WASHINGTON _ Add Donald Trump to the list of people frustrated with the decisions Donald Trump has made as president.
In a series of early-morning tweets on Monday, the president complained that his administration had weakened his first attempt to ban travel from a handful of predominantly Muslim countries in favor of a revised order designed to avert legal challenges. He also complained that congressional Democrats "are taking forever to approve my people, including Ambassadors," even though his administration has been slow to select and nominate candidates for the jobs.
Trump could fix both problems with the stroke of a pen. Instead, he appears content to try to leverage them for political gain, or perhaps as a distraction. On Thursday, in what could be a turning point for Trump's administration, former FBI Director James Comey is expected to publicly testify to the Senate about the president's conversations with him about the bureau's investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
Trump regards Twitter as a direct channel to the American public where his remarks can't be filtered by news organizations, and he refused to abandon the medium after his inauguration. But beginning on Saturday, after the terrorist attack in London, he appeared to dial up the controversy of his statements.
"It's a very important tool for him to be able to utilize," the principal deputy White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, told reporters Monday.
On Thursday, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to lift a lower court ruling that halted the revised travel restrictions. Trump said Monday that the Justice Department "should have stayed with the original Travel Ban, not the watered down, politically correct version" submitted to the Supreme Court. He added that his administration should seek a "much tougher version."
The president himself signed an executive order replacing his original ban. The revised travel ban dropped Iraq from the list of covered countries, removed a provision exempting religious minorities from the ban and made clear it doesn't apply to legal permanent U.S. residents, also known as "green card" holders.
Almost as an aside, the tweet also publicly contradicted Trump's press secretary, Sean Spicer, who insisted Jan. 31 that the executive order was "not a travel ban."
"The president isn't concerned with what you call it," Sanders said.
Trump's anger about his ambassadors appeared to have been sparked by the senior U.S. envoy to the U.K., Lewis Lukens, who in his own Twitter posts on Monday commended the leadership of London Mayor Sadiq Kahn in the aftermath of the London Bridge terror attack. Trump and his social media director, Dan Scavino, attacked Kahn in tweets on Sunday and Monday.
Trump said before his inauguration that he intended to name New York Jets owner Woody Johnson as U.S. ambassador to the U.K. But the president has yet to actually submit the nomination to the Senate.
In fact, Trump's administration has moved slowly to staff positions across the government.
Of the 559 positions in the federal government that require Senate confirmation, just 39 people have been confirmed and Trump hasn't nominated anyone to fill 442 of them, according to a list compiled by The Washington Post and Partnership for Public Service. Another 63 have been nominated and 15 are awaiting paperwork to be processed for a formal nomination.
Yet Trump apparently blames Democrats for the delay. "They are nothing but OBSTRUCTIONISTS!" Trump said on Twitter, adding that he wanted "approvals."
A surrogate, his former deputy campaign manager David Bossie, echoed the complaint.
"It has to move at a quicker pace," he said on "Fox & Friends" on Monday. "The Democratic Party has just become a permanent obstruction campaign."
The Republican Party, which the president leads, controls the Senate. Democrats are no longer able to filibuster presidential nominations, though they can slow action in other ways.
"If the president is looking for someone to blame on the slow pace of confirmations, he needs only to look in the mirror," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, said in a statement. "President Trump ought to roll up his sleeves and get to work rather than pointing false fingers of blame."
To be sure, the White House's slow work filling positions isn't the only thing delaying his nominees.
The Trump administration has sent names for six additional ambassador jobs to the State Department for signoff, and has become increasingly impatient with the process. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has also intervened in some cases; while the White House wanted ex-U.N. spokesman Ric Grenell to be ambassador to NATO, Tillerson asked to instead name former Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, according to an administration official familiar with the process.
Since Trump took office on Jan. 20, he's submitted 94 names to the Senate, with 35 being confirmed in an average of 41 days. By comparison, Trump's predecessor Barack Obama at this point had 130 administration members confirmed and another 89 awaiting confirmation in a process that took on average 32 days.
Schumer, in his statement, said the delays are because many nominees had "conflicts of interest and incomplete ethics agreements when they were named."
Trump's aides frequently decline to comment on his tweets, saying that the missives speak for themselves. White House counselor Kellyanne Conway denounced "this obsession with covering everything he says on Twitter and very little what he does as president" on NBC's "Today" show on Monday.
Yet they are presidential statements, and are taken seriously outside the administration. George Conway, Kellyanne Conway's husband, criticized Trump's tweets about the travel ban on Monday in a series of his own tweets.
"Tweets on legal matters seriously undermine Admin agenda and POTUS _ and those who support him, as I do, need to reinforce that pt and not be be shy about it," he said.
A spokesman for Conway verified that he controls the account.
