Donald Trump’s original plan for Kari Lake was badly flawed. Not long after returning to the White House, the president tapped the Arizona Republican, best known for her failed Senate and gubernatorial campaigns, to oversee the administration’s plan to gut the Voice of America.
That plan didn’t go especially well, and as recently as March, a federal judge invalidated Lake’s VOA tenure and nullified the mass layoffs she ordered last year.
This week, she received a consolation prize. The New York Times reported:
President Trump on Monday appointed Kari Lake, a fierce ally of the president who had led the administration’s efforts to shutter Voice of America and other federally funded news groups, as the next ambassador to Jamaica.
Her appointment, if confirmed by the Senate, would end her tumultuous time at the parent agency for federally funded news groups that broadcast to countries with limited press freedom, such as China, Russia and Iran.
Lake’s nomination coincided with the president also tapping Pennsylvania’s Doug Mastriano — another prominent Republican election denier who launched a gubernatorial campaign that failed — to serve as U.S. ambassador to Slovakia. The far-right state senator will also need to be confirmed by the Republican-led Senate.
Time will tell when and whether Lake and Mastriano receive the support they’ll need on Capitol Hill, but their nominations are emblematic of a larger pattern: The White House sure does like to hand out ambassadorships to those whose earlier political plans didn’t quite work out.
When Trump ousted Mike Waltz, for example, following his troubled tenure as the White House national security adviser, he didn’t exit empty-handed: The former Florida congressman soon after became the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
When former Republican Rep. Billy Long exited his remarkably short tenure as the head of the Internal Revenue Service, Trump made him the U.S. ambassador to Iceland.
In New Jersey, John Giordano’s tenure as an interim U.S. attorney lasted just three weeks. When that didn’t pan out, the president chose him to serve as the U.S. ambassador to Namibia.
Even Kristi Noem, after her many failures as the head of the Department of Homeland Security, made the transition to a diplomatic role as “special envoy” to the Shield of the Americas, a poorly defined security initiative for the Western Hemisphere.
As an Associated Press report summarized last year, “Diplomacy may be soft power, but in President Donald Trump’s administration, it’s also lately a soft landing.”
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