South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley to Be Trump’s UN Ambassador, Latest Nominee to Be Wholly Unqualified

Zero Relevant Experience

Nikki Haley has accepted Donald Trump’s offer to become his ambassador to the United Nations. The one and a half term chief executive of South Carolina, a Republican, Haley, 44, is currently the youngest governor in the U.S. The position holds cabinet level status.

Haley, like all of Trump’s picks to date, is not qualified for the role. She has no foreign policy experience, no foreign intelligence experience, no diplomatic experience. 

If confirmed by the Republican-majority Senate, Haley will replace Ambassador Samantha Power.

By contrast, here’s Power’s biography, via the State Dept.:

Prior to serving as U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Ambassador Power served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights on the National Security Staff at the White House.  In this role she focused on issues including UN reform; LGBT and women’s rights; the promotion of religious freedom and the protection of religious minorities; human trafficking; and democracy and human rights.

Before joining the U.S. government, Ambassador Power was the Anna Lindh Professor of the Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, teaching courses on U.S. foreign policy, human rights, and UN reform.  She was also the founding executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.

Ambassador Power is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (2002) and Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (2008), the basis for the award-winning HBO documentary, “Sergio.”  She is also the recent co-editor of The Unquiet American: Richard Holbrooke in the World (2011).  Ambassador Power began her career as a journalist, reporting from places such as Bosnia, East Timor, Kosovo, Rwanda, Sudan, and Zimbabwe, and contributed regularly to The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, the New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker Magazine.

Ambassador Power immigrated to the United States from Ireland at the age of nine.  She graduated from Lakeside High School in Atlanta, Georgia and received a B.A. from Yale University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. She is married to Cass Sunstein, with whom she has two young children.

Haley, who is also the president of the South Carolina Chapter of the National Association of Women Business Owners, holds a B.S. in accounting from Clemson University. She previously worked for a waste management and recycling company and in her parents’ fashion business.

 

Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr and a CC license