UPDATE (February 4, 2025, 4:19 p.m. ET): This report has been updated to reflect the fact that Andrew Puzder’s ex-wife retracted her spousal abuse allegations before his first nomination.
In August 2018, officials in the Trump White House started receiving media calls about a speechwriter and policy aide named Darren Beattie. Journalists wanted to know whether Beattie’s colleagues were aware of his role at a conference regularly attended by well-known white nationalists. Soon after, he was fired.
Seven years later, however, Beattie is apparently back in Team Trump’s good graces. Semafor reported:
Secretary of State Marco Rubio will appoint Darren Beattie, a speechwriter in President Donald Trump’s first term, acting undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, two people briefed on the plans said. Beattie has been a vocal critic of broad swathes of American foreign policy and represents a dramatic step away from the establishment Republicanism Rubio long embodied: In a widely-circulated essay on the site he founded, Revolver, Beattie compared the “color revolutions” that Western democracies backed in Eastern Europe in the 1990s and 2000s to “the coordinated efforts of government bureaucrats, NGOs, and the media to oust President Trump.”
While the move hasn’t been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, other news organizations are also reporting that Beattie is joining the State Department.
As it turns out, however, he’s not the only reject from Trump’s first term who’s facing a friendlier terrain in the Republican president’s second term. Around this time eight years ago, for example, Andrew Puzder, Trump’s choice to lead the Department of Labor, saw his nomination collapse in the face of bipartisan opposition.
Puzder faced a variety of controversies, including spousal abuse accusations, which he denied. His ex-wife renounced her abuse claims several times over the years, including prior to the 2017 nomination fight. Nevertheless, as Trump’s first term got underway, even Senate Republicans, who tended to act like rubber stamps for the president’s nominees, told the White House that Puzder was a bridge too far, in light of the scope of the controversies.
Two weeks ago, Trump nominated Puzder to serve as the next U.S. ambassador to the European Union, despite what transpired eight years ago, and despite his lack of diplomatic experience.
Let’s also not overlook Mark Green, whom Trump tapped eight years ago to serve as his secretary of the Army. As the political world soon learned, Green — at the time, a Republican state legislator in Tennessee — had compiled a colorful record of strange beliefs, including arguing that being transgender is a “disease,” promoting creationism, criticizing public health care programs for interfering with Christian evangelism, and even raising some strange concerns about Victoria’s Secret catalogs.
A Slate report added that Green also “agreed with a questioner that President Obama is not a citizen and he refused to answer whether the former president is really a Muslim.”
As this information came to light, some GOP senators felt compelled to raise concerns about his nomination, deeming the Tennessean a bit too radical to be confirmed, and on a Friday afternoon in May 2017, Green quietly withdrew from consideration.
As it happens, he’s another first-term reject who made a comeback, too: Green is currently the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee.
