Today, Explained - Rexit

Episode Date: March 13, 2018

Twitter. That’s how Secretary of State Rex Tillerson found out he was fired today. The news came on the heels of Tillerson calling Russia “an irresponsible force of instability”. He hands over the reins to CIA director Mike Pompeo - who is now in charge of planning a historic U.S.-North Korea meeting. Vox’s Zack Beauchamp describes Tillerson’s rocky relationship with Trump, and Ezra Klein reflects on this administration’s high turnover. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Okay, Luke Vanderplug, Today Explained producer. That's me. I know we can go to mattressfirm.com slash podcast to learn how we can improve our sleep, but where are we right now? Oh, well, we're at Mattress Firm. In our neighborhood. Yeah, but my house is right down the street. Makes perfect sense because this is America's neighborhood mattress store.

It is indeed. Let's go inside. All right. Zach Beecham, senior reporter at Vox, host of the Worldly podcast. Hi, Sean. Welcome back. Hello. Did the president just fire his secretary of state on twitter.com? So that's a good question. And it depends on what you mean by fired. Seriously, I'm serious about this. Right. So Tillerson was fired. He was fired,

we think via Twitter. We think because he didn't know and Trump didn't speak to him. He found out about the firing, according to a State Department official via Twitter. Really? That's what CNN is reporting right now, according to a State Department official they spoke to. Okay. We know that he didn't want to resign because the State Department said so in an official statement. Right. We know that Trump didn't tell him because the State Department said so in an official statement. So maybe he got fired some other way formally via paperwork. But if you find out about your firing via Twitter, that does seem a lot like

getting fired via Twitter. The president and his secretary of state have been disagreeing from what seems like day one on foreign policy, Iran, Russia, North Korea. Can we assume that this might actually be policy related? Some of the reporting I've seen suggests that this was about North Korea, that Trump was trying to clear the decks of a negotiator he didn't like that much before he sat down with Kim Jong-un. That actually makes a certain amount of sense. OK. The weirdness is that Tillerson has been much more open to talks than Trump. Trump has repeatedly shot him down, even at one point publicly saying Tillerson was wasting his time trying to negotiate with North Korea. Elliott Cohen, who was a counselor to the State Department under George W. Bush,

called Tillerson, and this is a quote, one of the worst secretaries of state we've had. What made him so bad? So Tillerson did two things that combined to make him a uniquely awful secretary of state. Okay. The first one is that he was terrible at getting the president's ear on anything. His public statements always contradicting the president, his inability to work with the president in private.

He would annoy Trump by saying things like, that's your deal when they disagreed with each other, which sounded like kind of condescending and insulting to the president. They just didn't get along. And for those reasons, he just was never able to really shape policy on key issues. The other way that secretaries of state wield influence is by building up the State Department as an important force, getting people inside the department, winning bureaucratic fights to concentrate policy responsibility in state, advocating for its budget, increasing the number of diplomats we have, things like that. Tillerson did the exact opposite of all of those things. Under his tenure, 60% of the top ranking, the equivalent of five-star generals in the State Department, 60% of them left. Applications to join the State Department, new ones, fell by half according to the best data that we have on the subject matter.

And career people are quitting at all sorts of different levels. And he has been pushing budget cuts. He has been laying people off or at least trying to. And when you do that, you demoralize an institution and you drain it of the people who are most talented in it. And when it comes to political appointments, you can see that really clearly. Only 64 out of 153 Senate confirmable positions have been filled. Right. That may sound weird, but it's been over a year and the top jobs at the State Department, most of them are still vacant. That's pretty bad.

That's really bad. We don't have an ambassador to South Korea. Think about that. We're about to negotiate with a North Korean leader directly, president to supreme leader for the first time ever in history. We don't have an ambassador to South Korea, the key country that's involved or related to these negotiations. That's crazy.

