Today, Explained - "I don't get confused"

Episode Date: April 19, 2018

Nikki Haley has had a rough week. On Sunday, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations announced sanctions against Russia. On Monday, the White House said there would be no sanctions. Then, the president’s economic advisor said Haley was simply “confused.” Vox’s Zack Beauchamp explains how Ambassador Haley punched back and why this isn’t the best look for the country. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Saturday was really sunny in the District of Columbia. I was biking around with a friend and couldn't help but notice a bunch of mattresses sitting on curbs around the city. If you're thinking about using the warm weather as an excuse to treat yourself to a new mattress, consider doing so at Mattress Firm. They have a lot of mattresses. Go to mattressfirm.com and use the code PODCAST10 to get 10% off a new mattress before May 2nd. Zach Beecham, host of The Worldly Podcast.

Welcome back to Today Explained. Hello, Sean. On Sunday, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said, Russian sanctions will be coming down. Secretary Mnuchin will be announcing those on Monday if he hasn't already. And at this point in our history, imposing sanctions on Russia, not exactly beyond the pale. No. Since especially the assassination attempt on a double agent in Britain, the U.S. and Russia have been in this sort of cycle and counter cycle of sanctioning each other. But then something sort of exceptional happens.

Yeah. Big twist. So she said this on, I believe it was Face the Nation. Okay. And there's a problem because the president was watching and he got real mad. And the reason he got real mad is because he didn't approve the sanctions yet. And nobody told Nikki Haley. How does that happen?

Who told her to say that on TV? Apparently, someone in the White House, I don't know who, but someone in the White House put together talking points for Trump administration people that weekend. Okay. And they explicitly told Haley, go on TV and talk about these Russia sanctions we're going to do. Okay. And she's happy to. She's a Russia hawk, not just by Trump administration standards, but she is part of her job at the UN is getting out there and condemning Russian human rights abuses,

condemning its assassination attempts abroad, condemning its sponsorship of the Assad regime, like all this stuff. The record will not be kind to one permanent member of this council. History will record that on this day, Russia chose protecting a monster over the lives of the Syrian people. She's the voice of the anti-Russia faction in the U.S. government. So not only when she got this, would she like, you know, just say what she's being told to say, but she'd be really excited to say it.

But whatever notes she was given about these sanctions were not also given to the president, we think? Right. Somehow, no one bothered to talk to the president about the policy he was signing off on. Or someone else just decided that they could do this policy on their own and then told the press people, get Ambassador Haley out there. This is just so beyond the pale of how policy is supposed to work that I don't know how such a snafu could occur. So dare I ask what happens next? Yeah. Then on Monday, because the president's real mad and he calls a bunch of people and was like, we're not doing this.

What is Haley talking about? The administration is to go out and tell reporters. So actually, we are not going to do these sanctions. Ambassador Haley was wrong. And so that's embarrassing for her to begin with, right? It seems like it's embarrassing for a few people. It's embarrassing for everybody.

Everybody looks bad. Then on Tuesday, Larry Kudlow is the director of the National Economic Council. Okay. He decides he wants to talk about this and try to give his explanation of what happened. She's done a great job. She's a very effective ambassador. There might have been some momentary confusion about that. But if you talk to Steve Mnuchin at Treasury and so forth, he will tell you the same thing.

They're in charge of this. Threw her under the bus. Yeah. Why did he do that in public? Why wouldn't he just figure it out and then come out with some sort of unified statement that makes everyone look good? That would be the smart thing to do, right? The issue is someone needed to explain why the U.N. ambassador, who is one of the most important diplomats in the country, was wrong on a major policy issue. Like you can't not explain that.

It speaks to her credibility. It speaks to the administration's coherence. It would be disastrous if they didn't come up with some explanation. And the truth, as it turns out, is really stupid. So people need to come up with another explanation, I think. So what does Nikki Haley say after that? She gets really mad, unsurprisingly. due respect, I don't get confused. So there is some clarity, at least from her part on that tonight. That's a pretty sick burn. Good for her.

Right. And then I just saw this cry on CNN. It was Nikki Haley absolutely owns White House advisor in eight words. Right. Like that's how this is playing. That comment. In part because of what happened next, which is that Kudlow was forced to apologize to her. Oh. Yeah. And he's like, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to do that. And then sources tell CNN that

Kudlow called Haley to say that the policy had changed and that she just had been kept in the loop. After apologizing, he said she was out of the loop. Yeah, she wasn't confused. It's just that nobody told her the policy changed. So like that's better. Yeah, it's not really better though. So like this is why everybody comes off looking bad here, right? Is the president is running a totally incompetent organization. Nikki Haley is undercut and her credibility is – takes a hit even though she looks impressive for asserting herself. And Larry Kudlow looks like a jackass. And some person in the White House press office is in big trouble, as far as I can tell. What does it mean if Larry

Kudlow's right? What does it mean to have an ambassador to the United Nations who is potentially out of the loop on what the White House wants to do? All right. So UN ambassadors do two big things. First, they serve symbolically as kind of the voice of the United States in a really important forum. So when they say things, it's the official diplomatic statement of the country. And they often – and Haley especially does deliver these fiery diplomatic speeches, particularly condemning Russia. And that – those were always seen as not really like – this isn't what Trump thinks.

