That disparity has festered with many Clinton supporters - including some who are calling for recount efforts in several states that she lost - making it more difficult for them to accept the fact that their candidate will not be taking the oath of office in January.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party continues to grapple with internal fissures stemming from the fact that much of its establishment wing had refused to get behind Trump's candidacy or did so only reluctantly.
Trump and Haley had been harshly critical of each other during the bitter 2016 campaign. Just days before the election, she pronounced herself "not a fan" of her party's nominee, though she would vote for him, and lamented that "this election has turned my stomach upside down".
Trump had deemed her an embarrassment to her state.
Carson was one of the 16 opponents that Trump vanquished in the Republican primary season.
At one point, quoting a memoir in which Carson acknowledged having a "pathological temper" in his youth, Trump said that the soft-spoken former neurosurgeon had a sickness comparable to being a child molester.
Though Carson endorsed Trump after folding his own campaign, it was with ambivalence. "Are there better people?" Carson said in a radio interview. "Probably."
DeVos, a major GOP donor who had contributed to several of Trump's primary opponents, also questioned whether Trump reflected Republican Party values.
Haley and Carson both have scant experience in the subject areas of their posts - international diplomacy in her case and housing and community development in his.
DeVos, on the other hand, has a national reputation as a conservative activist who has forcefully pushed for private-school voucher programmes. Her nomination is expected to face strong opposition from public school advocates, who oppose her efforts to funnel taxpayer dollars from public to private and religious schools.
Haley has been seen as a rising star in the Republican Party since her 2010 election as South Carolina Governor, where she won the GOP nomination as an insurgent fuelled by the tea party but became well-regarded by the party establishment as well.
Last year, Haley won wide acclaim in the wake of a racially motivated massacre in an African American church in Charleston; her efforts to heal and unify her state included calling for the removal of a Confederate flag on the grounds of the State Capitol that had for decades been a symbol of divisiveness.
She tangled with Trump repeatedly during the presidential campaign and used her star turn giving the GOP response to this year's State of the Union address to rebuke his candidacy as "the siren call of the angriest voices".
Trump is considering another prominent former rival and mainstream Republican, 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney, for Secretary of State, although some Trump advisers are pushing back against that and backing other candidates, such as former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.
