Palestinians Are Invisible to Mike Huckabee. To Trump, He’s Perfect.
Regardless of anything else about Huckabee, what he believes, or what he has said, that one sentence should immediately disqualify him from confirmation as ambassador. It won’t, of course. (The Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday advanced his nomination on a party-line vote.) But it’s worth considering what the choice of such a person to serve as ambassador to one of America’s closest security partners means for U.S. policy in the world’s most volatile region, and what it says about our current politics.
I’ve heard from a couple sources that Huckabee’s nomination, which was one of Trump’s first announcements in the heady days immediately after he won reelection, was done as a favor to Huckabee’s daughter, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s first-term press spokesperson and now governor of Arkansas. As is so often the case with Trump, not a lot of thought was put into the choice, so it’s probably a good idea not to delve too deeply into what it means. For the moment at least, Trump’s Middle East policy will continue to be led by his friend and real estate mogul Steve Witkoff and will be aimed primarily at advancing Trump’s own personal interests.
Having said that, it is clarifying to have someone like Huckabee as a nominee for this job. While groups like the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, are usually what people think of when discussing the “pro-Israel lobby,” it’s Christian evangelicals like Mike Huckabee who form the vast majority of the country’s pro-Israel constituency. AIPAC is effective at working the halls of Congress, but evangelicals are overwhelmingly the ones who show up at the voting booth.