The liberal media have their knives out for Heather Nauert, President Trump’s pick to replace Nikki Haley as United Nations ambassador, but their attacks only expose their own historical illiteracy, shameless bias and contempt for the president and the people around him.
CNN’s Brian Stelter abandoned any pretense of objectivity to ask a guest on his show Monday how to stop Nauert. “What do we do?” Stelter asked perennially wrong pundit Max Boot, adding, “Max, she is not qualified for this job.”
The segment followed days of breathless attacks on Nauert. Some are appropriately labeled as “opinion,” but, like Stelter’s show, many supposed “hard news” articles are virtually indistinguishable from the punditry. Most of them lead with the absurd, utterly disingenuous claim that the Ivy League-educated Nauert did not know America fought Germany during World War II, an insulting insinuation that would rightly be met with disgust by the mainstream media if Nauert were a liberal.
The hit pieces also target Nauert’s supposedly unprecedented inexperience, which likewise has absolutely no basis in fact. While many U.S. ambassadors to the U.N. have been career diplomats, many others have had backgrounds very similar to Nauert’s.
Liberal media were outraged, for instance, when President Richard Nixon appointed former ABC News correspondent John Scali to the position, accusing Nixon of “downgrading the office.” Of course, they had no such objections a few years earlier when President Lyndon Johnson appointed one of their own, Washington Post editor J. Russell Wiggins, to the position. Wiggins not only had never served in any public capacity; he had never even been to college.
Neither Scali or Wiggins, it must be noted, possessed anything approaching Heather Nauert’s charisma, poise or verbal dexterity — tools that are vital for an ambassador who must communicate America’s messages to the world in the age of the 24-hour news cycle. Nikki Haley has those qualities in abundance, which is one of the main reasons she’s been so effective as the U.S. ambassador to the U.N.
In her current role at the State Department, Nauert effortlessly articulates complex foreign policy issues before a room full of ravenous journalists — virtually all of whom are hostile to President Trump and his diplomatic agenda — on live TV multiple times every week.
Nauert has been an essential element of the State Department team for 19 months and one of the administration’s most effective messengers, so much so that she was promoted to serve as the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, the department’s fourth-highest position, earlier this year.
The real reason liberal journalists despise Nauert is that she is so effective in countering their negative narratives about President Trump’s foreign policy agenda. That she, a conservative woman, was also significantly more successful than most of them in their own field of journalism while she was at Fox News only adds to their indignation.
An alumna of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, Nauert had a 20-year career in TV journalism, reaching one of the largest audiences in the world. She has put those skills to good use every week in the State Department briefing room, deflecting the attacks of liberal journalist-activists, outsmarting their attempts to trip her up, and preventing them from using their questions to advance their own narratives.
Indeed, she makes it look easy.
We don’t have to worry about the liberal media attacks on Heather Nauert. She’s more than used to deflecting their predictable slings and arrows at this point. Liberal journalists have been trying to paint her as an unqualified blonde “pundette” for almost 20 years, and it hasn’t stopped her from rising to one of the highest positions in government.
They’ll probably keep writing hit pieces about her even as she represents the United States at the United Nations, but underestimating Heather Nauert hasn’t worked for them in the past, and it won’t stop her now.
Dr. Gina Loudon, Ph.D. (@RealDrGina) is a bestselling author, columnist, and frequent news commentator. She was a Trump delegate to the Republican National Convention and currently serves on the Donald J. Trump for President Media Advisory Board.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.