Two Buzzfeed reporters are upset that President Donald Trump, a Republican, might nominate “a lawyer with conservative ties” but no diplomatic experience as the U.S. ambassador to Mexico.
The reporters go to great lengths about how important diplomatic experience is when it comes to Mexico, even though they acknowledge it’s not uncommon for ambassadors to have no such experience. They lament the Obama years when the ambassador to Mexico had decades of diplomatic experience (did it make a difference? Who knows).
The lawyer, Christopher Landau, hasn’t been formally nominated, but appears to be in the process of being vetted. Though he may not have diplomatic experience (something acquired by being a bureaucrat), his father, George, was an ambassador to Chile, Paraguay, and Venezuela, Buzzfeed notes. The name is “very well known in the Latin America bureau,” former ambassador Roberta Jacobson told Buzzfeed.
Here’s the problem: President Barack Obama appointed people with little to no “diplomatic experience” as ambassadors, and Buzzfeed wasn’t upset then. The only article written by the outlet criticizing an Obama nominee was framed as Democratic infighting, not as a knock against the former president. The nominee they were writing about had never even been to Argentina, the country for which he was nominated as ambassador. Obama, like most presidents, appointed top donors and friends as ambassadors, and the media wasn’t upset then.
The Washington Post also defended Obama’s ambassador picks when Republicans were attacking them for limited experience.
Some left-leaning media outlets, like the Huffington Post, did criticize Obama for such nominations, but articles like that were few and far between.