By Kelsey Ables · The Washington Post (c) 2024
Donald Trump intends to nominate Herschel Walker, the former NFL player and Heisman Trophy winner who lost a scandal-ridden bid for Senate in 2022, as ambassador to the Bahamas, the president-elect announced on social media Tuesday evening.
Trump said Walker, 62, “has spent decades serving as an Ambassador to our Nation’s youth, our men and women in the Military, and athletes at home and abroad.” He added that Walker will “make Georgia, and our entire Nation, proud, because we know you will always put AMERICA FIRST!”
Walker, who served in a minor, health-related role in Trump’s previous administration, has had a long relationship with Trump, and he is another staunch ally chosen to serve in the new administration.
Walker’s Trump-backed bid for office in 2022 marked his first foray into politics and was rife with verbal gaffes and personal scandals.
During the campaign, Walker’s ex-wife accused him of holding a gun to her head and threatening to kill her. As he pitched himself as an antiabortion candidate, two ex-girlfriends said Walker had pressured them to have abortions, which he denied. At one point, Walker, who previously criticized absentee Black fathers, had to clarify how many children he had, when media reports surfaced that he had three additional children he had not spoken about publicly.
His son Christian Walker, who had been initially supportive of his campaign, later denouncedit, saying in a video on social media: “We were told he was going to get ahead of his past and hold himself accountable,” but “none of that happened. Everything’s been a lie.”
Walker, a Georgia native, had to repeatedly walk back false claims on the campaign trail, such as one made by his team that he had graduated in the top 1 percent of his class at the University of Georgia, when at the time, he hadn’t graduated at all. (Walker returned to the school and graduated recently,local media reported.) He also falsely claimed to have been a member of law enforcement.
As ambassador, Walker would manage a relationship with a country whose political stability is “especially important to the United States due to our long, shared maritime border,” the State Department says. The United States established diplomatic ties with the Bahamas in 1973, after it became independent from the United Kingdom, and the two countries have partnered on addressing transnational criminal activity andirregular migration.
Trump can formally make the nomination once he is in office, and Walker willneed to be confirmed by the Senate.Last year, the Senate sent back President Joe Biden’s nomination of former Georgia state representative Calvin Smyre for Bahamas ambassador. The position in Nassau is vacant, according to a recent State Department report.
It seemed that Walker would appear in the new administration in some way; on the campaign trail, Trump suggested he might put Walker in charge of a new missile defense shield, Forbes reported.
In his post Tuesday, Trump highlighted Walker’s success in sports, noting that in addition to being an “NFL Great,” he competed on the 1992 U.S. Olympic bobsled team.