Politico notes, in the wake of the Stephen Moore debacle’s termination, how poorly the Trump Administration has done in vetting candidates for important positions:
In total, Trump has withdrawn 62 nominees since taking office, according to data provided to POLITICO by the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit that tracks federal vacancies. At this point in his presidency, Barack Obama had withdrawn 30 nominees. The figures include only people who were formally nominated, so Moore and others who took themselves out of consideration before their official paperwork was sent to the Senate aren’t counted.
The context is weak, since numbers for Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II are not provided, nor how many such total positions needed to be filled for those Administrations, nor how many positions have not even had a nominee advanced, a Trump specialty. Still, stuff like this is eye-catching.
In the past three months alone, two high-profile candidates for top administration jobs have pulled themselves out of consideration, in addition to Moore. Trump announced last month that he would not nominate Herman Cain, a former pizza executive, to the Fed amid opposition from some Senate Republicans. And in February, Heather Nauert removed herself from consideration to become the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations after learning that she had employed a nanny without the correct work authorization.
Current and former administration officials insist that they’ve made strides in professionalizing the White House’s internal vetting operation. But they say the president himself sometimes undermines that process by making major staffing decisions on his own, with little consultation and with little notice.
It’s easy enough to laugh at the assertion in the last paragraph, but that may be a mistake. Let’s make a contrarian assumption that this is nothing to laugh at – and not because of the incompetence of an amateur President is showing through, as does Steve Benen.
Instead, we know that President Trump likes to work with “acting” Secretaries and the like, because he’s told us so. Putting forth nominees sure to be rejected is one way to slow down the process, leaving Trump in a position where he thinks he holds more power than he would otherwise. (One has to wonder how much less likely it is that an “acting Secretary” will tell him No than will a confirmed Secretary.)
But we can take this a step further and recall there’s a common assumption that doesn’t often come out in the open concerning, and that’s happens to be the belief that all these positions are necessary and must be filled. Out on the right-wing of the GOP, there is a philosophical disagreement with this ideas, as this conflicts with the ideological position of ‘small government.’
Watchdog groups also remain alarmed by the sheer number of positions for which Trump has neglected to nominate anybody. At the State Department, more than 30 senior positions are vacant. There are more than a dozen senior-level vacancies at the Justice and Defense departments.
Of course, an argument could be made that there really shouldn’t be 30 senior positions at State, because, by golly, the world’s not that big. I can hear Trump professing such sentiments. However, given our position in the world, and the many philosophical positions we take in order to push a better civilization on the rest of the world, State is probably severely understaffed.
So when Trump fails to nominate anyone for a position, or advances ludicrous choices for nominee, he, or more likely his puppet-masters, may be making a strategic choice that advantages their position on the global chessboard. It may not be Trump being an impulsive man-child.
