Trump remakes American diplomacy in Florida’s image

Ben Wieder, Tribune News Service

From Panama to Singapore, President Donald Trump is deploying an unprecedented number of Floridians to represent the United States as he transforms the country’s approach to diplomacy. One out of every three nominees to ambassador-level positions in the Trump administration hails from the president’s adopted home state of Florida, a higher percentage than any other state has produced in the past two decades. The nation’s top diplomat, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, is also from Florida. “Clearly, Florida is the political epicenter of Trump world,” said Mauricio Claver-Carone, who recently left his role in the administration as the US State Department’s special envoy to Latin America and served in numerous roles in the first Trump administration.

The nominations — highly coveted positions given to top supporters in any administration — come as the president has deprioritized career diplomats, radically remaking the country’s foreign policy apparatus. The administration has shuttered the US Agency for International Development, which annually gave billions in foreign aid, and fired more than a thousand US State Department employees last week. Political nominees are often posted to friendly Western allies with little chance of major conflict, while career foreign service officers are often given the most sensitive assignments. This time around, the White House has so far only nominated three career foreign service officers to serve as an ambassador — far less at this point than any administration in the past 25 years — and Florida nominees, who have varying levels of experience, have been tasked with some of the most delicate appointments, including Panama, Mexico and Colombia.

The list of Florida nominees features a mix of top campaign donors, Mar-a-Lago regulars and personal friends of the president including:

• South Florida healthcare entrepreneurs and top donors Benjamín León Jr., who gave $3 million to political committees supporting Trump last year, and Peter Lamelas, who gave more than $700,000 to Pro-Trump committees last year and another $250,000 to Trump’s inaugural committee. Leon was tapped to be the ambassador in Spain and Andorra and Lamelas is the pick to represent the country in Argentina.

• Windermere trial lawyer Dan Newlin, who gave more than $5 million to pro-Trump committees during the 2024 election and $1 million to the inaugural fund, is Trump’s choice to be the ambassador to Colombia.

• Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr.’s ex-girlfriend and a former Fox News host, is the pick to represent the country in Greece.

• Michael Waltz, Trump’s former national security adviser and a former Florida congressman, was nominated to be the ambassador to the United Nations.

• Kevin Cabrera, a former Trump campaign staffer and Miami-Dade county commissioner, who successfully pushed for a street in Hialeah to be renamed “President Donald J. Trump Avenue,” was nominated to be the ambassador to Panama.

• Trump’s personal friends and golfing partners John Arrigo, a West Palm Beach car dealer, and Michel Issa, a Highland Beach investor, who were tapped to be ambassadors to Portugal and Lebanon, respectively.

‘You’ve not even done your homework’: With the Senate under Republican control, Trump has prioritised moving ambassador nominees through the confirmation process as quickly as possible. “They’re going along as rapidly as the system can go along. We’re ahead of, I guess, anyone else thus far,” Trump said in March at a gathering at the White House with several of his ambassador nominees. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is tasked with vetting nominees before they go to the Senate floor for a full confirmation vote.

In March, Democrat Brian Schatz of Hawaii put a hold on nominees reaching the Senate floor in protest of the shuttering of USAID, but it hasn’t stopped the progress of nominees and several have already been confirmed through a process called cloture, which allows these votes to advance with a majority vote. Democrats have voiced their disapproval of several Florida nominees, but there’s little else they can do to block their nominations. On Tuesday, Waltz faced tough questions about his participation in a group chat on the encrypted messaging platform Signal while he was national security adviser in which details of upcoming military strikes were shared with a journalist from The Atlantic. “We both know Signal is not a secure way to convey classified information,” said Democrat Sen. Chris Coons, of Delaware. “And I was hoping to hear from you that you had some sense of regret over sharing what was very sensitive, timely information about a military strike on a commercially available app that’s not, as we both know, the appropriate way to share such critical information.”

Waltz denied that any classified information was shared by the group and said that the government recommended that some government officials use encrypted messaging tools like Signal. Last week, Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat, chided Anjani Sinha, the nominee to be ambassador to Singapore, for his lack of knowledge about the country. “You’ve not even done your homework, sir,” Duckworth said. She said that the position was “not a glamour posting” because of the country’s strategic importance in the US relationship with China. Duckworth said she had hoped the White House would nominate a career foreign service officer to fill the role rather than Sinha, a retired orthopedic surgeon living in West Palm Beach described by South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham as a “a friend of President Trump for over a decade.” Democrats boycotted a May 8 hearing to protest what ranking Democrat Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, of New Hampshire, characterised as a break from the committee’s “long-standing rules and traditions” calling for bipartisan coordination. But the boycott wound up smoothing the path for a controversial Florida nominee.

Lee Rizzuto, a former executive at the beauty accessories company Conair, was blocked from becoming an ambassador during the first Trump administration by the Republican-controlled Senate Foreign Relations Committee over concerns that the Boca Raton businessman had spread conspiracy theories. He was later appointed to lead the US Consulate General in Bermuda, which didn’t require Senate confirmation. This time around, there were no Democrats present to question Rizzuto about his nomination to be the ambassador to the Organization of American States. “That’s good news for you, because sometimes these can get a little testy,” the committee’s Republican Chair Sen. James Risch said to Rizzuto and his fellow nominees at the May hearing. “But obviously that won’t happen this morning.” Sen. Shaheen objected to Rizzuto’s nomination when it came up for a vote a week later, saying that Rizzuto “has been willing to share unfounded conspiracy theories online to attack members of Congress, including members of this committee.”

But Rizzuto’s nomination was approved by a party line vote.

The United States is unique among Western countries for the number of political appointees who are appointed to be ambassadors. “These are extraordinarily plum positions and are highly sought after,” said Rufus Gifford, a political appointee to two ambassador-level roles — chief of protocol in the Biden Administration and ambassador to Denmark in the Obama administration. Over the past 50 years, presidents have typically drawn about two-thirds of their ambassador nominees from the ranks of career foreign service officers, while roughly one-third have been political appointees, according to data from the American Foreign Service Association. That the White House has only nominated three career appointee is a major shift from prior administrations.