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Executive Departments Part 2


Coconut Flan

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I've tried, for several days, to link an article about Dumpy's personal pilot, who he is pushing to head the FAA. Unfortunately, every time I click "Submit Reply", it fails. So, if you are interested, it's from the WaPo. I can't believe the people Dumpy keeps hiring.

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18 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I've tried, for several days, to link an article about Dumpy's personal pilot, who he is pushing to head the FAA. Unfortunately, every time I click "Submit Reply", it fails. So, if you are interested, it's from the WaPo. I can't believe the people Dumpy keeps hiring.

I can. He finds the bigliest and bestest swamp dwellers for his administration. Really. Convicts at Sing Sing and San Quentin have nothing on them. Trump thinks no one will notice his corruption  if he hires people who are even more corrupt.

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Gotta hand it to him on this one. He is sure proof that some humans never evolved.

 

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Awww, poor Benny: "Ben Carson on His Vexing Reign at HUD: Brain Surgery Was Easier Than This"

Spoiler

WASHINGTON — Before Ben Carson accepted President Trump’s offer to become secretary of housing and urban development, a friend implored him to turn down the job to preserve the reputation he had earned as a brilliant neurosurgeon and lost, in part, as a politician.

The confidant, Logan Delany Jr., who was the treasurer of Mr. Carson’s 2016 presidential campaign, described HUD as a “swamp” of “corruption.” He predicted in an email that Mr. Carson’s “lack of a background in housing” would make him prey to the department’s career staff and political appointees, as well as predatory lobbyists.

To drive home the point, Mr. Delany appended a link to an obituary of Samuel R. Pierce Jr., the Reagan-era HUD secretary whose reputation as a trailblazing black corporate lawyer was tarnished by accusations that he steered contracts to Republican cronies.

Mr. Delany’s most dire prediction has not materialized. But many of the other problems outlined in the memo have come to pass during Mr. Carson’s first year running a sprawling $47 billion-a-year community development bureaucracy that provides rental subsidies for about five million families and oversees people living in 1.2 million units of public housing. And Mr. Carson’s own lapses in judgment — combined with the questionable behavior of his family and his reluctance to aggressively engage Mr. Trump — have left him at the margins of the cabinet.

Mr. Carson, people close to him said, has been whipsawed by a job he has found puzzling and frustrating — so much so that he considered quitting during recent wrangling over the department’s budget.

“There are more complexities here than in brain surgery,” Mr. Carson said in an interview last week. “Doing this job is going to be a very intricate process.”

Mr. Carson’s efforts to steer the agency toward programs that foster self-sufficiency, one of his stated goals, have been undermined by staffing mistakes, his indecisiveness and a president indifferent, at best, to the department’s mission of helping the poor, according to two dozen current and former HUD and administration officials.

All of this has been exacerbated by Mr. Carson’s tin ear for politics — such as the damaging disclosure that he had looked the other way when subordinates spent, at a time of savage budget cuts, $31,000 to buy him a new mahogany dining room suite for his office that included a pair of $1,000 side chairs.

“I think you have to come to the job with a sense of what the duties and responsibilities are,” said Representative Al Green, a Texas Democrat and frequent Carson critic. “If you don’t come with that sense, and the doctor didn’t, it doesn’t matter what your intentions are, you aren’t going to succeed. We are seeing that now.”

“Secretary Carson has to step up,” said Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, who voted against his confirmation a year ago.

HUD, created in 1965 as a Great Society response to a growing urban crisis, is a lot less powerful than its vast portfolio suggests. It is mostly a conduit for congressional appropriations and a caretaker for a patch quilt of existing anti-poverty programs.

Mr. Carson accepted the job after an intense multiple-call-a-day barrage from Mr. Trump, who saw a chance to infuse HUD with the self-help philosophy that was the theme of Mr. Carson’s presidential campaign. His model is his own mother, a domestic worker who rescued her two sons from poverty, roach-infested apartments and the low expectations of their teachers.

