Another of Trump's nominees has withdrawn amid scandal. This time it's current State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert, who Trump had announced would be his choice as new Ambassador to the United Nations. Trump never managed to send the nomination to the Senate, however. Apparently there were ... complications?
Before she joined the State Department, Nauert employed a nanny who was in the United States legally but was not legally allowed to work, a source familiar with the matter and an administration official told CNN.
So, a nanny problem. Nauert hired a nanny who did not have legal permission to work in this country; and one who did not pay taxes on the money they earned from Nauert. This apparently never came up in the vetting for her current State Department position, with Nauert only revealing it in documents for her would-be ambassadorship.
Nauert withdraw from consideration yesterday, saying that "the past two months have been grueling for my family." She also is apparently leaving the State Department entirely.
An administration nominee withdrawing from consideration after a revelation that they had hired undocumented workers or those without green cards as domestic help is, in the present day, downright quaint. It's in fact almost implausibly quaint: Numerous undocumented workers have come forward recently to identify themselves as longtime employees of Donald J. Trump's various golf courses and resorts, so many that a large chunk of an entire Costa Rican town had at some point been employees. The premise that this administration, which has tolerate no end of scandals from other appointees, would be getting the vapors over a single worker hired years ago seems sketchy at best.
So there may be something else going on here. It may be that the "nanny problem" was the last straw, in the two-month process. Nauert may have had second thoughts about joining Team Trump in the midst of so many other scandals and indictments; the vetting team may have found something more pressing than a "nanny problem." But the current story doesn't quite add up.
Heather Nauert came to her State Department job via the most Trumpian of paths: She was a host on one of Trump's most-watched television shows, Fox & Friends. In her Fox News position she was a promoter of anti-Muslim conspiracy theories and conspiracy peddlers, from "no-go zones" to dire warnings of "sharia law" when a YMCA offered swim classes for Muslim girls that allowed them to swim in non-revealing garments. She promoted Benghazi conspiracy theories and claimed immigrant children brought "disease" into this country.
It was this crackerjack analysis that led Trump to choose her for a prominent State Department role, where she contributed such insights as, for example, noting on one occasion that "tomorrow is the anniversary of the D-Day invasion. We obviously have a very long history with the government of Germany, and we have a strong relationship with the government."
The loss of previous Fox & Friends host Nauert as prospective Ambassador to the United Nations is, in other words, not a great one. But the theory that she's bowing out of the role due to a nanny problem? That's an eyebrow-raiser.
Update: Edits made to clarify that the worker was in the country legally, but did not have legal permission to work in this country.