SUMMARY: President Trump announced Saturday that his chief of staff John Kelly is leaving his post by the end of the year. Kelly replaced Trump’s first chief of staff, Reince Priebus in July 2017. Trump said Kelly's successor would be declared in the coming days. To put this in perspective, NewsHour White House Correspondent Yamiche Alcindor joins Hari Sreenivasan via Skype.
SUMMARY: Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks join Judy Woodruff to discuss the week’s news, including the firing of Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin, questions about EPA administrator Scott Pruitt’s Washington living arrangements, the Trump administration’s addition of a citizenship question on the 2020 census, and the March for Our Lives.
Judy Woodruff (NewsHour): It was the third week in a row where President Trump fired a member of his administration. This week, it David Shulkin of the Department of Veterans Affairs.
That and other news brings us to the analysis of Shields and Brooks. That’s syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks.
Gentlemen, more turnover. This time, it was the head of the Veterans Affairs Department.
David, it looked as if he and the President were getting along well, but then there was a dispute over how fast they should privatize, what the Veterans Affairs, what the VA does, and then there were questions about a trip he took to Europe with his wife last week. But he’s out.
David Brooks, New York Times: Yes.
Can you imagine working at a place where every week somebody goes? And this was a quiet week, but they still lost a Cabinet member. And it just speaks to how little sense of camaraderie and trust there is, because you never know who going to be there day to day and no assurance that so-and-so is staying is a real assurance.
I guess, to me, the most interesting thing is the replacement with Rear Admiral Jackson. And that’s sort of part of the key belief of populism, which Donald Trump I guess stands for, is that experience is more corrupting than it is educational, and that you need clean people from outside who are pure from partisan interests and from rotting in the swamp.
And we’re about to test that proposition, because, apparently, an extremely good man, but with no administrative ability, is being asked to run the second largest bureaucracy in the U.S. government. And as someone who has no administrative ability, but who hangs around people who do, it’s just a different style of thought.
And I have — I feel great sympathy for that guy coming into what’s going to be an extremely difficult job.
Judy Woodruff: And, in fact, we read that Dr. Ronny Jackson, the President’s personal — the White House physician, was reluctant, apparently, when this was first raised with him to take over the VA.
Mark Shields, syndicated columnist: That’s exactly it. He does come with very high, as David mentioned, personal recommendations.
Lisa Monaco, who was the deputy chief of staff in the Obama White House, called him not only a patriot, but a saint. And Dan Pfeiffer went on the record, Obama people did, about — and he had been there for under three Presidents.
So I think the personal credentials are pretty solid, and he — and the President likes him. And he did very well on television presenting the President’s medical report and telling with a straight face the President weighed 239 pounds.
(LAUGHTER)
Mark Shields: So that endeared him.
But I come back to the firing. And this is quite a unique administration in the terms of public service. I can recall, when Donald Trump was running, he said — and I looked it up again today — I know the best people, I know the best managers, I know the best steel makers, we’re going to have the best Cabinet.
I don’t know how many more it’s going to take. We’re on our third National Security Adviser at this point. But what really is so bizarre to me is that I have been around so long that I can remember when the Peace Corps was created. And there was one young man who put his career on hold.
And they said, why are you doing this? And he says, I have never done anything that was political or patriotic or unselfish, because nobody never asked me. And he said, President Kennedy asked me.
And, you know, that sense of public service, that it’s a high calling, that it’s for the common good, is totally absent from this President, from his lexicon, from his frame of reference.
Judy Woodruff: Well, and, you know, while we’re talking about personnel, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, David, appears to be in some hot water this week, because it turns out he was living in a room or renting a room near Capitol Hill last year and paying an unusually small rent, $50 a night, in an area where it’s more expensive than that.
And then there’s a story in The Washington Post today about unusually inexperienced and not — people who didn’t do a great job in the White House Personnel Office. So, just more questions.
David Brooks: Yes.
And this goes to the point Mark made and to the notion of norms. I have been talking to a lot of people who like the President — the President’s approval ratings are up again. He’s up to about 42 percent. And people are saying, I forget — I ignore all that tweeting. I just know the economy is doing well, and so I give him credit for that.
And there’s a validity to that argument. But there’s been a damage to the norms by which we govern ourselves, by the capacity of state, why we think about our government. He appoints people who he’s personally linked to, as if we’re in a royal system where a personal relationship to the king is all that matters.
And then with Pruitt, he takes this apartment which has some ties to the wife of a lobbyist. And it’s not that it’s the biggest corruption scandal in the history of the republic. It’s just that somebody who goes in with a mentality, I’m here to serve the people, I’m here to serve the country, it just doesn’t feel right to do that.
Alarm bells go off in your head of any normal person, oh, that’s going to look bad, that’s going to hurt my capacity to do my work.
And so the fact that the alarm bells suddenly didn’t go off suggests to me that the shift in capacity from private sector to public sector has not happened. They haven’t crossed the mental leap that Mark described, that you can be a corporate lawyer, you can do all that, and it’s perfectly fine, but when you do the public service, you’re entering a different realm.
You’re probably not going to get fly first class, which you’re already used to. There is just going to be sacrifices you’re going to have to make, but you do it because you feel it’s the right thing.
Judy Woodruff: It’s a different realm, Mark. And, typically, the vetting is tough to get these jobs in the administration.
Mark Shields: It is.
And the piece you mentioned in The Post pointed out that they started with a far smaller pool of talent. Most administrations start with 300,000 names. They had, I think, one-fourth of that when they came in.
And many have been shot down because they didn’t meet the loyalty test at one point or another. And, of course, the whole personnel staffing was absolutely blown up. It was done by Chris Christie. They had done, according to independent observers, a pretty darn good job, and then they just burned that. So they have been behind.
