Excerpt
SUMMARY: Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks join Judy Woodruff to discuss the week’s news, including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s firing amid a wave of rumors about a wider Cabinet shakeup, Pennsylvania’s stunning election upset and Sen. Jeff Flake’s comments about 2020.
Judy Woodruff (NewsHour): The secretary of state is fired, a Democrat claims victory in a conservative stronghold, and that was just on Tuesday.
Thankfully, Shields and Brooks are here to help make sense of it all. That is syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks.
And we are so glad to see both of you this Friday.
Mark Shields, syndicated columnist: Yes.
Judy Woodruff: Welcome.
Mark Shields: Thank you.
Judy Woodruff: As we just mentioned, David, there have been top people, the secretary of state, the chief economic adviser to the President. We could name many others. There is speculation that a number of Cabinet secretaries may go. We’re showing a picture of just a few of the names out there.
McMaster, the President’s National Security Adviser may be fired by the President.
How do we process all this going on in this administration right now?
David Brooks, New York Times: Well, Trump is getting Trumpier, and the administration is getting Trumpier.
He’s decided that he’s — in the beginning, he was sort of on the learning curve of the Presidency, but he’s got it mastered, and so he doesn’t need all these people who are telling him no all the time.
And it’s a process of him feeling comfortable with himself. And it’s also a process of him being anti-system. White Houses work through the system. You have got this vast apparatus. And normally it all works in some form, with deputy meetings, deputy-to-deputy meetings, and then principal meetings and all that.
Trump sort of resists all that. All the process is sort of within here [makes stomach trouble jester], or maybe lower, I don’t know. And…
(LAUGHTER)
Mark Shields: This is a PBS station.
(LAUGHTER)
David Brooks: Sorry.
(LAUGHTER)
David Brooks: And so he’s decided, I’m happy here, and I’m going to get rid of the people who are making me feel uncomfortable.
Judy Woodruff: Mark, should we be wringing our hands over this or just say, as the White House does, that he’s just having people around him who make him comfortable?
Mark Shields: It’s a new standard for hiring people for jobs, does he or she make me comfortable, not whether they can contribute to the public wheel and make the country better or anything of the sort.
I want to salute David for coining Trumpy, what are the — Sleepy and the other seven dwarfs.
(LAUGHTER)
Mark Shields: But, Judy, anytime you go through this sort of wholesale firing of — it’s an indication of weakness in a President. It’s of political uncertainty.
I mean, the two most recent Presidents who did it, Gerald Ford in 1975 going through, getting rid of Jim Schlesinger, Secretary of Defense, and dropping Nelson Rockefeller from the ticket, was a sign of political weakness, and Jimmy Carter in 1979 when he got rid of five Cabinet members, including Schlesinger again and Joe Califano.
And it is really — and that’s what you are seeing with Donald Trump. But I think, at a personal level, there are two things that have to be commented upon.
First of all is that there is about this administration just a fatiguing, draining aspect. People really — Americans are not consumed with politics and policy and government. They want somebody who’s going to run things and run them in an orderly way.
This has been disorderly from day one. And it’s draining, it really is, of the nation’s, I think, well-being and peace of mind. And Donald Trump promised he would bring the best people, that he knew the best people, they would all come.
Now we have reached the point, quite frankly, where people won’t even accept invitations to the White House to be interviewed or overtures. And just — he’s running out of — I think of personnel, and I think he’s running out of time politically.
Judy Woodruff: But, David, the President himself says he believes in being disruptive, he believes in sort of rearranging things, being — creating a little chaos, in so many words.
David Brooks: Well, that’s true. He’s accurate about that.
The problem is, the staff never knows what’s going to happen. And it’s just hard to do your job, (A) if you don’t know what’s going to happen, (B) if you’re constantly being undermined by the President himself.
Everyone who has gone in there, whether it’s Tillerson, looks smaller coming out. H.R. McMaster is being dangled and dangled and dangled. H.R. McMaster had a really sterling reputation going in. He was compelled to not be totally honest early in the administration about what the President told a bunch of Russian diplomats who came. That hurt his reputation.
And then it’s a process of constantly having to suck up to the President. Gary Cohn, the economic adviser, let some comments known that he was unhappy with the way the President responded to Charlottesville. And so he fell out of favor, out of quite — comments that suggested some integrity on Mr. Cohn’s part.
And so you have always got to please the prince. And you have always got to play in a princely manner.
And what worries me is, they never had really access to the Republican A-level staff, but they had the B-level. And now we’re going down to C and D. Larry Kudlow, a new economic appointee, very nice guy, I agree with him on a lot of things.
But Philip Tetlock, who is a scholar who studies decision-making, several years ago identified Kudlow as one of the worst decision-makers, because he’s always driven by ideology. John Bolton is talked about coming in to the National Security Adviser. That’s a job where you want somebody neutral to let the process work its way.
John Bolton, who is a FOX News analyst, is anything but ®MDNM-neutral on anything. And so what you just see is worse personnel, more chaos.
(CROSSTALK)
Judy Woodruff: Go ahead.
Mark Shields: Well, I agree with David. And I just want to underline one point he made.
And that is, the way it’s done, Judy, it’s public humiliation, the people who did leave.
Judy Woodruff: Well, Tillerson, who was notified in a tweet.
Mark Shields: Tillerson in particular.
But everybody is demeaned or denigrated in tweets afterwards. And, you know, again, I come back to ordinary Americans. Just this is not — this is bullying. This is mean. This is ugly. This is not what you want in a President.
Finally, just a personal note, and that is, 50 years ago today, Robert Kennedy announced his candidacy for President. I was lucky enough to work for him in the primaries in Nebraska and Oregon and California, and got totally unearned status and credit because I had worked for Robert Kennedy, one of the great men of the 20th century, in retrospect, and — but unearned benefits.
Now people of public service, of commitment have gone to work for Donald Trump. They’re diminished, they’re demeaned, they’re smaller. They’re in a cauldron of resentment and revenge in the White House. And they have got legal bills. And they don’t know from one day to the next whether their job is there and what their job is.
And I just — I feel badly for them, I mean, because every one of them is going to carry that with them the rest…
(CROSSTALK)
David Brooks: I will say one other thing about just having been around a lot of Trump supporters in the last week.
They have tuned it out. They support the administration. They like the big things about it, the tax bill, the deregulation, that kind of thing. And I always ask them, what about this, what about this, the things we frankly talk about a lot every week.
And it just sort of drifts by them unnoticed. And so if you want to know why he’s still got 90 percent approval roughly among Republicans, I think that’s the answer. A lot of things that would cause most people to shake their heads, they just — it just doesn’t rise to the level of consciousness and it just gets tuned out.
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