This is what some faction of the US government thinks. But that gets undercut even more by her not being seen as not having access to policy. And the second thing that UN ambassadors do is they negotiate things, right? It's not just that they're symbolic. It's that they hammer out things with other people at the UN. They work on UN Security Council resolutions. UN Security Council resolutions, by the way, also are not just symbolic. They are international law. So when you have somebody who's working on those very important documents who is seen as not actually having access to the president or not being involved in crafting what America's policy will be on the issues she's negotiating over, it severely undercuts her position in talks like this.

Is there evidence already of her not being taken seriously within the United Nations because of this perceived or very concrete disconnect between her office and the White House? The Russian response to her anti-Russia tirades is to largely treat them with contempt. They know that when push comes to shove on Russia, Trump is going to take the Russian side unless he really has no other options. I want to be clear. Disagreement is good. You want to staff the US government with smart people who think differently because groupthink is – political psychologists have studied this a lot and they found that that's a real problem in government.

So everybody thinks the same thing and no one challenges the leader, right? That you get bad policy and no one considers what's happening if it goes off the rails. The problem here is that the disagreements aren't playing out in private. That means foreign governments don't really know how to interpret the point or the purpose of any individual foreign policy or even know how seriously to take American threats and promises. And the risk of them thinking that you will do one thing and then you do another is the way that wars start sometimes. Sounds like what you're saying here is that this job is pretty important. Yes. One expert I spoke to earlier today, I sort of asked her to talk me through,

because she was in the Obama White House and knows how these things work, right? And so I asked her, why is this bad? What happens? Yeah. This mixed signal. And she said, what if this weren't sanctions they were talking about? And what if it was bombing North Korea? What if Nikki Haley had gotten on TV on Sunday and said, we are getting ready for military action on the Korean Peninsula? It's unlikely that a screw-up on that grand a scale could happen.

But when you have these mixed signals, when you have an internal policy process that's fundamentally broken, those are the kinds of disasters that arise as a result. Nikki Haley doesn't get confused, but she did sign up for a very confusing gig. Why would she want to work for an administration that undercuts her? That's after the break.

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And if you're a little nervous, worry not. Their mattresses come with 120-night low price guarantee and 120-night sleep trial. How great. Mattressfirm.com and use the code podcast10 for 10% off. It's good until May 2nd. And one more thing. Zach Beecham is on Today Explained every so often, but you can hear him talk about the most important news in the world every week on another Vox podcast. It's called Worldly, and Zach's one of the hosts. This week, they're talking about former CIA director Mike Pompeo, who took a secret Easter

trip to Pyongyang to meet with the leader of North Korea. It's historic, consequential stuff. Subscribe to Worldly wherever you get your podcasts. I'm a little curious who exactly Nikki Haley is, because I think she's got something of a fascinating backstory. Yeah, she's super interesting as a person. So she's from South Carolina. She is Indian American, and she grew up Sikh, but she converted to Methodism. She married her husband, whose last name she took, Nikki Haley. Nikki is an anglicized version of her Hindi name. And she has been active in conservative politics for a long time,

but before she was in the Trump administration, the salient point is that she was governor of South Carolina. Ladies and gentlemen, I present the Honorable Nikki Randhawa Haley, governor. An historic day at the state capitol, Republican Nikki Haley became the first female and first Indian American governor of South Carolina. And at the time, she was the youngest person to be serving as governor in the country, right?

