Herschel Walker's nomination as ambassador proves Trump has no respect for the presidency

Trump's willingness to give an ambassadorship to a dangerously unstable man proves--again--that he hasn't even begun to understand what the president's job is.

Herschel Walker speaking in 2017 (image courtesy U.S. Marine Corps, part of public domain)

It’s an article of faith among the most diehard supporters of Donald Trump that his foes were not willing to let him do his job as president. Never mind that time and again, he demonstrated that he never even began to understand what his job as president was, let alone do it. Clearly, he still hasn’t done so, based on the people he has nominated for his return to the White House.

Trump wants Robert Kennedy Jr., a chest-beating anti-vaxxer and AIDS denier, as his Secretary of Health and Human Services. He wants Tulsi Gabbard, a woman with a dangerous tendency to amplify conspiracy theories and propaganda from a hostile power, as his intelligence chief. He wants to give the Pentagon to Pete Hegseth, a guy who paid hush money to make an accusation of sexual assault go away. And he wanted to make Matt Gaetz, a man who has been credibly accused of sexual misconduct and rampant drug use, his attorney general.

But as bad as these nominations have been, one nomination is almost as odious, but hasn’t been talked about—at least not as much as the others. A week before Christmas, Trump nominated former NFL player and 1982 Heisman Trophy winner Herschel Walker as ambassador to the Bahamas. Trump and Walker have been friends for over 40 years, dating back to Walker’s time with the USFL’s New Jersey Generals.

Incredibly, we haven’t had a full-time ambassador in the Bahamas since 2011—Obama’s first term. As much as we should want that vacancy filled, anyone who paid attention to Walker’s behavior during his run for a Senate seat in Georgia in 2022 would conclude that Walker is among the last people who should even be on the list for that post. After all, unless you have a MAGA hat glued to your head, you would have seen that Walker’s behavior proved not just beyond reasonable doubt, but ALL doubt, that he is not fit for office.

He piled up gaffes by the barrelful on the campaign trail, so many that Chris Cillizza—then of CNN—called him “a walking gaffe machine.” He said—with a straight face—that the Green New Deal was a waste of time because “bad air” from other countries” simply gets dumped here. He has also claimed that there are 52 states, and suggested that it’s possible to walk through a building that could kill off COVID. His response to the Uvalde school shooting devolved into word salad.

He also played fast and loose with the truth in a way that aped his dear one, Trump. He had long claimed to have been an FBI agent and trained at the FBI academy, but at the time he said he went to Quantico, he didn’t have the bachelor’s degree required to get in. Indeed, he long claimed to have graduated in the top one percent of his class at Georgia, but only finished his degree at Georgia in 2024. Indeed, some of his own staffers knew he was “a pathological liar.”

All things considered, it should have been obvious to anyone without formal training that Walker was not well. It’s very likely a number of those issues stem from the hits he took over a quarter-century playing football at the junior high school, high school, college, and pro levels. As most football fans now know, protective equipment—especially helmets—was grossly inferior during Walker’s days in secondary school, as well as his days at Georgia and with the Generals. Well into his days in the NFL with the Dallas Cowboys (twice), Minnesota Vikings, and Philadelphia Eagles, concussions and head injuries were considered part of the game. It’s safe to say that Walker took a lot of hits back then that would have yanked him off the field for weeks today, and would result in the defenders delivering the hits getting 15-yard penalties, ejections, heavy fines, and even suspensions.

When I looked at Walker, I frequently found myself thinking about another player of his era, Art Schlichter of Ohio State. He finished behind Walker in Heisman balloting in 1980 and 1981, but his career was bogged down by compulsive gambling that not only drove him out of the NFL after four seasons and 13 games, but resulted in him facing numerous arrests from 1987 onward. From 1994 to 2006, counting time served awaiting sentencing, he spent all but 358 days behind bars.

In 2011, he pleaded guilty to state and federal charges of theft and fraud after he rooked Anna Barney, the widow of the former CEO of Wendy’s, into helping him get money under the pretense of getting tickets for Ohio State sporting events. In truth, he used that money to gamble. At sentencing, Schlichter’s public defender revealed that Schlichter had been diagnosed with “deficits” in his frontal lobes, which control our impulses and judgment. Later, it emerged that he’d been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and dementia—which likely explained why he continued gambling even in federal prison. In a profile of Schlichter that aired on CNBC’s “American Greed,” Jeff Snook, who co-authored Schlichter’s 2011 biography, Busted, suggested that Schlichter had chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative condition caused by repeated blows to the head. That condition can only be definitively diagnosed in dead people, but has run rampant among football players up to Schlichter and Walker’s era.

All things considered, Walker shouldn’t have been running for Senate in 2022, and shouldn’t be considered for an ambassadorship now. He should be getting help. But the biggest issue of all surrounding Walker can’t be entirely chalked up to concussions and possible CTE. A month before Election Day, his son, Christian, revealed that he and his mother had suffered horrific abuse at Walker’s hands for years. According to Christian, they moved at least six times in as many months to get away from him. Anyone who wants to know why Christian kept quiet over the years got their answer when NBC News interviewed a number of Atlanta-area Black conservatives who said the reports about Walker’s depravities didn’t dissuade them in the least from supporting Walker. To a (wo)man, they all said that all that mattered to them was getting Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock out and Walker in.

Reading this angered me on a personal level. Like Christian, I was basely betrayed by my own father. He refused to switch from night shift to day shift, even though my mother was a teacher and he had two sons at home—meaning that my parents only saw each other a few hours out of the week when school was in session. It turned out he was staying on nights to facilitate cheating on my mother.

Granted, my father’s misdeeds were minor league compared to those of Walker. But even now, I find myself imagining if my father were running for office, and I had come forward about his cheating. Now imagine hearing people say that all that mattered was getting a seat, no matter what my father would have done. They would have essentially been giving me the finger—just like these so-called Black role models essentially gave Christian.

And now Trump is essentially giving Christian the finger again by nominating his father to be an ambassador. Granted, we already knew that Trump’s standards for diplomacy are absurdly low. Remember, his ambassador to Germany for much of the latter portion of his first term, Richard Grenell, seems to think that calling out Trump’s disturbing and outright fascistic comments on the campaign trail amounted to “fomenting violence.” But if he believes a man with Walker’s history is fit to represent our country on the international stage, then he has no right to complain that we aren’t letting him do his job. It cannot be repeated enough—this is evidence that he hasn’t even begun to understand the nature of his job.

Indeed, a case can be made that Walker exemplifies how twisted our politics have become under Trump. In so many words, we’ve been told that the perils facing our country are so dire that it doesn’t matter if Trump is a boor, a bully, a buffoon, a criminal, a traitor. So it’s rather ironic that Trump is apparently of the mind that filling a vacancy of a decade-and-a-half is so important that we have to ignore that the man he wants to fill it is clearly unstable and has a history of violent behavior. Then again, that’s what happens in a world where expecting our leaders to uphold basic standards is a sign that we don’t really love our country.