Trump nominates former Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison to be NATO ambassador

President Trump on Thursday nominated former Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, (R-Tx), to be America’s next ambassador to NATO, according to Fox News reports.

The White House made the announcement Thursday evening, which was first reported on Twitter by Fox News’s John Roberts and Mike Emanuel. 

.@realDonaldTrump officially announces fmr. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison to be US Ambassador to NATO @WhiteHouse

— John Roberts (@johnrobertsFox) June 29, 2017

WH: Former Senator @kaybaileyhutch of Texas to be United States Permanent Representative on the Council of @NATO.

— Mike Emanuel (@MikeEmanuelFox) June 29, 2017

The Trump administration announced the nomination in a brief press release Thursday evening, saying Hutchison would have the rank and status of “Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary.” {mosads}

Hutchison was an early critic of President Trump, and said during the 2016 campaign that she wasn’t sure she could support Trump if he ended up being the Republican candidate against Democrat Hillary Clinton.

In April of last year, she criticized Trump for using personal attacks against his opponents, a tactic which Trump was heavily criticized for earlier Thursday when he attacked MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski’s looks on Twitter.

Hutchison seems to have warmed up to Trump, and strongly supported Trump’s nomination of Secretary Rex Tillerson for the State Department in a January op-ed in The Hill.

At a joint press conference in April with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, Trump walked back his previous claims about NATO, saying the organization was no longer “obsolete.”

“The secretary-general and I had a productive discussion on what more NATO can do in the fight against terrorism,” Trump said in April. “I complained about that a long time ago and they made a change and now they do fight terrorism.”

“I said it was obsolete,” he continued. “It is not longer obsolete.”