Richard Haass on Secretary of Labor Resignation: The Question Is When Will Trump Consider Getting a Stronger Team?

HAASS: "First of all, the cabinet, just for people watching, the cabinet as a collective body is irrelevant and pretty much always has been. What matters is individual cabinet offices. In the side of life that I follow, I think the most impressive is probably the head of the CIA, John Ratcliffe, comes through as one of the, as you called it, Mika, a truth teller, someone who’s informed and in a low key way. I think the secretary of state has kept some distance from some of these things, but at a cost. He’s not, for example, in Islamabad and all that. No, but it’s an incredibly weak system. Plus, what’s also weak, Mika, again, is the national security process. I mean, that New York Times article a few weeks ago, the detail of how the decision was made, the lack of serious process, the lack of analysis, the lack of red-teaming, questioning assumptions, the lack of expertise and experience in the room, the fact that you have two outsiders playing the principal role in these negotiations, this is unlike anything — this is truly unprecedented. And the real question is, it’s really a political question, at some point, none of this is helping the president. And I know he wants to avoid the first term thing of getting rid of lots of people, but he is not being well-served by his own appointments for the most part. So the question is not simply when does he throw them under the bus, but when does he think about getting a stronger team?"

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Richard Haass on Secretary of Labor Resignation: The Question Is When Will Trump Consider Getting a Stronger Team?‘None of this is helping the president’News & PoliticsEXCERPT:HAASS: "First of all, the cabinet, just for people watching, the cabinet as a collective body is irrelevant and pretty much always has been. What matters is individual cabinet offices. In the side of life that I follow, I think the most impressive is probably the head of the CIA, John Ratcliffe, comes through as one of the, as you called it, Mika, a truth teller, someone who’s informed and in a low key way. I think the secretary of state has kept some distance from some of these things, but at a cost. He’s not, for example, in Islamabad and all that. No, but it’s an incredibly weak system. Plus, what’s also weak, Mika, again, is the national security process. I mean, that New York Times article a few weeks ago, the detail of how the decision was made, the lack of serious process, the lack of analysis, the lack of red-teaming, questioning assumptions, the lack of expertise and experience in the room, the fact that you have two outsiders playing the principal role in these negotiations, this is unlike anything — this is truly unprecedented. And the real question is, it’s really a political question, at some point, none of this is helping the president. And I know he wants to avoid the first term thing of getting rid of lots of people, but he is not being well-served by his own appointments for the most part. So the question is not simply when does he throw them under the bus, but when does he think about getting a stronger team?"Video filesFullCompactSort byDateSummaryRelevancePopularityPer page81216Audio filesFullCompactSort byDateSummaryRelevancePopularityPer page81216Recipient e-mailMessage (optional)Preview

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