The process surrounding Donald Trump’s nominees tends to resemble an efficient assembly line. The president taps a loyalist with dubious qualifications; obedient Senate Republicans do what the White House tells them to do; and the nominees are confirmed to powerful positions that many of them clearly shouldn’t have.
Lately, however, the assembly line has broken down with surprising frequency. Take this week, for example. MSNBC reported:
President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Office of Special Counsel, Paul Ingrassia, withdrew his name from consideration on Tuesday after his confirmation looked destined to fail. In a social media post Tuesday night, Ingrassia said he would no longer attend his Senate confirmation hearing on Thursday ‘because unfortunately I do not have enough Republican votes at this time.’
The right-wing nominee’s record is filled with a great many ridiculous comments, but his head count was correct: Ingrassia’s history of radicalism made him one of the president’s most outlandish nominees to date, but after Politico reported on a group text in which Ingrassia acknowledged his “Nazi streak,” a variety of prominent GOP senators said they’d vote against him.
At that point, the question wasn’t whether his nomination would fail but rather when. As it turns out, the public didn’t have to wait too long for an answer.
Whether Ingrassia will be able to keep his current job — the right-wing lawyer and former podcast host is currently serving as the White House liaison for the Department of Homeland Security — is unclear. That, in and of itself, is worth dwelling on: Trump’s White House currently employs a radical with a self-professed “Nazi streak,” and he might very well remain at his current post, despite the revelations.
Relatedly, it’s also not altogether clear whether the president’s team failed to do their due diligence on Ingrassia, researching his record before he was tapped to lead the Office of Special Counsel, or whether the White House was well aware of his radicalism and nominated him anyway.
But this is not, strictly speaking, simply a story about the demise of a ridiculous nomination. Rather, it’s equally important to appreciate the larger pattern — because while the conventional wisdom is that the Republican-led Senate reflexively confirms every misguided Trump nominee, that’s not entirely the case.
Earlier this month, for example, Brian Quintenz’s nomination to chair the Commodity Futures Trading Commission failed, and just a few days earlier, E.J. Antoni’s nomination to become the next commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics failed in the face of bipartisan opposition. And while three nomination failures in three weeks is a lot, the problem has persisted for months. Indeed, the same list also includes Matt Gaetz, Dave Weldon, Ed Martin, Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, Chad Chronister, Kathleen Sgamma and Jared Isaacman. (If we widen the aperture a bit, Elise Stefanik is also arguably part of the same group.) The longer this list grows, the louder the concerns about rampant incompetence in the West Wing. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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