Right, and conservative. And conservative. And very religious in her approach. She's hardcore pro-life, is another part of her background, right? This is all a very uncommon political biography to have. Look, we have illegal immigration laws for a reason. South Carolina takes illegal immigration very seriously, and I need the federal government to

get out of the way. They have gotten in the way when it comes to health care in South Carolina. They have gotten in the way when it comes to unions and which companies can create jobs in South Carolina. And now they're getting in the way with the fact that I'm trying to govern a state, enforce illegal immigration, and they're keeping me from doing it. And she's one of a very small number of very prominent female Republican politicians and has managed to make a national profile out of herself. And then she got tapped to be a UN ambassador instead of governor. And when you assemble a profile like that, you want to be president. Okay. So that kind of explains why she'd leave this historic post, this

first female governor of South Carolina to become ambassador to the United Nations. Yeah. She wants to be president. She needed foreign policy experience. She didn't have high level foreign policy chops. And now if you're a UN ambassador, well, yeah, you really know your shit after that, right? That's a day in, day out, really hard. You got to learn a lot of stuff to interact with a lot of people from a lot of different countries kind of job. How did she feel about Donald Trump before he became president as a candidate? Do you know? She wasn't one of the hardcore pro-Trump people. And my guess, again, guessing here, this is not based on anything that I've heard, became president as a candidate. Do you know? She wasn't one of the hardcore pro-Trump people. And my guess, again, guessing here, this is not based on anything that I've heard,

is that she's by inclination, a kind of never Trump type who has decided to go Trump for basically expedient reasons. I think we're seeing it across the country, but yes, Mr. Trump has definitely contributed to what I think is just irresponsible talk. She's a movement conservative. She believes in limited government, muscular foreign policy, and quote-unquote traditional social values. That's always been her thing. She's always been down the line on those issues. And so she joins up to an administration who ideologically it's not clear that she's aligned with. And she is one of the rare members of the Trump administration that I've seen almost an increase in respect for among foreign policy observers. Really?

Since joining the administration. Huh. Because in many ways Russia is the defining country in the Trump administration. Yeah. country in the Trump administration, either when it comes to the Russia scandal or Trump's foreign policy approach to Russia. The thing that really scrambles the way that people think about who they are, especially conservatives, traditional conservatives and their relationship with the Republican Party. So Trump cozying up to Russia is the motivation for a lot of these never Trump types. One of the many motivations, but a big one as to why they jumped ship.

And so to see Nikki Haley out there, not only being in the Trump administration, but managing to stay in the president's good graces. And for the most part, she hasn't been publicly humiliated as badly as say Jeff Sessions has been, who's ideologically totally in line with the president. So there's not that much tension, but she's out there getting way ahead of him on Russia policy, but has this reputation as somebody who manages to smooth it over and not go so far that the president is going to fire her while simultaneously getting to run a shadow foreign policy in Turtle Bay. That's not actually the foreign policy Trump wants to put together.

It's super weird. I have hit Russia over the head more times than I can count. And it's because if they do something wrong, we're going to call them out on it. And the things they've done with Crimea and Ukraine, the things they've done and how they've covered up for Assad, those types of things, we're not going to give them a pass on. Do you think working with someone like Donald Trump could impede her future political aspirations, her ambitions? There is already a sense in Washington that if you have the Trump administration on your resume, it's poison. That the place is so dysfunctional and so embarrassing for a lot of people that you can't get hired if you are a high-profile Trump person who's closely associated with it.

So that's a real risk that Haley gets caught in the morass of the Trump administration. The strategy from a narrow calculating political point of view here is that she can get the attention and profile that she got from being UN ambassador, but avoid the Trump taint because she has been implicitly criticizing his views on Russia through her post at the UN. So she gets this traditional conservative credibility on the Russia stuff and as like undermining Trump from within type while also having gotten the benefit of being able to be in office while Republicans have power. If Russia is the most important issue between the two of them, one of the biggest controversies for the administration, a source of tension with Syria,

there's all of these sort of potholes to fall into, you know? Is there a chance that the president's relationship with his ambassador to the UN becomes so poisoned by their disagreements on Russia that she goes the way of Rex Tillerson? Oh, totally. Yeah, I can easily imagine that happening. I think at one point he publicly mused about firing her. I want to thank Ambassador Nikki Haley for her outstanding leadership and for acting as my personal envoy on the Security Council.

She's doing a good job. Now, does everybody like Nikki? Otherwise, she could easily be replaced. We won't do that. I promise. And this wasn't like one of his more serious musings about firings. But like the fundamental truth of the Trump administration is that anyone at any point can piss off the president enough that he'll just decide to fire you. It's very possible that the Haley Gambit fails. You know, she could end up being a kind of martyr for the Never Trump movement, somebody who tried her best to moderate Trump and failed, which could end up being great for her standing in the conservative movement. Alternatively, she could become someone who is now seen as so toxic by the Trump-captured

Republican Party, so persona non grata, that she'll never have a career in conservative politics again. Zach Beecham writes about the world for Vox. I'm Sean Ramos from This Is Today Explained. Imagine lying on a mattress wearing pajamas emblazoned with a picture of your face. Now, imagine that mattress being brand spanking new. Does life get any better? Probably not. The code podcast10 gets you 10% off at mattressfirm.com until May 2nd.