.”

DeVos, 58, is one of the nation’s most avid supporters of school choice, a subject she and Trump discussed last week when she met him at his country club in Bedminster, N.J. But DeVos also sharply criticized him during the campaign and spent much of the year raising money for other Republicans on the ballot.

For Trump, who was spending a quiet day before Thanksgiving at Mar-a-Lago, his estate in Palm Beach, Fla., the appointments ended a breathless two-week sprint since his stunning victory. In a videotaped holiday greeting to the American people on Wednesday, he acknowledged the wounds left by a “long and bruising political campaign.”


His aides said he would resume meeting with potential Cabinet members on Friday, when they said he would announce Carson, the retired neurosurgeon with whom Trump bitterly clashed and lavishly praised during the campaign.

Soon after, Trump is expected to name General James N. Mattis as defense secretary. But the search for a secretary of state has become less clear, people involved in the transition said. Aides are divided between Rudy Giuliani, who staunchly backed Trump’s candidacy but whose business dealings pose potential problems, and Mitt Romney, viewed by many as a safe pick but who harshly criticized Trump during the campaign.

The tension has left some on the team looking for a third choice, like Marine General John F. Kelly, the former head of the US Southern Command, which oversees the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba; David H. Petraeus, the retired Army general who was director of the CIA; or, a particular long shot, former senator Jim Webb of Virginia, who could be the lone Democrat in the Cabinet after having briefly run for the party’s presidential nomination last year.

Trump’s selections could blunt criticism that his early picks came from a homogeneous bloc of older, white men. If confirmed, Haley would step down as governor and be replaced by the state’s lieutenant governor, Henry McMaster, who was an early Trump supporter.

Carson is a familiar face to Americans after a GOP primary campaign in which he briefly rose to the top of the polls.


Neither he nor Haley are particularly experienced for the posts they have been offered. Carson had even seemed to take himself out of the running for a Cabinet position last week, with his friends putting out word that he had concluded he was not qualified to run a vast federal bureaucracy. Some pointed to Haley’s experience as a legislator and trade ambassador for South Carolina as credentials for the UN post.

DeVos, a former finance chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, won the support of Senator Lamar Alexander, the Tennessee Republican who chairs the Senate Education Committee, and called her an “excellent choice.”

She favors charter schools, which are publicly funded but typically run independently of local school boards and teachers’ unions; and school vouchers, which give students tax dollars to apply toward private-school tuition.

The DeVoses have been the force behind a rapid expansion of charter schools in Michigan. The state has one of the most generous charter school laws in the nation, allowing an unusually large number of colleges, universities, and school districts to grant charters, with little state oversight.

About 80 percent of those — an uncommonly high percentage — are operated for profit. In Detroit, the US city with the second-highest share of students in charter schools, the charters have been characterized by a high turnover of students, teachers, and companies that operate them. Even groups that support charters have pushed for stricter oversight. But legislation to do so failed last spring, largely because of lobbying by the DeVos’ group.


“The status quo in education is not acceptable,” DeVos said Wednesday after her nomination was announced. “Together, we can work to make transformational change that ensures every student in America has the opportunity to fulfill his or her highest potential.”

Lily Eskelsen Garcia, president of the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers’ union, criticized the nomination, saying that DeVos’ efforts over the years had “done more to undermine public education than support students.”

“She has lobbied for failed schemes, like vouchers — which take away funding and local control from our public schools — to fund private schools at taxpayers’ expense,” she said. “These schemes do nothing to help our most vulnerable students while they ignore or exacerbate glaring opportunity gaps.”