Coming out at the same time as news broke that President Trump had a second, undisclosed and private hour long meeting with President Vladimir Putin to which he did not invite an English translator, the Trump White House announced that the President nominated Jon Huntsman as Ambassador to Russia.
They spelled his name wrong, in case you were wondering if there was anything this White House could pull off without error or a modicum of competency.
President Donald J. Trump today announced his intent to nominate the following individuals to key positions in his Administration:
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Governor John Huntsman Jr. of Utah to be Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the United States of America to the Russian Federation. Governor Jon Huntsman has had a distinguished career as a politician, diplomat, and businessman. He currently serves as Chairman of both the Atlantic Council, a premier foreign policy think tank, and the Huntsman Cancer Foundation. His robust record of public service includes service as U.S. Ambassador to China and to Singapore, Deputy United States Trade Representative, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Trade Development. He was also twice elected Governor of Utah. In the private sector he is a director on numerous corporate boards including Hilton, Chevron, Ford Motor Company, and Caterpillar. He and his wife Mary Kaye are the parents of seven children.
Sure, it’s just a misspelling on top of RUSSIA news on the hour that a second, private, undisclosed meeting with Putin came out. It’s not a big deal in and of itself. It’s the totality of the incompetence coupled with the utter spit in our country’s eye – the inability to conduct themselves in a way that does not humiliate the U.S.A. – that this misspelling represents. It is evidence, when taken as a very small part of a much larger systemic pattern of incompetence, that Republicans who criticized President Obama over the way he sat at his desk really have no standards. Zero. Zero expectations or standards for their own white, Russian puppet.
It’s beginning to look as if the Trump White House are deliberately trolling us to see how much we will tolerate before we finally say enough. And by we, I mean Republicans in Congress.
Congressional Republicans’ seemingly endless tolerance for Trump humiliating our country and putting our national security in peril is truly amazing.
It is only sad that when Republicans finally decided to tolerate something, it would be an attack on this country from their own president.
This is a double fail on behalf of a White House that has proven that Republicans do not actually love America more than they love power. It would be nice if they could pull one thing off without an error that says, “We don’t know what we’re doing and worse, we don’t care!”
Some will say this is petty, and in the face of all of the fail, it is. But things like this actually matter quite a bit in diplomacy and if these people were remotely competent, we could afford to care about small things like how Trump sits at his desk and whether his people can manage to pull of the most basic requirements of public relations.
We should not be so eager for them to pull something off that we are prepared to clap for them when they spell a name correctly both times. They are in the White House, leading the free world. There are expectations.
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