And most administrations, Republican and Democrat, at the Office of Personnel Management, put in professionals, I mean, really talented people. I have known a number of them myself. And, you know, that’s — because they recognize that personnel is policy in any administration.
You could have the greatest ideas and policy in the making, but unless you have able, committed people to execute those policies, it’s for naught. And that’s exactly what’s been the problem here.
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.
SUMMARY: Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks join Judy Woodruff to discuss the week’s news, including a tumultuous week at the White House, President Trump’s surprise announcement of a tariff on imported steel and aluminum, and political polarization in Congress over gun control.
Judy Woodruff (NewsHour): It’s been one more whirlwind week in Washington, another high-profile departure from the White House, fresh scrutiny over the president’s son-in-law, and an escalation in the war of words between Mr. Trump and his own attorney general, all this as the President made surprise declarations on trade and gun control.
That brings us to the analysis of Shields and Brooks. That is syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks.
Welcome, gentlemen.
So, so much going on this week, I barely know where to begin.
At the White House, Mark, the President’s closest aide announced she’s leaving. He has a son-in-law who is under a lot of scrutiny over alleged conflicts of interest. He has a chief of staff who is raising questions again about his — how he handled the firing of an aide over domestic abuse, and on and on.
The leaks seem to just be flowing a gusher every day. What matters in all of this?
Mark Shields, syndicated columnist: What matters is chaos in the White House is bad for the United States and bad for the world. There’s no rational order.
I mean, for example, what you have described, the morale at the White House, from every report, is just incredibly low. To work in any White House, Judy, is an act of both self-sacrifice and self-interest. You miss birthdays. You miss anniversaries. You miss your children’s recitals.
But there’s a sense of mission, a sense of history, a sense also that it’s special. You’re part of something special. You get status and recognition.
All that is missing here. This is a civil war in a leper colony. There is no sense of direction. The steel quotas being a perfect example. There was no preparation — tariffs, rather — there was no preparation politically, there was no preparation for making a case, there was no preparation for the press, there was no preparation within the White House.
There’s nothing organization. It’s all act on impulse and chaos and sort of the whim of the President himself.
Judy Woodruff: There’s almost a temptation, David, to look at this as some kind of sideshow. But there are real consequences, aren’t there?
David Brooks, New York Times: Yes.
I’m actually thinking — I’m trying to think of historical parallels, when we have had this much chaos in the American Presidency. Richard Nixon had some bad days at the end there, but he had a very high-quality staff around him. Woodrow Wilson had a stroke.
I’m going through the list. I can’t think of anything quite like this, where we have the combination of a semi-competent or a missing staff, and an emotionally and intellectually unstable President.
Reince Priebus, the former chief of staff, said in an interview not long ago that, when you look from the outside, it’s actually 50 times worse from the inside. And we’re getting a glimpse of that.
And one thing that leapt out at me — and I think this is the key thing, the most important thing — that it has real-world consequences. We’re not just fighting over whether he has a military parade or not.
The steel tariff thing has real consequences. And the word that leapt out at me that one of his staffers said, one of his allies said, he made the decision because he became unglued.
And so we have a President makes a decision because he becomes unglued, a decision totally in avoidance of the entire process. And then to combine the chaos of it, he issues a tweet this morning which to me was a topper even by Trump standards that a trade war is good and easily won, a concept that no economist of any stripe and no historian of any stripe could possibly think is anything other than crazy.
And so it’s extremely disorienting right now.
Judy Woodruff: So, how do we process this, Mark?
It’s the headlines. Again, you could go in almost any direction every day over a new controversy or set of controversies at the White House.
Mark Shields: I honestly don’t know, Judy.
I mean, it’s just — it’s overload. It really is. The one consolation, the one defense that the President’s apologists and supporters say, he doesn’t mean what he says. That’s supposed to be the consolation. And don’t be so concerned.
One of the more plausible explanations for the impulsive imposition, keeping of a promise he’s made for 30 years on steel tariffs, was that the 18th District of Pennsylvania is up in two weeks, the special election for a Republican seat that the Democrats have not even contested in 2014 and 2016, that Donald Trump carried Southwestern Pennsylvania, blue-collar, by 20 points, and the Democrat, Conor Lamb, former Marine, former prosecutor, U.S. prosecutor, is even with the Republican nominee.
And a defeat here would send such panic. This is Trump territory. And this — was seen as standing up for American jobs. That’s the most plausible explanation politically. It’s not a defense, but it’s an explanation.
SUMMARY: White House Communications Director Hope Hicks made the surprising announcement on Wednesday that she will leave the Trump administration in the coming weeks. The news comes a day after Hicks testifies for hours before the House Intelligence Committee as part of the Russia probe. Judy Woodruff learns more from Ashley Parker of The Washington Post.
SUMMARY: What’s the political fallout from President Trump's reported incendiary comments about some immigrants? Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report and Margaret Talev of Bloomberg News join John Yang to discuss whether it has derailed immigration talks about DACA protections and how Republicans are responding in different ways.
SUMMARY: President Trump's reported remarks at a White House meeting last week continue to dominate in the days before a looming government funding deadline. As senators grilled Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen on a specific profanity and President Trump was pressed on a different detail, Congress and the White House try to reassemble talks over DACA. Lisa Desjardins joins Judy Woodruff.
SUMMARY: The clock is ticking as lawmakers labor to find a way to keep the federal government running, hitting up against demands for more defense spending and a fix for the expiring DACA program. Lisa Desjardins and Yamiche Alcindor join Judy Woodruff to discuss where negotiations stand and what the White House wants.
