The report that another Trump nominee may withdraw has highlighted the selection process for America’s top positions. As reported by Huffington Post, Heather Wilson is facing problems with her confirmation as Secretary for the Air Force due to possible conflicts of interest. She is the third candidate to face such problems after the withdrawal of Vincent Viola for the Army and Philip Bilden for the Navy.
While they show that the process can be successful in selecting Secretaries, such as process does not occur for the nation’s highest office
Tax returns
The United States introduced the system of primaries for the selection of a party candidate for the race to the White House.
This process is now copied by parties in other countries. Yet these primaries were unable to find a definite solution for the doubts raised about the man who would eventually become the 45th President of the United States of America.
When businessman and reality star Donald Trump announced his run for the presidency few took the attempt seriously, but many did raise the issues of his business activities. These doubts began during the primary campaign and then spread to the presidential campaign where he refused to follow established practice of releasing his tax returns by stating they were under audit and would be released once approved.
These returns have never been released with the reply now being that since he won the election the public was obviously not interested in them.
Added to this theme were also the rumours of possible Russian interference in the election campaign which are still dogging him and are now subject to investigation by the country’s intelligence community.
Press conference
The Trump business empire owns many properties around the world and in some politically sensitive countries such as Turkey.
For this reason his election victory raised concerns that they may affect Donald Trump’s decisions in office.
At his first press conference after the election a lawyer presented an apparent plan for the incoming President to distance himself from his business activities while he was in office. Despite the disapproval of many experts on ethics matters these conflicts of interest were never resolved satisfactorily and recent news of business developments in China have once more raised the issue, at least in some of the newspapers.
Russia
Naturally the issue that has the potential of creating the most disruption to the Trump Administration is the allegations of Russian interference in the election. This matter has already claimed the scalp of National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and is still causing some embarrassment for Attorney General #Jeff Sessions in regards to contacts by both with Sergey Kislyak, Russia’s Ambassador to Washington.
The constant repetition of these themes in the newspapers and media sources is proof that they will never go away until they have been resolved.
These matters would have been cleared in the beginning if the candidates for election were to face a confirmation hearing such as that for Secretaries before the beginning of the formal presidential campaign.
Failure of the Primaries
In the past the primaries managed to weed out uncomfortable candidates, but in the 2016 presidential campaign the Republican primaries and then the campaign proper failed to resolve the issues identified from the very early days of Trump’s candidacy.
This failing also affected Hillary Clinton’s candidature as it would have confronted the issues of the emails and even the incident in Benghazi in a manner that would have avoided the many unfounded or exaggerated accusations that haunted her until the eventual defeat on November 8th.
There is something wrong when the country has to wait for intelligence investigations to understand what happened in its presidential election. It may be time that possible candidates for the highest office to be subject to close scrutiny to ensure that the current disruptions to government do not happen again.
