All the Best People

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, December 27, 2024

 

Herschel Walker, the failed Senate candidate, says he has been treated for an unusual mental-health problem: multiple personalities. I wonder how many personalities he has. I wonder if any of them knows how many children he has. I wonder if he has a personality that doesn’t give every impression of being functionally illiterate. 

 

But, then, I’m no diplomat. Walker, however, apparently is.

 

Yes, a wife-abusing dolt and famous football player who at one point played for Donald Trump’s New Jersey Generals in the United States Football League—another of the many business ventures Trump’s incompetence has helped to wreck over the years—will be nominated by the president-elect to serve as U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas. 

 

The Bahamas may not sound like a very high-stakes posting, but it is potentially more sensitive than you might think: Among other things, the greater Caribbean region (with which the Bahamas is generally lumped in, though it is not quite in the Caribbean Sea) presents some security challenges, being used from time to time as an entrepôt for persons (and powdery white commodities) unable to legally enter the United States. A diplomatic source once told me (NB: my information here is a bit old) that a dozen or so Middle Easterners on the “known bad-guy list” had been observed passing through the airport at another Caribbean destination before disappearing—a subsequent check of customs-and-immigration records showed no evidence of the jihadists coming or going. Maybe they were just there for the sun.

 

I will say this for Walker: He is not the least qualified diplomat Trump would offer the world. 

 

Callista Gingrich is to be the U.S. ambassador to Switzerland. In her defense, this is a slightly less inappropriate role for Newt Gingrich’s third wife than was her prior Trump posting as U.S. ambassador to the Holy See. Prior to hooking up with Newt, Mrs. Gingrich’s career in public administration topped out at serving as a clerk on the House Committee on Agriculture almost two decades ago. She had the good sense to get into bed with an up-and-coming political figure and the bad taste to do so while he was still married to his second wife, who was just then inconveniencing Newt by having multiple sclerosis, and who had married Gingrich a full six months after he divorced the wife before her, who had been his high school math teacher. In 2012, when Newt was running for president, I asked one of his business associates for an opinion on his campaign, and the answer has stayed with me: “I think we’re all going to jail.” Maybe it’s not as bad as all that, but who needs the drama? Not the ever-discreet Swiss. 

 

The Brits are getting Republican donor Warren Stephens, a banker, as ambassador, but only because it was too complicated to install the guy Trump really wanted at the Court of St. James’s: Mark Burnett, the television producer behind The Apprentice, the game show Trump hosted before running for president of the United States of America. Burnett will instead serve as a “special envoy” to the United Kingdom, a slight status downgrade from ambassador but still pretty good for the guy who brought us Survivor. “Mark brings a unique blend of diplomatic acumen and international recognition to this important role,” Trump says. Sure he does. 

 

Hamptons trophy wife Somers Farkas will serve as U.S. ambassador to Malta. Her qualification for this job—Trump describes her as “model, philanthropist, documentary producer, and very successful businesswoman”—is that she is married to a guy who inherited a lot of money from his family, which was in the department store business. It’s a family thing: Her mother-in-law, Ruth Farkas, bought an ambassadorship from Richard Nixon (to Luxembourg) for $300,000 and was a minor figure in the Watergate hearings. Mr. Farkas is one of those socialites whose name is always on the list—any list, including the Jeffrey Epstein visitors’ list. 

 

Nicole McGraw, until recently Nicole Henry, has one of those great rich-person pretend occupations: She owns an art gallery in West Palm Beach and stages shows with such themes as “unity” and explains: “I thought that was really important because of all the division that’s been going on in the world.” Uh huh. I suppose we need a few more diplomats who talk like Miss America contestants. Her promotional literature describes her as having “an international clientele among high-net-worth-clients,” i.e., she is a rich dilettante who sells things to other rich dilettantes when she is not engaged in “philanthropy,” as they call it in Palm Beach. If confirmed, she will be the U.S. ambassador to Croatia.

 

John Arrigo will be the U.S. ambassador to Portugal. Trump describes him as a “highly successful entrepreneur in the automotive industry, and a champion golfer.” No: Elon Musk is a highly successful entrepreneur in the automotive industry; Mr. Arrigo owned some car dealerships in Florida. I have no doubt that he is a hell of a golfer—or, at least, not much doubt, though you cannot trust anybody in that orbit about his golf score. 

 

Lou Rinaldi is to be U.S. ambassador to Uruguay. Who is he? “Lou is a great golfer,” says the president-elect.” Is that entirely … relevant? Well, Uruguay has “some terrific courses,” Trump adds. He also grew up in Uruguay, and I am sure that Donald Trump was wondering where he’d find another buddy who … speaks Uruguayan?

 

The U.S. ambassador to NATO is to be Matt Whitaker, a former U.S. attorney in Iowa who has zero relevant experience but who has spent a lot of time on Fox News criticizing various criminal cases filed against Donald Trump. No word on his golf game. Whitaker is a former adviser to World Patent Marketing—one of those funny inventions-promotions companies that sell their “services” to very, very gullible people—which paid a multi-million-dollar settlement after a federal investigation covering the period during which Whitaker was involved with the firm. “Acting U.S. Attorney General Matthew Whitaker was aware of fraud allegations against an invention promotion company where he was an advisor and was slow to respond to government investigators probing it,” as Reuters gently put it.

 

The U.S. ambassador to France is to be Charles Kushner, who was convicted of “one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes” in the memory of Chris Christie, who prosecuted him and secured a felony conviction—which Trump eliminated by means of a pardon after Kushner, previously a generous supporter of Democratic politicians, made some generous donations to Trump, who is also his son’s father-in-law. Kushner’s crimes involved illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness-tampering. Even with the prison time, I’d rather take his route to an ambassadorship than Callista Gingrich’s. 

 

Or Kimberly Guilfoyle’s, for that matter. The former girlfriend of Donald Trump Jr. and Fox News grotesque will be the U.S. ambassador to Greece. 

 

And let’s hope nothing flares up in Cyprus: Guilfoyle’s colleague in Turkey is to be Tom Barrack, a big Trump donor recently acquitted on federal charges of acting as an unregistered foreign agent of the United Arab Emirates and lying to federal investigators as part of a scheme to peddle his influence in the Trump administration. Barrack beat the charges by very successfully pleading … stupidity. Investigators wanted to know about the businessman who approached him to act as a go-between linking Emirati interests to Trump: “Did it ever occur to you that maybe [he] was some kind of government agent to the UAE?” they asked. “No, sir,” he answered. If you’re playing the home version of “Lying or Stupid?” consider that federal investigators would later report that Barrack had described the businessman in question as the “UAE’s secret weapon to influence the United States.” So, possibly lying and possibly stupid and possibly both—but acquitted, nonetheless. Pardons are for extended family.

 

All the best people? There have always been a lot of grifters and social climbers in the ambassadorial ranks—leave it to Donald Trump to plumb an even lower class of them.