But he has not yet been able to get serious buy-in from Mr. Trump or secure commitments from his staff on the programs he favors, especially his plan to create thousands of community centers geared toward fostering self-sufficiency. In part, this is because the president views him as a secondary player, a nice guy unlikely to make waves.

While Mr. Trump treats him with respect, he views him as a beta “winner,” not as a “killer,” the alpha in his organizational taxonomy, according to several White House officials.

That lack of influence was painfully apparent during the internal debate before the release of Mr. Trump’s budget, which would help pay for increases in military and Homeland Security spending with steep cuts to HUD’s Community Development Block Grant and core housing programs.

Mr. Carson, people close to him say, hates asking anybody for money — and has told advisers that he feels acutely uncomfortable asking the president for anything that could be construed as a favor.

When the White House budget director, Mick Mulvaney, proposed an 18 percent cut to HUD late last year, Mr. Carson reluctantly reached out to the president. Mr. Trump expressed sympathy. Then he told him to “talk to Mick” about the details.

Mr. Carson denies that he has been marginalized and says he backs Mr. Trump’s guns-before-butter budget approach. “I believe in what the president believes,” Mr. Carson said. “We are in a very precarious situation with North Korea, with radical terrorists who want to destroy us, with the Soviet Union, who has ambitions.” An aide later said he was referring to Russia.

In private, however, Mr. Carson has been profoundly frustrated, telling friends he would find it difficult to stay if deep cuts to two housing programs, focused on helping the elderly and the disabled, were enacted.

“He was ready to walk — he would have walked,” said Mr. Carson’s longtime business manager and political adviser, Armstrong Williams.

Eventually, Mr. Carson persuaded the White House chief of staff, John F. Kelly, and the president to restore about $2 billion for HUD’s budget. That dropped the total percentage cut to 14 percent. It was bad but better.

Raising his voice in defense of HUD doesn’t come naturally to the defiantly low-key Mr. Carson. That sotto voce serenity prompted Mr. Trump as a candidate to mock a favorite Carson anecdote about his troubled youth — the one in which a teenage “Bennie” Carson tried to stab a buddy, only to be stopped by a providentially thick belt buckle.

“How stupid are the people of the country to believe this crap?” Mr. Trump asked at a November 2015 rally.

Mr. Trump later apologized for his remarks, Mr. Carson has told associates, confessing to being “a little bit panicked” by the doctor’s early popularity.

Mr. Carson has, at times, and in a measured way, criticized Mr. Trump, mildly taking him to task for his profane description of Haiti and African countries in January. But he said he did not “spend a lot of time thinking about race, quite frankly,” when asked if he felt responsibility as the most prominent African-American in an overwhelmingly white administration.

Still, Mr. Carson said that he was trying to soften Mr. Trump’s tone. “I have moderated my own speech because I recognized that when I say things in an inflammatory manner, that’s not particularly helpful,” he said. “I have made it known to everyone in the administration, including the president.”

The power dynamic in the relationship, however, is clearly tilted. Mr. Trump shot down Mr. Carson’s choice for deputy secretary, Rick A. Lazio, a former Long Island congressman who savaged the president during the campaign.

At around the same time, the White House press office also rejected the secretary’s request to appear on CNN and then told him to clear all media appearances, much to Mr. Carson’s annoyance, aides said.

He often simply seems out of the loop — telling senior staff members at a gathering last spring that the president had given him assurances that HUD’s budget would not be cut at all.

Congressional Democrats have also proved to be a problem. Until she relented in late 2017, Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, blocked the confirmation of the eventual nominee for deputy secretary, and Ms. Warren continues to delay the confirmation of two other top housing officials.

People close to Mr. Carson have been prodding him to show more fight with the White House and Congress. “I like the aggressiveness! That’s a new secretary I haven’t seen!” Mr. Williams said after the secretary raised his voice during a televised town-hall-style meeting recently.

