Nikki Haley Finally Realizing She Works in the Trump Administration
The U.S. was supposed to impose new economic sanctions against Russia on Monday. At least according to Trump's U.N. ambassador, Nikki Haley, who on Meet the Press Sunday said that Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin would be announcing the sanctions against companies related to Bashar al-Assad's alleged chemical-weapons attack in Syria.
But that didn't happen. So reporters had a lot of questions about what exactly was going on, and Trump's economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, did his best to explain:
She got ahead of the curve. She’s done a great job. She’s a very effective ambassador. There might have been some momentary confusion about that. But if you talk to Steve Mnuchin at Treasury and so forth, he will tell you the same thing. They’re in charge of this.
There we have it. This whole mess was just the ramblings of a confused woman who's otherwise good at her job. It's a compliment, really, when you ignore the whole "she had no idea what she was talking about" implication. Unfortunately for Kudlow, Haley fixated on just the bad part. On Tuesday, she replied in a Fox News interview, saying simply, "With all due respect, I don’t get confused."
Kudlow has since tried to smooth things over, telling The New York Times that of course Haley wasn't "confused" and he was wrong to say that. "As it turns out," he told the Times, "she was basically following what she thought was policy. The policy was changed and she wasn’t told about it, so she was in a box.”
That passive voice is doing some heavy lifting. But to his credit, while Kudlow probably knows who changed the policy, it's entirely possible that neither he nor anyone else at the White House knows who was supposed to tell Haley about it. But while Haley was left out of the loop, the White House was quick to contact the Russian embassy in D.C. after her interview to offer assurances that no such sanctions were coming, according to an official at the Russian Foreign Ministry. The Times also paints a vivid picture of Trump watching Haley's initial comments on Face the Nation:
President Trump was watching television on Sunday when he saw Nikki R. Haley, his ambassador to the United Nations, announce that he would impose fresh sanctions on Russia. The president grew angry, according to an official informed about the moment. As far as he was concerned, he had decided no such thing.
The Times continued, saying that this wasn't the first time Trump had yelled at the TV over something Haley said, which is a normal and comforting thing to know about the president. And for Haley, that's probably not an inspirational detail to learn about your boss's attitude about your job performance. But she should realize by now that even if she works at the U.N., she's still a member of the Trump administration, which means that she's just taking up space until the president sees a bus he needs to throw her under.
