President Trump’s pick for U.S. ambassador to Singapore faced a heated grilling in his Senate confirmation hearing in which he struggled to answer questions about the city-state.
It took barely ten minutes for Dr. Anjani Sinha—who is not an expert in global affairs or trade, but an orthopaedic and sports surgeon who owns a chain of practices on the East Coast—to reveal his apparent lack of knowledge about Singapore as he melted down live on television, in a clip that has now gone around the world.
Facing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the Indian-born Florida-based doctor boasted he was a “lifelong bridge builder.”
Seemingly unconvinced that this, or his background, made Dr. Sinha qualified for such a crucial post, Illinois Democrat Sen. Tammy Duckworth went to town.
Duckworth asked Dr. Sinha if he knew the size of the United States trade surplus with Singapore. Dr. Sinha initially guessed $80 billion, before revising it to $18 billion. Duckworth informed him it was actually $2.8 billion.
Not a great start.
Next, Duckworth asked Dr. Sinha about Trump’s looming 10 percent tariff on Singaporean goods, and how he would sell it to Singapore.
Dr. Sinha meandered through half-sentences before landing on a shrug: “The dialogue is not closed. The door is not closed.”
Smelling blood, Duckworth pressed harder. “When is Singapore going to be the ASEAN chair?” she asked, referring to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations regional bloc.
Dr. Sinha didn’t know. It’s 2027, he was informed by Duckworth.
“What does holding the chairmanship entail for Singapore? Can you name one thing?” Duckworth pressed.
At first, Duckworth’s question was met with silence—before Dr. Sinha responded with incoherent filler, leading the combat-veteran senator to unload on the gormless clinician.
“I just feel you are not taking this seriously,” she snapped. “You think this is a glamour posting—that you’re going to live a nice life in Singapore—when what we need is someone who can actually do the work.“
Describing him as “unqualified” for the key role, she went on: “You are not currently prepared for this posting, period, and you need to shape up and do some homework.”
The exchange detonated on Singaporean social media, where the BBC reported that one viewer quipped Sinha was “more Embarassador than ambassador.” Another asked whether Trump’s tariff or Trump’s envoy was the bigger insult.
Yet despite his real-time humiliation, the nominee’s prospects remain very much alive. Republican Lindsey Graham—who introduced Sinha as “a friend of President Trump for over a decade”—controls the committee’s gavel, and the GOP’s Senate majority means party-line votes can still hand the surgeon the keys to America’s most strategic outpost in Southeast Asia.
Donald Trump hailed Sinha as a “highly respected entrepreneur” when he nominated him in March. The U.S. Department of State went further still, saying in May that with “his deep social and cultural ties to the Indo-Pacific region, Dr. Sinha is uniquely positioned to relate to its key stakeholders [and] his appreciation for Singapore’s role as a financial hub…render him well qualified to serve as U.S. Ambassador to Singapore.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
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