Presidents love to give ambassadorships to friends and donors

Although the president of the United States is the most powerful man in the world, he actually has few ways to pay off his supporters. Unlike the queen of England, he cannot bestow a royal title on anyone. But being named ambassador comes pretty close.

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The elevated status the title carries is the reason the Founding Fathers refused to use it when they were creating a republic in which all men were created equal. That dislike is why no American diplomat was sent abroad with the title “ambassador” until 1893. It happened then only because European nations were beginning to take the United States seriously as a nation and started sending envoys with that rank to Washington.

Today presidents often use ambassadorships to reward people who helped them get elected. The nicer the country’s capital, the more likely it is that it will have a political-appointee ambassador. They, therefore, go mainly to Western Europe, a few other rich countries and the Caribbean. The career diplomats are largely left to the rest of the world. This pattern is so predictable that a colleague and I wrote a paper that worked out a formula for calculating how much London costs in terms of campaign contributions as opposed to Lisbon.

In part because the number of desirable embassies is limited, for five of the last six presidents, 30 percent of the ambassadors have been political appointees and the remaining 70 percent career Foreign Service officers. (Ronald Reagan was the exception, as his political ambassadors accounted for 38 percent.)

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Of course, presidents recognize that it can look unseemly to give ambassadorships to political supporters. President-elect Barack Obama acknowledged that in a news conference on Jan. 9, 2009, when he said that his general inclination was to appoint “high-quality civil servants” as ambassadors. He added that there would be political appointees but that “as we roll out our ambassadors, you’ll be able to make an assessment in terms of the professionalism and high quality of the people that we appoint.”

But Obama went on to name many big contributors as ambassadors. Some of them had such little knowledge of countries they were being sent to that their performance at their confirmation hearings made “The Daily Show.”

What about Trump?

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Breaking with a decades-old tradition, Trump ordered that, as soon as he took office, all of Obama’s political-appointee ambassadors had to depart immediately. The career ambassadors were left in place, but the departure of the political ones has left 54 of 189 ambassadorships vacant.

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Thus far, Trump appears to be following the time-honored tradition of using the title ambassador for political reasons. Of course, he has nominated relatively few so far — 10 in total. And political ambassadorships are often the ones that come first in any presidential administration.

But Trump still looks typical. Of the 10 ambassadors Trump has formally nominated, only two are career officers and are being sent to Senegal and Congo. The eight political appointees have few foreign policy credentials but a clear political connection to Trump.

For example, David Friedman, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, was Trump’s bankruptcy lawyer. Scott Brown, nominated as ambassador to New Zealand, was said to have embraced the role of cheerleader for Trump during the campaign. William Francis Hagerty IV, a wealthy Tennessee businessman and nominee for ambassador to Japan, was finance director for the Trump campaign in Tennessee and worked for the Trump transition team.

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Terry Branstad, governor of Iowa, is being sent to China. He at least has a long-term relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping, based on frequent trips to China to sell Iowa pork and other products there. Branstad’s son ran Trump’s campaign in Iowa. Doug Manchester will be going to the Bahamas. Like Trump, Manchester is a billionaire real estate developer; he was also a Trump supporter and fundraiser during the campaign.

There may have been an indirect political motivation for sending Nikki Haley as ambassador to the United Nations. Although Haley was not a full-throated Trump supporter during the campaign, sending her to New York meant that a bigger Trump supporter, Lt. Gov. Henry McMaster, became governor of South Carolina. McMaster was the first statewide elected official in South Carolina to endorse Trump and helped him win the state’s primary. McMaster also gave a nominating speech for Trump at the Republican convention.

George W. Bush and Obama frequently gave ambassadorships to big campaign contributors. Thus far, only Manchester is in that class, but there will no doubt be some to come. That may be hard to discern when it happens, however. George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, Obama and Sen. John McCain all revealed who had bundled campaign contributions for their runs for president. Mitt Romney and Trump did not.

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Just as Trump departed on his first overseas trip as president, which includes a stop in Rome, the White House announced the nomination of Callista Gingrich as ambassador to the Vatican. Her husband, former House speaker Newt Gingrich, was an early Trump enthusiast. While she has no foreign policy experience, she meets the only real requirement for the job. Although the Constitution says there shall be no religious test for any government job, she, like her predecessors, is a Catholic.

Ambassadorships can also be used to deal with personnel problems. On Friday, K.T. McFarland, a former Fox News commentator, was nominated as ambassador to Singapore. She was hired by Michael Flynn to be his deputy national security adviser. When he left, her days were numbered.

The use of ambassadorships to reward supporters is an often-lamented practice. For example, in a report last year on ways to make the State Department more effective, the Heritage Foundation urged that the process of selecting ambassadors should “ensure that all candidates for ambassadorial appointments are qualified.” It added that the process “should not devolve into rewarding political supporters” or “succumb to political patronage and reward unqualified individuals with plum posts in desirable locations.”

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If those recommendations are ignored by this administration, much as they have been ignored by previous administrations, Trump won’t end up draining the swamp. He’ll just slowly change the alligators.