Isaacs, with 35 years’ experience crafting relief programs to stem migration flows, including a stint as director of foreign disaster assistance at USAID, is a solid pick by President Donald Trump, who has come under widespread criticism for comments demeaning life in some of the countries Isaacs knows best. But State Department foes and The Washington Post are going after the aid executive ahead of a June 29 vote by the IOM’s 169 member nations. The Post on Feb. 3 cited scattered Twitter and Facebook posts to claim Isaacs “made disparaging remarks about Muslims and denied climate change.

In the world of public policy there are those who talk and those who do. When you find a talker with a track record to go with it, someone in a position to propose making things happen but then who makes them happen, you pay attention. When those happenings are in Washington, Baghdad, Monrovia, and Darfur—each a war zone all its own—you want to go along for the ride, take notes from the front, and send word back to friends, family, and the generally weary: Hey, the world is careening through another disaster of its own making, but someone just stopped this runaway train for a possibly brief but shining moment!

Ken Isaacs is one of the runaway train stoppers, someone whose job is to make good things happen in the very worst, most hopeless places. For decades he has supervised aid work in the wake of humanitarian disasters—the colossal 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, West Africa’s 2014 Ebola outbreak, Europe’s 2015 migration crisis, and more—coordinating with officials, across language barriers, often in places where phones are down, lights are off, and survivors are traumatized.

The 65-year-old vice president of Samaritan’s Purse, the North Carolina–based aid agency headed by Franklin Graham, frequents front lines but rarely makes headlines. That is, until President Trump tapped him as the candidate to become the next director general of the International Organization for Migration.

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