But that forcefulness has often been absent in his dealing with staff members. His first six months in office were marked by damaging infighting and the departure of dozens of experienced people.

Mr. Carson’s first chief of staff, Sheila Greenwood, a HUD veteran, clashed with Lynne Patton, a former officer with a charitable foundation run by Mr. Trump’s son Eric, who was given a top department job without any consultation with the secretary.

Their conflict came to a head when Ms. Greenwood rejected Ms. Patton’s request for an Amtrak ticket from Washington to New York, ordering her to take a shuttle flight at a cheaper contracted rate. Ms. Patton told associates she was offended, then paid for the train ticket out of pocket. To alleviate the tension, Mr. Carson arranged for Ms. Patton to be transferred to HUD’s New York City regional office, according to people with knowledge of the situation.

Mr. Carson complained about her behavior — and requested her apology this year when she called a White House reporter “Miss Piggy” on Twitter — but he has not taken more serious disciplinary action, and Ms. Patton still enjoys the protection of her friends in the White House.

To the consternation of some staff members, Mr. Carson has leaned heavily on his family, especially his wife, Candy — who occupied a space in Mr. Carson’s office suite for much of his first year in office, said a Carson confidant.

A former chief administrative officer in the department, Helen Goff Foster, has filed a complaint with the federal whistle-blower agency, the Office of Special Counsel, alleging that she was demoted and transferred after she refused Mrs. Carson’s request to circumvent a rule capping redecorating expenses for Mr. Carson’s office to $5,000.

The Carsons, through a HUD spokesman, denied her claim. But shortly after, someone in Mr. Carson’s office decided to pay a small Baltimore company $31,561 to replace his dining room table, chairs and hutch. The secretary did not know about the purchase, according to his spokesman, Raffi Williams. After the spokesman said last week that Mr. Carson had no plans to reverse the decision, Armstrong Williams said two days later that the secretary was trying to cancel the order.

Issues involving Ben Carson Jr., the secretary’s son and a Maryland-based businessman, have proven equally troublesome. Mr. Carson invited him to a Baltimore listening tour last summer, despite a warning from department lawyers, during one of his daily briefings, about a potential ethics problem.

In response to the lawyers, Mr. Carson summoned his son and his wife, a government contractor, to ask if they were doing anything wrong — then left the decision of whether they planned to attend up to them, according to two people with knowledge of the conversation. They did.

“I don’t have any problem with ethics,” Mr. Carson said. “Here is a rather unique situation, Ben is somebody who is integrally important to me, and wants to help. I’m not going to just say no because it looks this way or that way.”

He added, “We are ethically pure.”

Such questions, Mr. Carson believes, are a distraction from his grand vision of HUD as a ladder out of dependency for the working poor. Increasingly, he is staking that legacy on a single program, the so-called EnVision Centers project.

Over the next three to five years, Mr. Carson hopes to establish more than 3,000 of the centers to provide low-income families, especially young people, with one-stop access to educational, job training, mentorship and health care services. But Ms. Greenwood argued that Mr. Carson’s team was not experienced enough to make it work, and it soon became apparent that there was little appetite in the White House for more than a pittance in funding — $2 million over the next year.

In response, Mr. Carson has turned to charitable foundations for funding. But he has not proved to be the best pitchman, according to a dozen attendees at a January meeting with potential donors at HUD headquarters. He began with a libertarian lecture, extolling the genius of the 19th-century robber barons who created the country’s philanthropic charities. They had spared the country from “European socialism,” he said.

One skeptical foundation officer countered by asking the secretary where “the public” part of the public-private partnership was coming from. Another asked, “What does this have to do with public housing?”

But his audience, mainly composed of community development specialists who believe that the government has an enduring moral responsibility to help the poor, was most put off by Mr. Carson’s assertion that the goal of EnVision was to put HUD out of business.

“There is nothing wrong with encouraging safe, inviting places for youth to grow,” said Adrianne Todman, chief executive of the Washington-based National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials. “But it is time for us to focus on the ‘H’ in HUD — ‘housing.’”

