Donald Trump just made an extraordinarily embarrassing admission
Donald Trump was forced to withdraw his Director of National Intelligence nominee John Ratcliffe today. He blamed the “LameStream Media” for the debacle, when the nomination was actually quietly torpedoed by the Republican Senate, which apparently didn’t want to take the blame for the whole thing. When Trump was trying to explain away his failure, he accidentally let a bit of embarrassing truth slip.
While speaking to a group of TV news cameras today, Donald Trump said this about his nomination process in general: “I give a name. I give it out to the press and you vet it for me. A lot of times you do a very good job. Not always … but you’re part of the vetting process.” The thing is, Trump is right, but not for the reasons he wants to be.
When Trump nominates someone, he nearly always picks the kind of corrupt or compromised person who is most likely to be willing to do his bidding. The media then quickly dives in and finds out whatever ugly or strange secrets that person is hiding. Then if it’s ugly enough, Trump simply withdraws the nomination. But even from a standpoint of corruption, this is a stupid way of doing things.
If you’re smart, you vet your own nominee first. You dig up the dirt yourself, and you figure out how to spin it, just in case it becomes necessary. That way, when the media also finds that dirt, you already have a plan in place to try to immediately put that controversy to bed before it spirals out of control, thus perhaps salvaging the nomination.
Donald Trump just admitted that his method is to nominate crappy people on a whim, and then simply cross his fingers in the hope that whatever dirt might be out there, the media doesn’t find it. Then when the media does inevitably find it, Trump and his team are caught off guard when it comes to trying to deflect it, and the nomination ends up getting torpedoed. Trump could likely get more of his terrible nominees confirmed if he weren’t so arrogant and lazy about it. That’s just embarrassing.
