All that thumbs-up practice to impress the Donald, completely wasted.

The President's second nominee for Secretary of the Army, Tennessee Senator Mark Green, withdrew his nomination today after he said mean people were misconstruing his years of unequivocal statements slagging Muslims, minorities, and LGBT Americans.

The President's first choice- as in all things- was a billionaire whose business couldn't clear the hurdle of even Trump-era ethics in government standing. He withdrew.



Conservatives cheered when the President turned to Green. Nothing fed the animal spirits more than an antigay social issues warrior succeeding the first gay Army secretary, Eric Fanning.

Irked by candidate Trump's assertions that gay Americans deserve not to be executed by ISIS, his base ate it up when Green compared transgender people to ISIS on a radio show last year and then declared,

"The government exists to honor those people who live honorable who do good things — to reward people who behave well and to crush evil," Green said in the interview. "So that means as a state senator, my responsibility very clearly in Romans 13 is to create an environment where people who do right are rewarded and the people who do wrong are crushed. Evil is crushed. So I'm going to protect women in their bathrooms, and I'm going to protect our state against potential infiltration from the Syrian ISIS people in the refugee program."

Green finished nailing himself to the cross he says the mean gays and liberals erected for him this afternoon, then issued a press release before his hopes of running a splendid little war or two expired:

JUST IN: President Trump's pick for Army Secretary, Mark Green, withdraws his nomination pic.twitter.com/9dLo77iqro

— NBC News (@NBCNews) May 5, 2017

Even some Republicans were getting skittish over Green's long anti-LGBT record in the Tennessee legislature. But it was others cutting and pasting his words- a Greenism for publicizing what he actually said- who doomed his call to service.