Trump’s Anti-EU, Potential Pick for EU Ambassador Gets Fact-Checked

Ted Malloch has been floated as President Donald Trump’s pick for ambassador to the European Union, a union which he has likened to the Soviet variety. He’s gotten in hot water lately, and not just because he’s dead set against the institution he might be interacting with, but for a good, old-fashioned inflated résumé.

Malloch taught at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School until last year, and made various claims about himself at that university, which is where his trouble with the Financial Times began.

The British daily ran a piece saying that, while Malloch claimed affiliation with three colleges at Oxford — Wadham College, Wolfson College, and Pembroke College — all three denied that he had, in fact, held the positions he said he had there. Wadham, which has a reputation at the university’s leftist college, went so far as to point out that, while Malloch claims to have been a Wadham senior common room fellow, “He has never been a Fellow of Wadham College and the role of Senior Common Room Fellow does not exist here.”

Oxford students and alumni reacted exactly as one might imagine Oxford students and alumni would react.

“I’m deeply disturbed to find out that someone affiliated with such a respected institution would inflate their credentials,” Wolfson College alumnus Justin McNamara told Foreign Policy. He continued, tongue firmly in cheek, “I imagine this is the first, and hopefully last time anyone from the Oxford community has done this. Sad!”

Ivaylo Iaydjiev, another Oxford student, zeroed in on Malloch’s claim to have finished his doctorate from the University of Toronto in under three years. When this was proven untrue, Malloch explained that this did not include his thesis (that is, his dissertation). “I rest my case,” Iaydjiev said. (To be fair to Malloch, in Oxbridge, the doctorate is just the thesis. To be fair to everyone else, one cannot say one was awarded one’s doctorate without a thesis.)

Malloch is important inasmuch as he is rumored to be Trump’s man before Brussels, a union that Washington has staunchly backed for decades but which it now seems bent on tearing apart. “Whether the eurozone survives, I think it’s very much a question that is on the agenda,” Malloch told Greek television. His rumored appointment has caused consternation in Brussels. But then, Trump himself is understood as a threat by EU leadership.

To be sure, Malloch’s spat with an elite (not to say elitist) institution will probably only burnish his credentials with the Trump administration. But there’s more.

The Financial Times also fact-checked claims that Malloch held an “ambassadorial role” at the United Nations; was called a “global sherpa” live on air by former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher; had his documentary “Doing Virtuous Business” nominated for an Emmy award; wrote for the New York Times and Washington Post; was the first to use the term “thought leadership”; and that the Financial Times rejected a piece by Malloch “because it was contrary to [the paper’s] pro-EU policy.”

All those were lies or misleading statements, the Financial Times found.

Photo credit: Danny E. Martindale/Getty Images