 

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Wow, just wow: "Senior EPA press official has a side job as an outside media consultant"

Spoiler

Two senior Environmental Protection Agency political appointees — including one who personally supervises every grant the agency awards to or solicits from outside groups — got approval from the agency’s ethics office to continue to collect outside income while working for the Trump administration.

Letters from the EPA’s office of general counsel, which were released Monday by Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, show that EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s special assistant Patrick Davis and the deputy associate administrator for the office of public affairs, John Konkus, sought permission to work for private clients even as they occupied full-time federal jobs.

Davis asked to work “as the sales director of Telephone Town Hall Meeting,” according to a Feb. 3 letter from Justina Fugh, the EPA’s alternate designated agency ethics official, while the clients Konkus is consulting for were not made publicly available. Instead, Fugh’s Aug. 1 letter to Konkus states that he wanted “to take on clients to advise about strategy, mail and media production”: It mentions two “likely clients,” whose names are redacted, adding that he anticipated “getting more clients in the next six months.”

Both officials were instructed that their outside annual income could not exceed $27,765 and that they could not participate in “any matter that will have a direct and predictable financial effect upon your outside” employer or clients.

Davis, who makes about $135,000 a year in his job as a senior adviser for public engagement to the regional administrator in the EPA’s Denver office, also owns a Republican political consulting firm based in Colorado Springs. He was also given permission to “solicit prospective clients” in his spare time, provided that he did not use agency resources.

A Monday letter signed by the Energy and Commerce Committee’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (N.J.), and fellow Democrats Diana DeGette (Colo.), Kathy Castor (Fla.) and Paul Tonko (N.Y.), asks Pruitt to provide greater disclosure about which of the agency’s top officials are earning outside income and to address the “potential conflicts of interests” that could arise from such arrangements.

In an email, EPA spokeswoman Liz Bowman noted that both officials had gone through regular channels to gain approval for maintaining businesses on the side. “As the letter states, EPA career ethics approvals have reviewed and approved these opportunities,” Bowman said.

Last year, The Washington Post reported that Konkus had started vetting the hundreds of millions of dollars in grants that the EPA distributes each year, singling out awards that either highlighted climate change or supported priorities that he viewed as conflicting with those of the administration. Konkus canceled close to $2 million competitively awarded grants to universities and nonprofit organizations, though the EPA reversed course last week and restored $325,000 in funding to the Bay Journal, a print publication that covers Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay.

“A political appointee cutting millions of dollars in funding to EPA grant recipients on what appears to be a politically motivated basis, while at the same time being authorized to serve as a paid media consultant to unnamed outside clients, raises serious concerns of potential conflicts of interest,” the four Democrats wrote.

Konkus, who makes about $145,000 a year, declined a request for comment. A longtime GOP operative in Florida, he served as Trump’s campaign chairman in Leon County, home to Tallahassee. He later joined the “beachhead” team at the EPA and helped handle communications work during the confirmation process for Pruitt. Previously, he spent several years as a vice president for political consulting firm Jamestown Associates.

On his LinkedIn profile, Konkus describes himself as an “executive-level manager, top strategist, and expert communicator.”

The letter asks Pruitt to provide by March 19 a list of all EPA political appointees who have received approval to engage in a paid outside activity, a nonredacted copy of any memo of approval authorizing any outside activity, and a nonredacted list naming and describing each authorized outside client.

 

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Another one's leaving.  How long until there's nobody left?

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/gary-cohn-resigning_us_5a9f170ee4b0e9381c132858

Quote

Gary Cohn, who has served as President Donald Trump’s chief economic adviser since last year, will step down from his position, the New York Times reported Tuesday.

According to the Times, Cohn will leave his role as director of the National Economic Council in “the coming weeks.”

 

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4 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

 

I'm going to warn you all, I'm probably going exclusively with "disgust" and "angry" from here on out.