Trump has pegged Mike Pompeo to replace Rex Tillerson. Can he turn the franchise around? Pompeo has apparently been a decent manager at the CIA, where he is now. OK. So it's possible that he might push back against the budget cuts. He might work to restore confidence in the department. I don't know. It's also the case that he might be perceived as too closely aligned with the Trump administration and Trump priorities. Hopefully, he doesn't make the same mistake

Tillerson did of forcing people out and concentrating his time and attention on a very small handful of people, thereby not connecting with the rest of the department, making everybody else seem unwelcome and useless. But State right now is a husk. It will take a tremendous amount of work just to rebuild the institution to be a functional diplomatic organization. And Pompeo has to do that. And he has to manage these upcoming North Korean negotiations. And he has to deal with the fallout of this Russian attack in London and every other crisis that's percolating around the world. We've got that move of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem that's formally going to happen later this year, apparently. There's a lot of stuff to deal with when you have an emaciated State Department. So I don't know if anyone could

successfully fix everything that's wrong with the State Department while also dealing with the consequences of President Trump's foreign policy. So what's standing between the job and Mike Pompeo? Does he have to be confirmed by the Senate? Yes. He has to go through that whole rigmarole, right? Yeah, Pompeo needs to be confirmed again. And there's going to be a lot of stuff coming up about him. Pompeo has really close connections to this group called the counter jihadists.

Okay. Who are the progenitors of the major anti-Muslim conspiracy theories in the United States. Sharia law is taking over the American legal system. The Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated the federal government in various different states. Pompeo himself personally has said, There are organizations and networks here in the United States tied to radical Islam in deep and fundamental ways. And they're not just in places like Libya and Syria and Iraq, but in places like Coldwater, Kansas and small towns all throughout America,

this network is real. This is not true. This is for the record. There are no secret Islamists trying to take over Coldwater, Kansas. That's not a thing. Got it. But this is a guy who has a lot of skeletons in his closet, and he made it through a CIA director.

But being the Secretary of State is different. How so? Well, you have to negotiate with other countries. You have to meet with people of all kinds of different and diverse backgrounds. And Tillerson, for all his faults, really did have a long history of working with people from different places. But Pompeo, when you have said things that are offensive and you align yourself as he has with people like Frank Gaffney, perhaps the leading anti-Muslim bigot in the United States. How do you work with US allies in the Muslim world?

How do you go and credibly speak to people in a country like Iraq or Indonesia? And the biggest issues on the table right now are obviously North Korea. You've still got a brutal civil war in Syria. You have a series of upcoming decisions about the Iran deal, whether to keep it, how to deal with it, and so on. You have a promise from the Trump administration to punish Russia somehow for the election hacking and various different Russian shenanigans. You've got a Chinese president who just abolished term limits and has basically set himself up to be dictator for life in China. There are so many different things

that could go wrong if they are not handled well diplomatically, or at least handled normally. And now the new secretary of state is coming in at a time when it's not clear if he's going to be able to actually do his job with his organization so depleted. I think there's a silver lining here, Zach, which is that the first female CIA director has just been nominated. Well, that's fine. But Gina Haspel is not exactly your exemplar of an ethical CIA agent. Damn it. She was heavily involved in the torture program under the Bush

administration and ran, as far as I'm aware, or at least was deeply involved in CIA black sites in Thailand. How does this look to the world? I mean, they were probably just getting used to Rex Tillerson and now he's gone. Look, the one constant that I've experienced when I travel overseas during the Trump administration is people of all walks of life, from cab drivers to government officials, being like, what is wrong with your country? And you get a real sense that people are writing off the U.S., at least temporarily, as a leader in the world, as a country that shapes the international order and helps solve problems. And now with the State Department in chaos, I mean, look, maybe there'll be an improvement if Pompeo seems like somebody who

has the president's ear and he builds trust inside the State Department. But right now, it looks like American foreign policy is in shambles and at odds with itself. Zach Beecham writes about foreign affairs for Vox. The turnover in the Trump administration is record-setting and also just a little hard to keep track of. Ezra Klein joins us after the break to help. Also, we made this song to help. I'm a former staffer, now back your desk up Rex and Trump just broke up Pompeo's waiting in the wings Hope had to dip, dip, carry a cone quick, quick So Terrence placed on steel

Reince and Sean, Ben and Scone Don't pay them any attention Comey's done, done, the mooch had fun This is how the president deeds Omarosa, Rapport, I put a flan on it Watsonshop and Katie Wals, I put a flan on it. What's a shop and Katie Walsh can put a flan on it. Don't be mad, we can't fit them all in on it.

