President Trump said on Friday that he was nominating his head of presidential personnel appointments, Sergio Gor, to be the U.S. ambassador to India.
Mr. Gor previously helped create a publishing venture that paid millions of dollars to Mr. Trump to produce his books when he was out of office, and he ran a super PAC supporting the president in 2024.
“I am pleased to announce that I am promoting Sergio Gor to be our next United States Ambassador to the Republic of India, and Special Envoy for South and Central Asian Affairs,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social.
He claimed that Mr. Gor and his team had placed nearly 4,000 people across government, a figure that could not be independently verified.
Mr. Gor would need to be confirmed by the Senate. His appointment would come as a sudden rift has developed between the United States and India amid Mr. Trump’s threats of punishing tariffs, rocking a friendship between the world’s two largest democracies that had seemed to be flourishing just months ago.
Mr. Gor was valued by the president for his perceived loyalty, and his willingness to freeze out of government people he considered insufficiently pure in that regard. But he was also criticized by others as capricious in his decisions. And he fought bitterly with Elon Musk, Mr. Trump’s billionaire adviser who ran an effort that ripped through existing government systems in the name of cutting costs and who himself often fought with others in the government.
Mr. Gor was involved in providing Mr. Trump information that Jared Isaacman, a businessman and ally of Mr. Musk whom Mr. Trump picked in late 2024 to lead NASA on Mr. Musk’s recommendation, had donated money to Democrats in the recent past. Mr. Trump decided to pull the nomination from the Senate confirmation process on Mr. Musk’s last day working at the White House. Mr. Isaacman had directly told Mr. Trump about those donations in their 2024 meeting during the presidential transition, according to two people with knowledge of the events, but Mr. Trump claimed to be learning of them for the first time.
Several people, including Mr. Trump, were later said to have been unhappy about how the situation had played out that day, according to a person familiar with the remarks.
Mr. Gor has also been a focus of a crush of negative news stories that have raised questions about his personal back story and how he rose to prominence in Mr. Trump’s world.
In 2024, the super PAC he ran was heavily backed by the former Marvel Entertainment executive Isaac Perlmutter, a friend and member of Mar-a-Lago, the president’s private club in Florida.
Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent for The Times, reporting on President Trump.
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