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3 hours ago, GrumpyGran said:

I'm going to warn you all, I'm probably going exclusively with "disgust" and "angry" from here on out.

Quite okay...disgust is now neutral instead of counting as a downvote. I'm using it more often now, too.

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WTAF? "Ousted White House drug-policy aide joins HUD"

Spoiler

President Donald Trump’s former liaison to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, who was pushed out after questions surfaced about his lack of experience, has joined the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Taylor Weyeneth will serve as a mid-level official in the office of Community Planning and Development, according to HUD spokesman Raphael Williams. He will focus on opioid policy, Williams said.

Weyeneth, a onetime Trump campaign aide, was forced to step down from his White House post in January after inconsistencies in his resume were revealed. A Washington Post story detailed his rise to influence within the Trump White House despite a lack of work experience.

Weyeneth will start at HUD as a general schedule 9 employee.

Williams had no immediate explanation for Weyeneth’s hiring.

So we got him out of one agency and he crept to another. Sigh.

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From Politico Magazine: "The Gold-Plated Cabinet" I can't quote here because it's basically all graphics, but it compares the net worth of Dumpy's, Obama's, and Bush's cabinets. It's quite striking.

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Watchdog: Social Security acting head hasn't been authorized to serve for months

Quote

The acting head of the Social Security Administration (SSA) has been prohibited by law from serving in her position for months, a government watchdog informed the White House this week.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) sent a letter to President Trump this week saying that Nancy Berryhill is in violation of the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, which generally bars acting agency chiefs from serving in the post for more than 210 days.

Berryhill was appointed to her position on Jan. 23, 2017, days after Trump entered office.

"Specifically, we are reporting that the service of Nancy A. Berryhill as Acting Commissioner at SSA after November 17, 2017, is in violation of the Act," GAO general counsel Thomas Armstrong wrote to the White House.

“We have previously determined that using the acting title of a position during the period in which the position should be vacant violates the time limitations in the Vacancies Reform Act,” the letter continued. “Therefore Ms. Berryhill was not authorized to continue serving using the title of Acting Commissioner after November 16.”

Rep. Sam Johnson (R-Texas), who chairs the Social Security subpanel of the House Ways and Means Committee, issued a statement this week calling on the Trump administration to nominate a permanent head for the SSA.

“Americas want, need, and deserve the SSA to provide the service they expect and count on – and that requires the authority and consistency of a Senate-confirmed Commissioner who can lead the way," Johnson said. 

"I look forward to discussing the critical importance of this role for the millions of people who receive Social Security – today and in the future.”

The Trump administration is currently behind on filling hundreds of vacancies in top government positions.

The White House itself has been dealing with a series of resignations, including two staffers who resigned over domestic violence accusations last month and the recent resignations of longtime Trump aide Hope Hicks, the White House communications director, as well as Gary Cohn, the president's chief economic adviser.

The Washington Post first highlighted the GAO letter this week.

It's astonishing that the Republican chair of the Social Security subpanel of the house Ways and Means Committee is pointing this out.

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"Steven Mnuchin says Trump is ‘funny’ when he cusses — and other ways to flatter a president"

Spoiler

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s predecessor, Larry Summers, once called him possibly “the greatest sycophant in Cabinet history.”

Mnuchin has reliably backed up President Trump not just on economic policy — but also on race relations and football. He has praised Trump’s “perfect genes.” When CNN ranked two dozen Cabinet officials’ compliments of Trump from a single meeting last year, Mnuchin easily made the top 10 for extolling the many virtues of serving the president.

Trump is great and right and healthy, in Mnuchin’s words. And did you know he’s funny, too?

The treasury secretary revealed this in an interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd on Sunday, after Trump had held a rally in Pennsylvania and called for the execution of drug dealers, praised dictators, cussed and whipped the crowd into a frenzy by calling Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), a frequent critic of his, “a very low-IQ individual.”

