Malevolence Compounded by Incompetence

 Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start. Its incompetence extends to current officials and nominees.

Trump’s pick for U.S. ambassador to Singapore was told to “shape up and do some homework” as he struggled to answer questions about the country.

Read the full story here: https://t.co/ny8TosCYlW pic.twitter.com/tM1uN2UVKT

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) July 10, 2025

Someone tell Education Secretary Linda McMahon it's AI, not A1.... @Lesdoggg pic.twitter.com/tpVINadjwO

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) July 7, 2025

Yes, Hegseth should resign. Glad Sen. Tillis and Rep. Bacon are there now, but it should have happened in April. (Or, more accurately, he should never have been confirmed).https://t.co/2m8XtpHue6

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) July 10, 2025

The Best People, Continued

In Defying the Odds, we discuss Trump's approach to governing.  The update  -- just published --includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms.

Trump is reportedly considering sexual harasser Herman Cain for the Fed.  During the 2012 campaign, he was comically uninformed on issues.  Catherine Rampell writes at WP:

Cain is a longtime inflation hawk, which could put him at odds with Trump’s calls for looser money. As recently as December 2017, Cain was even defending higher interest rates. But perhaps Trump assumes that Cain will dutifully flip his views, just as the once-hawkish Moore has done.

In fact, in January, when Cain was already rumored to be in contention for a Fed seat, he told Bloomberg he was concerned about recent Fed rate increases and said the real thing to fear was not inflation but nonexistent “deflation.” This is Moore’s boogeyman du jour, too.

But perhaps the bigger issue is that Cain has said — repeatedly — that the United States should return to the gold standard.

This stance is one Moore has also intermittently espoused, and it has been roundly rejected by actual economic experts. That includes, for instance, every single economist surveyed by the University of Chicago’s IGM Economic Experts Panel.

Then there’s the fact that Cain spent the years following his failed presidential campaign spamming his email followers with snake-oil scams, promising “weird tricks” that would make his followers get rich quick or “naturally” cure their erectile dysfunction. Of course, such grifting might enhance Cain’s candidacy in Trump’s eyes, but it hardly bodes well for a man seeking to join an institution with consumer protection duties.

Emily R. Siegel, Andrew W. Lehren, Brandy Zadrozny, Dan De Luce and Vanessa Swales at NBC:

An NBC News review of those who donated to the Trump inauguration found at least 14 major contributors to its inaugural fund who were later nominees to become ambassadors, donating an average of slightly over $350,000 apiece. Though the Trump administration says the business acumen of these nominees qualifies them to represent the U.S. abroad, six of the 14 nominations have languished for months in the Republican-controlled Senate. One nomination has stalled for about two years.
...

Since the 1950s, roughly two-thirds of confirmed ambassadors have been career foreign service officials and one-third have been political appointees. Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush kept within that range, according to the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA), which is comprised of current and former diplomats.

The Trump administration is different. Of its confirmed appointees, around 50 percent are career foreign service diplomats, and 50 percent are political appointees, according to AFSA.

There are also 52 vacant ambassadorships out of about 250. Two years into their presidencies, Obama had 11 and Bush had 15. There are also a large number of vacancies in critical countries like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

The rate of confirmation is also quite different for Trump nominees. Two years into their presidencies, Presidents Bill Clinton, Bush and Obama had 96, 84 and 89 percent of their nominees confirmed. Trump is currently at 66 percent, according to a senior congressional staffer.

Ambassadorships and Campaign Money

Previous posts have discussed the federal posts that have gone to contributors and bundlers. Barndon Conradis reports at Open Secrets:

President Obama's choice to be the next ambassador to Hungary is Colleen Bradley Bell, a television producer who made a name for herself working on the daytime soap opera "The Bold and the Beautiful" -- and who has been a major contributor to Obama since his first presidential race.

In 2008, Bell contributed $63,900 to the president. During the following election in 2012, she contributed $102,400, and bundled more than $500,000 on top of that. In addition, she and her husband, Bradley, held a re-election fundraiser for Obama at their home in Los Angeles last year, which the president attended.

Bell is the latest of Obama's friends in the entertainment industry to be named official envoys of the U.S. James Costos, HBO's vice president of global licensing and retail, as well as a past Obama campaign and inaugural donor, was chosen to be the next ambassador to Spain this summer. In 2012, Charles Rivkin, who bundled at least $500,000 for Obama in 2008 and was at one time president and CEO of The Jim Henson Company, was appointed ambassador to France.

