Media pounce on White House for nomination delays but miss glaring error by Schumer

It was a tough statement by the Senate minority leader, blaming President Trump for the fact that so few of his nominees have been confirmed.

“If the president is looking for someone to blame for the slow pace of confirmations, he needs only to look in the mirror,” Chuck Schumer said Monday. “Of the 63 that have been nominated, the Senate has confirmed 39 of them.”

But as the White House tried to tell a number of reporters, only to be met by a collective yawn, the New York senator had confused the official statistics. At the time, the 63 nominees awaiting Senate approval were in addition to the 39 confirmed – meaning that Trump had nominated 102 people to top posts overall.

Schumer’s office put out an updated release later that day, correcting the numbers but making no mention of the mistake. But almost no one in the press picked that up. New York’s Daily News, which played up the story, did say the senator had “initially mis-stated how few people Trump had nominated.”

It is hard to imagine Trump getting a pass from the media on a blunder of that magnitude.

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