Todd offered Mnuchin an opportunity to explain Trump’s conduct. Another less admiring aide might have simply tried his best to do so. But Mnuchin took the opportunity to praise Trump like he’d never praised him before.

“The president likes making funny names,” he told Todd, whom Trump had called a “sleeping son of a bitch” at the rally.

“He's using these vulgarities in the context of a campaign rally,” Mnuchin said, “and, obviously, there were a lot of funny moments in that rally.”

Unlike CNN, we won’t attempt to rank that compliment against Mnuchin’s priors. Nor do we see any reason to compare Mnuchin’s flattery with that of Trump's other subordinates.

Nearly everyone who works for Trump seems to admire him in their own unique way. So here’s a list in no particular order.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt

“It is abundantly clear that President Trump is the most consequential leader of our time. ... No one has done more to advance the rule of law than President Trump.” — In an agency statement from January.

Trade adviser Peter Navarro

“My function, really, as an economist is to try to provide the underlying analytics that confirm his intuition. And his intuition is always right in these matters.” — In an interview with Bloomberg last week.

Former National Economic Council director Gary Cohn

“The president was able to make some of the most amazing deals that have really been made by an administration ever.” — Speaking to NPR and other media outlets after Trump visited Saudi Arabia and watched a signing ceremony with U.S. business leaders.

Policy adviser Stephen Miller

To transcribe what he said would only lessen its effect, so just behold:

Trade Representative Robert E. Lighthizer

“I apologize for being late to work. I got bogged down in that swamp that you’ve been trying to drain.” — A joke at a Cabinet meeting last year in which two dozen aides took turns praising Trump, via CNN.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross

“Mr. President, thank you for the opportunity to help fix the trade deficit and other things.” — At the same Cabinet meeting.

Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue

“A lot of us just got back from Mississippi. They love you there.” — Same deal.

Communications Director Hope Hicks, before she resigned

“President Trump has a magnetic personality and exudes positive energy, which is infectious to those around him. He has an unparalleled ability to communicate with people. … He is brilliant with a great sense of humor.” — In a written statement.

(We note, for the record, that Hicks praised Trump’s sense of humor months before Mnuchin’s appearance on NBC.)

Vice President Pence

We could quote Pence if we wanted to. After all, he once praised Trump every 12 seconds for three minutes straight.

But more often, the vice president conveys his admiration without saying anything at all:

< picture of Pencey gazing lovingly at Dumpy>

I think I need some anti-nausea medication. And an adult beverage.

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45 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

When CNN ranked two dozen Cabinet officials’ compliments of Trump from a single meeting last year, Mnuchin easily made the top 10 for extolling the many virtues of serving the president.

"Yeah, no, I just bend over and he shoves money up my ass. Then it comes spewing out of my mouth like an ATM. My gold-digger wife scoops it up and runs out to buy all kinds of crap she doesn't need. Then I occasionally get sex. Somehow it all makes me happy. I love working for him!"

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Rexit!  Pompeo is in like Flynn.  Uh, wait, that's not a good reference these days.  Anyway, Tillerson will be spending more time with his family. 

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12 minutes ago, seraaa said:

This seems fine

Everyone has lost the plot. All of the countries. All of them

Remember how PO'd Carrie was when Berger broke up with her via post-it note on Sex & The City?  Maybe Trump couldn't find a post-it, or doesn't know what a post-it is, or missed that episode.

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6 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

Hey ho here we go: Make torture great again

 

Yes, the extraordinary rendition program, which consisted of kidnapping prisoners and exporting them to countries that engage in torture, putting them far outside of the judicial process.  Nasty, nasty business.  Pompeo and Haspel still have to go through the confirmation process. 

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"How Trump managed to make me feel sorry for Rex Tillerson"

Spoiler

President Trump has done the impossible. He has made me feel sorry for Rex Tillerson.

