One of the more delightfully dumb and blessedly low-impact storylines of the first Donald Trump administration involved a man named Matthew Whitaker. In 2018, when Trump finally hectored former Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions into resigning his position as attorney general—Sessions had approved the investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, which made Trump mad—the highly underqualified Whitaker replaced Sessions as interim AG for three zany months. It was a sort of King Ralph situation but for the Department of Justice, down to Whitaker and John Goodman both having been pretty solid football players in their younger days.
Anyway, Trump has now nominated Whitaker to be the U.S. representative to NATO, which is another job for which he is not qualified.
Whitaker served as a U.S. attorney in Iowa from 2004 until 2009, but much of his notoriety owes to work he did from 2014 until 2017 for a company called “World Patent Marketing.” The company charged would-be inventors thousands of dollars for services such as “Global Invention Royalty Analysis” that would purportedly help them make money off their ideas; the Federal Trade Commission, though, alleged in a lawsuit that its advertisements were deceptive and and that it performed basically no actual work on behalf of its customers. In 2018 a federal judge ordered the company to pay $26 million in damages while permanently banning its founder—who was based, naturally, in Florida—from selling services to inventors. (You can read more about this in the Miami New Times.)
Whitaker acted as a World Patent Marketing “adviser” and once told a dissatisfied customer that there could be “criminal consequences” for him if he complained about the company online, but was never charged with any personal wrongdoing in relation to the case. Here you can see him touting an alleged innovation in hot tub technology that the company had allegedly facilitated:
As was widely noted at the time of Whitaker’s DOJ appointment, the 2014 World Patent Marketing press release that announced his affiliation with the company also announced that it would be marketing a so-called “masculine toilet” that was designed for men with larger-than-usual penises.
So, Whitaker, toilet lawyer at law, served as acting attorney general for three months before being replaced by William Barr. (He’d initially been brought on as Sessions’ chief of staff, by the way, because Trump had seen him criticizing the Mueller investigation on CNN.) After that, he joined a political consulting group and worked with a Kansas City–based law firm. (His biography on its website does not mention his tenure with World Patent Marketing.) He is also affiliated with a MAGA think tank called the America First Policy Institute, where he acts as co-chair of “law and justice” initiatives.
Whitaker does not appear to have any foreign policy or military experience that would be relevant to his new job with NATO. For comparison, the woman who served as NATO ambassador for most of Joe Biden’s term had previously been an adviser to the secretary of state, a fellow at a national security think tank, a contributor to Foreign Policy magazine, and the director of Europe and NATO policy at the Department of Defense.
Whitaker’s lack of credentials, shared by most if not all Trump 2.0 nominees, may be pointed in this case, given that the president-elect has long complained that the U.S.’s commitments to NATO are a waste of money and has supported a policy of essentially letting Russian president Vladimir Putin do whatever he wants with Eastern Europe.
And, famously, Europe does have some unique toilet designs going on. In Amsterdam a few years back, after my friends and I drank some “special tea,” I ended up—eh, actually, let’s save that one for another time. Welcome back, Matthew Whitaker!