Similarly, in 2009, Obama nominated Nicole Avant, a major bundler for the president with ties to the music industry, to serve as ambassador to the Bahamas. That choice didn't turn out so well: Her tenure ended less than two years later, when she resigned amid reports of failed leadership.

Consider the case of Howard Gutman.  During the 2008 campaign, Obama promised not to make an issue of his opponents' private lives.  Then ABC reported:

On the Laura Ingraham Radio show, Friday, attorney Howard Gutman — an original member of the national finance committee for Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill. — very directly criticized the parenting of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

...
"This has nothing to do with gender, whether Todd Palin was the nominee or Sarah Palin was the nominee," Gutman said. "If my daughter had just come home at 17 years old and said, ‘Mom, Dad, I’m pregnant, we have a family problem,’ I wouldn’t say, ‘You know what we’re going to do? We’re going to take this private family problem…and you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to go on the international stage and broadcast this to the world.’"

Gutman continued, "this wasn’t a working mother issue, this was a parent issue…The proper attack is not that a woman shouldn’t run for vice president with five kids, it’s that a parent, when they have a family in need, a Down’s baby who needs them — mother or father."

"So you are judging her parenting skills," Ingraham said. "You’re saying you don’t think she’s a good parent for doing this job."

"I’m saying the proper criticism is not that it’s a woman or man – it doesn’t matter whether it’s Todd or Sarah," Gutman said. "Think of how many politicians have said it’s not the right time in my family’s life for me to run."

Obama did not separate himself from Gutman.  Instead, he appointed him ambassador to Belgium.  It did not go well.  In 2011, Haaretz reported:

Some Jewish groups and others were demanding Sunday that United States President Barak Obama take action against his ambassador to Belgium, following comments the envoy made to the effect that Israel’s political positions serve as some sort of explanation for anti-Semitism amongst Muslims.

Ambassador Howard Gutman, who is Jewish, made the controversial remarks at a conference on anti-Semitism organized by the European Jewish Union in Brussels last week.

“A distinction should be made between traditional anti-Semitism, which should be condemned, and Muslim hatred for Jews, which stems from the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians,” Gutman reportedly told those gathered, going on to argue that “…an Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty will significantly diminish Muslim anti-Semitism.”

In reaction to the comments, and the subsequent uproar they caused, the White House released a statement distancing itself from Gutman's words: "We condemn anti-Semitism in all its forms, and that there is never any justification for prejudice against the Jewish people or Israel," read the statement, which was sent out over the weekend to Jewish leaders.

In July of this year, The New York Daily News reported:

The U.S. ambassador to Belgium on Tuesday denounced what he called “baseless allegations” that he solicited sexual favors in a Brussels park.

“I live on a beautiful park in Brussels that you walk through to get to many locations, and at no point have I ever engaged in any improper activity,” said Howard Gutman, who has held the post for four years.

Gutman’s name has emerged in connection with an internal memo from the U.S. Department of State’s inspector general that claimed senior State Department officials quashed eight different internal investigations of wrongdoing in the diplomatic corps.

He soon quit.

Ambassadorships and Campaign Contributions

From the Center for Responsive Politics:

President Obama announced another 10 names for ambassadorships last week, and in doing so, he awarded another set of big donors and bundlers with plum positions
representing U.S. interests abroad. The new nominees for ambassadors to Belize, Belgium, Liechtenstein, Romania and Switzerland — along with their spouses and dependent children — have contributed at least $637,800 to federal candidates, parties and committees since 1989, CRP has found. Nearly that entire sum has gone to Democrats, including $32,775 to Obama himself and $8,300 to former primary
opponent and now-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. These individuals also brought in at least $1.1 million for Obama's presidential bid as bundlers, and at least another half-a-million as bundlers for his inauguration.

Republican and Democratic presidents alike have given ambassadorships to political supporters. Late last year, however, former diplomat Morris Abramowitz urged the new president to change the practice: "Obama can publicly declare that he will not appoint ambassadors who have in effect secured their posts through financial contributions and who have little background to merit any such appointment." He explained that the practice "further diminishes the appeal of the Foreign Service, and it is particularly discouraging when many of the most important jobs are reserved for political appointees. In fact, not many talented professional career diplomats can become ambassadors under current practices, especially at the larger, more prestigious posts."