I urged a “no” vote on his confirmation, because he had no background in foreign policy and his tenure at ExxonMobil suggested that would pursue an amoral approach. He did prove as uninterested as his boss in promoting democracy and human rights, for example stripping out language relating to racial, sexual and ethnic discrimination from an upcoming human rights report.

But I would never have guessed that someone who had been the CEO of one of the world’s largest companies could turn out to be such a poor manager. Tillerson pushed a roughly 30 percent cut in State’s budget, refused to fill vital jobs and unleashed management consultants with a mandate to re-engineer the department — as if it were the underperforming division of a conglomerate determined to raise its stock price.

The result was plummeting morale and an exodus of talent. Nearly 30 percent of the most senior officials — career ambassadors and ministers — walked out. This would be the equivalent of the Defense Department losing a third of its three- and four-star generals. Meanwhile, the number of applicants taking the foreign service exam dropped 33 percent from a year earlier. Legendary former diplomats Nicholas Burns and Ryan C. Crocker warned that Tillerson was “Dismantling the Foreign Service.”

Tillerson was as unsuccessful at managing the president as he was his own department. It was a relationship beyond repair after Tillerson refused to deny that he had called Trump a “moron.” The secretary of state’s lack of influence became apparent as differences surfaced over issues such as Qatar (Trump wanted to back the Saudi squeeze, Tillerson wanted to serve as an honest broker), the Paris climate accord (Trump pulled out, Tillerson wanted to stay in) and the location of the U.S. Embassy in Israel (Trump announced he would move it to Jerusalem, Tillerson wanted to keep it in Tel Aviv). The final humiliation was Trump’s decision on Thursday to hold a summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un without first consulting Tillerson.

For all these reasons, I stand by my judgment that Tillerson was the worst secretary of state since the United States’ rise to global power began in 1898. If he had any self-respect, he would have resigned long ago.

And yet the manner in which “Rexit” finally occurred was despicable. Trump became famous on television for saying “you’re fired,” but it turns out that in real life he is too cowardly to look people in the face when he is getting rid of them. FBI Director James B. Comey found out he was canned from seeing the news on television; Tillerson reportedly from Twitter. No one deserves to be treated this way. Trump demands maximum loyalty from his followers, but he does not give any loyalty — or respect — in return.

So now Trump will get the secretary of state that he has long wanted. CIA Director Mike Pompeo was openly campaigning for the job even while running the CIA. In October, for example, Pompeo claimed that the intelligence community concluded that Russian meddling did not affect the outcome of the 2016 election. Only it wasn’t true: The CIA issued an embarrassing statement correcting its own director by noting that it had made no assessment of the electoral impact of Russian interference. This Sunday, Pompeo was on TV defending Trump’s decision to rush into a summit with Kim Jong Un, claiming the president had made “no concessions,” when the very act of giving the North Korean leader a meeting with the U.S. president is a huge concession.

It’s a good thing that Pompeo has better chemistry with Trump than Tillerson did — it’s important to have a secretary of state who speaks for the president. But it’s worrisome that Pompeo may get along so well with the president in part because he doesn’t tell him what he doesn’t want to hear.

Trump tweeted out Tillerson’s firing one day after Tillerson fingered Russia as the likely culprit behind the nerve-agent attack on a former Russian double agent and his daughter in Britain. He said that he was “extremely concerned about Russia.” Will Pompeo be willing to call out Trump’s buddy Russian President Vladimir Putin as forthrightly?

Or what about the Iran nuclear deal? In explaining why he fired Tillerson, Trump cited their disagreement over the deal, while adding that he shared “a very similar thought process” with Pompeo. Does that mean that Trump is now likely to scrap the Iranian nuclear deal at the same time that he is meeting with Kim to discuss the denuclearization of North Korea?

This is a schizophrenic approach that is likely to lead to failed talks with North Korea, which could in turn lead to a renewed push within the administration to launch Korean War II. For all his faults, Tillerson knew that a war with a nuclear-armed state was a bad idea. Does Pompeo?

 

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