All the presidents are shuffling this cabinet. Oh, oh, oh. Oh, oh, oh. Oh, oh, oh. Oh, oh, oh. Oh, oh, oh. Okay, Luke, what do we see here mattresses just all sorts of mattresses of all all different sizes shapes even colors yeah actually okay oh that one's a beauty rest black hybrid that sounds fancy that does this one over here is a beauty rest legend there's a lot of selection in here

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Yeah, go to mattressfirm.com slash podcast and learn how you can improve your sleep. I'm Sean Ramos from This Is Today Explained, and I'm talking to Vox's explainer-in-chief, Ezra Klein. Ezra, what is the turnover rate in the Trump administration at this point? So as of Gary Cohn's resignation, it was, if I'm remembering this correctly, I believe 44, 45%. Yikes.

That made it the highest turnover rate ever recorded in a presidential administration at this point. This is not normal. Like everything else in the Trump administration, this is not normal. This is retail food levels of turnover. Right. And why does this keep happening? What's the root of the problem here? Is it right at the

top? So there are a couple of explanations that I think are worth taking into account here. One is that Donald Trump is terrible to work for. Possibly it is not surprising that a guy whose television persona was firing people on national television is not a great boss. But Donald Trump is also very difficult to brief just in the daily work of doing your job. You go in and you've got time with him on some issue or another, and you spend a couple of minutes of your time briefing him about that issue. And then the rest of it, following every rabbit hole and squirrel chase and dark alley he wants to run down, his electoral college victory, stuff he saw on Fox News, people he doesn't like. It is not an easy place to work. It is not a place

where you feel good about what's going on a lot of the time. A lot of the folks in the Trump administration are there because they feel at this point it's their duty to keep things from getting worse. How far back does this go? From the very beginning, you've heard about this fight between the globalists, right, with Gary Cohn and Jared Kushner and the sort of Trumpist cultural conservatives. You put Jeff Sessions and Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller in that group, right? They're a very hard line on immigration, etc. Then you've had the establishment Republican side, folks like Reince Priebus. But if you look throughout the Trump administration, Mike Pence. Right.

Because Donald Trump himself does not have strong views, at least strong views that he holds to about where policy should go. He does not resolve these wars between these different factions. And because he does not resolve the wars between these different factions, the White House is in a continuous state of disequilibrium. If you can ever knock off someone else, things might actually be different. Because depending on who Trump has spoken to last, depending on who's controlling the information flow to him, everything can change. When there's that much to be gained by knifing your adversary within the administration, then your adversaries are consistently getting knifed. Everybody's

leaking on each other. They're undercutting each other. It is a unbelievable constant slice of chaos because nobody can ever just settle on the idea that, well, this is what we're doing. This is what the president believes. Whenever somebody weakens, the other side goes to Trump and is like, you should get rid of this person. You got to feel like this is hardest for Chief of Staff John Kelly, whose job may also be on the line, it sounds like. How does he work into all the dysfunction in the administration that we're seeing? So John Kelly is, of course, the general who succeeds Reince Priebus. And Kelly is a kind of personality who impresses Donald Trump. He's forceful. He's hyper-masculine in an old school way. He's a general. Trump likes generals.

