Donald Trump confirmed Friday morning that he would nominate State Department spokeswoman and former Fox News personality Heather Nauert to be the ambassador to the United Nations, replacing Nikki Haley. Nauert was a Fox & Friends co-host, which makes her an ideal Trump candidate, but her time at the State Department has not made her a foreign relations or history expert:
“When you talk about Germany, we have a very strong relationship with the government of Germany,” Heather Nauert, the State Department’s spokeswoman, said in June. She added: “Tomorrow is the anniversary of the D-Day invasion. We obviously have a very long history with the government of Germany, and we have a strong relationship with the government.” She also pointed to the Marshall Plan, which rebuilt Western Europe in the ashes of Adolf Hitler’s quest for global domination.
D-Day, of course, was not exactly a high point of U.S.-German relations, being as it was a decisive battle to defeat Nazi Germany.
In an understatement:
“In terms of what we normally look for at the United Nations, her résumé is very thin,” David Gergen, the veteran presidential aide, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Thursday night. He said the role of U.N. representative was not a “communications job” but rather “a place where we conduct active diplomacy with nations around the world.”
But every job in the Trump administration is a communications job—the job of communicating to Donald Trump that he’s the best and that you are there to be his attack dog or his lap dog, depending what he requires at any given moment. In that regard, with diplomacy and the U.S. position in the world as third-tier concerns at best, Nauert is doubtless a good choice.