In 2016 a wealthy hotel-chain-owner, Gordon Sondland, donated $1 million to Donald Trump's inaugural committee. Then, in 2018 he was asked by Trump to be the U.S. ambassador to the European Union. This is the guy trying to convince us there was probably not any quid pro quo by the President with the, I'll give you the money to buy Javelin anti-tank missiles, if you "do us a favor though" publicly available transcript. Sondland is also the, "I suggest we stop the back and forth by text" about Ukraine guy. To reiterate, the guy who gave Donald Trump a million dollars then got a job as the ambassador to Europe is lecturing us about quid pro quo...
This kind of pay-to-play ambassador gig is not new. Just recently I was Googling my old 305 C-Street neighbor, Scott Brown (Elizabeth Warren's senatorial predecessor) and realized he is now the ambassador to New Zealand. Wonder how he landed that job? Also, I was just listening to the book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter and heard the story of Maxwell Henry Gluck who was a wealthy clothing-store-chain-owner who donated heavily to the Republican party in the 1950's and was subsequently appointed Ambassador to Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka). Sondland; a Gluck for our time.
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