Nice Try Again Donald

Trump, who is currently sitting somewhere in the White House fuming about the fact that Congress won’t give him $5 billion dollars to build a wall, decided to try to take a shot at Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer this afternoon. After assumedly scrabbling around the bag of political issues unrelated to the government shutdown for a while, he picked out ambassadors.

The State Department, under President Donald Trump’s tenure, has not exactly been a high-functioning place. There are dozens of important positions, including the ambassadorships to several major countries that are still unfilled. When Saudi Arabia murdered Jamal Khashoggi, for instance, a reporter nicely pointed out that the State Department didn’t have official ambassadors for the KSA or Turkey, where Khashoggi was killed. Part of this could very well be true: maybe heads of state are calling him! Even Australia, Australia, doesn’t have an ambassador. Someone from Australia probably wants to know what’s up with that. That shouldn’t be a hard or controversial post to fill. And yet.

Trump trying to blame it on Schumer, however, is that is a load of shit. As Senator Chris Murphy immediately noted, Schumer can’t even stop Trump’s nominees if he tried—they only need 50 votes (with a VP tiebreak) to go through. The Republicans have a majority in the Senate. There’s nothing stopping him besides his own party’s ineptitude.

I would close with some pithy line about “strike two, Donald!” but there’s no actual consequences if he gets to strike three because accountability is a myth in this administration and I probably overuse sports metaphors as it is.