Donald Trump didn’t think through this whole CIA thing

| 7:05 pm EDT May 6, 2018
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After Rex Tillerson committed the cardinal sin of publicly criticizing Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump suddenly decided he needed a new Secretary of State. Trump decided to appoint his CIA Director Mike Pompeo to the position, seemingly only managing to get him confirmed after blackmailing Republican Senator Rand Paul into changing his vote and then bragging about it. The trouble now: Trump clearly didn’t think through his nominee to replace Pompeo at the CIA.

Trump seemed to think he could just shoehorn longtime CIA official Gina Haspel into the CIA Director position, and maybe even score points by promoting a woman. But the nomination has only served to place a focus on Haspel’s history of helping oversee a dark chapter in which the United States tortured prisoners to try to get information out of them. It’s gotten so ugly, the Washington Post is now reporting that Haspel has privately offered to withdraw her nomination. It gets even worse.

Now that Haspel’s torture scandal has made clear that she’s not qualified for the job, and her nomination is in trouble, Trump and his team have resorted to an utterly absurd strategy. Sarah Huckabee Sanders posted this tweet: “There is no one more qualified to be the first woman to lead the CIA than 30+ year CIA veteran Gina Haspel. Any Democrat who claims to support women’s empowerment and our national security but opposes her nomination is a total hypocrite.” Suffice it to say that the tweet didn’t go over particularly well.

It’s not yet clear what the vote total will look like in the Senate, if Gina Haspel ends up making it that far. But it’s a bad sign when a nominee offers to withdraw before even getting to a vote. When Donald Trump decided to pluck his ally Mike Pompeo from the CIA and tried to replace him with someone he clearly hadn’t vetted, he didn’t think the whole thing through. This comes shortly after Trump had to withdraw his nomination of scandal-plagued Ronny Jackson to lead the VA.