And Kelly comes in saying that he is not going to try to manage Donald Trump, but he's going to try to impose discipline on the process by which information reaches Donald Trump. So there's this hope, there's this kind of moment of John Kelly dawn where, you know, okay, we're finally going to get the normal White House everybody's been waiting for. And of course we don't. And John Kelly doesn't have connections in a deep way to the Hill, to the establishment Republican Party. And so Kelly was not able to play any role at all in resolving these disagreements. They just keep exploding. When we keep seeing people dismissed from the administration this way, do we have to wonder

if our best people will be attracted to jobs in the cabinet, in the administration anymore? I don't think we have to wonder. I don't think they will be. If you go into the Trump administration right now, you are courting reputational ruin because you may end up standing behind Donald Trump while he delivers Charlottesville remarks, for instance. You might expose yourself to tremendous legal risk, right? You're going to need to lawyer up. There's all these inquiries going on along the administration. If you're somebody who values your own reputation, you may not get out with it intact.

And a lot of the people don't like Trump himself. Famously, Rex Tillerson did not deny calling Trump a fucking moron. He just did not deny it. I think he said, well, that's a silly thing to be talking about, more or less. Isn't it amazing that he lasted this long after not walking that back? It was amazing. And then he had to go out and give this, you know, like hostage video press conference. Let me tell you what I've learned about this president, whom I did not know

before taking this office. He loves his country. He puts Americans and America first. He's smart. He demands results wherever he goes, and he holds those around him accountable for whether they've done the job he's asked them to do. But this goes to a different point, which is the other point about what brought people like Rex Tillerson into the administration is that at the beginning, there was this belief that Donald Trump was a showman. Right. And during the campaign, he had been putting on this great reality show of the Trump presidential campaign. And so a number of people came in the administration believing that if Trump had a good operation around him and given his history before the campaign, that maybe this wasn't going to be like you know, the Trump people knew from New York, which was, you know, a flamboyant, ostentatious businessman, but somebody who you could work with. And the thing is, that has now also been disproven. You cannot go into the administration now believing that Trump will be anyone other than or anything other than Trump. I think it's really easy to get caught up in sort

of the train wreck. But I got to wonder, how does this affect our country, our security? And I want to make this point because it's really important. The administration is bleeding. And the reason this is such a crisis of staffing for them, of management for them, is they've also lost the ranks underneath that. So Gary Cohn, the National Economics Council chief, left 10 years ago, a week ago, it's hard to say, but he's gone. And normally what you would say is, well, maybe his deputy will take his place. But he had a pretty well-respected deputy, a guy who came from the management consulting world named Jeremy Katz. But Katz left in January. And it's not just there. When the communications chief,

Hope Hicks, resigned, so too did the deputy communications chief. The State Department is widely known to have been gutted by Trump and by Tillerson. What normally happens is that it's not weird for the top level people to burn out a year or two years in. It's happening faster here. What would then happen though is that the number twos would have been there and they're waiting for the number ones to leave so they can become the number ones, but they're leaving first. So they don't have a next in line. So they don't just need to replace the principal. They need to replace the people under the principal. There is this question of who is going to be running the government. We are going to as a country make mistakes and miss opportunities and see ultimately disasters.

We've already seen what happens when this administration deals with an unforeseen crisis. Puerto Rico is what happens when it deals with an unforeseen crisis, and they still don't have power. So what's going to come next? And what are we going to do as this administration has to deal with it with even less staff, with even less experience around Donald Trump? Ezra Klein is the editor-at-large at Vox. He also hosts a podcast called The Ezra Klein Show. Vox's Christina Animashan sang for us up top, Noam Hassenfeld produced, Luke Vander Ploeg also produces the show, Bridget McCarthy is our editor, Afim Shapiro is our engineer, Irene Noguchi is our executive producer, and the indispensable Breakmaster Cylinder makes music for us. Today Explained is produced in association with Stitcher

and we're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Julie Bogan does a heroic job of managing our social media. You can enjoy her work on Twitter at the mattress firm. I'm seeing all sorts of shapes and sizes and colors of mattresses, but the one common thread here is that all of the pillows are yellow, green, or blue. Why do we think that is? Look, there's signs that tell you why. Oh, there's a legend! There's a legend!

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