president of the washington strategy group and former deputy assistant secretary of state joel rueben. joul joel, good to have you back on broadcast. i want to have you listen with me to what senator lindsey graham had to say to the president about this earlier today. here it is. if it becomes a tweet without meaning, then he s hurt himself on north korea. if he doesn t follow through and live up to that tweet, he s going to look weak in the eyes of russia and iran. so this is a defining moment, mr. president. you need to follow through with that tweet, show a resolve that obama never did to get this right. give me your assessment of this statement. is the senator correct? well, alex, it s great to be with you. and clearly president trump is always looking for an easy way out of complex situations. this is no different from a variety of situations we ve seen. no, senator graham is not correct. this is not one where you just fire off a tweet and then the
secretary did not try to quit and denied he was offended by the speech to the boy scouts. we have our panel for the next 35 minutes or so, national security and foreign policy reporter josh leaderman, and reporter for the guardian, sabrina sadiki. joel, you just saw the report, what message does this send to the world? it sends deep dysfunction for the world and no respect for rex, essentially. and that is deeply concerning for our country s ability to negotiate with our adversaries and to send a sense of calm to the world about where we stand on issues of national security. it is not a secret that on north korea, on iran, on qatar, there have been differences, but this personal level, this is very different. but when you look at the personal level, okay, so you heard that supposedly rex tillerson, according to three sources familiar to this, josh and sabrina, rex tillerson and
that qatar was a sponsor of terrorism. then hours later the president was in the rose garden playing up the same issue and sort of supporting saudi arabia s actions. i think that also as others have sa said, the president does not have north korea s ear. and tillerson is hard to get ahold of and doesn t return a ton of phone calls. how important is it that there is an open line of communication? it has to be a nonstop open line. can tillerson stay on? he can stay on but is deeply wounded and has to do a lot of repair work, not only within the white house but with congress and the public. he needs to restore congress. joel rueben, don t go far. we ll talk about that in the days to come. we are not forget gt abotin the disaster puerto rico. one day after the president is
talking about this who are covering the state department. and joel reuben who used to work at the state department. as carol was talking you re saying, yeah, this is significant. it is very significant. nikki haley, the u.s. ambassador to the u.n. is the cabinet rank official, but she needs to be working with rex tillerson hand and glove. and there have been separations in public messaging on core issues. that only feeds into the questioning about positioning to succeed him at the state department. sabrina, given the push-back that we have heard from the state department on this nbc news reporting, seems kind of likely that s what rex tillerson is about to do. yes, i think you have seen from a lot of trump cabinet officials who found themselves in trouble, more of a dear leader approach as you might call it. but i think one thing that rex tillerson faces by way of a challenge is, unlike other cabinet officials, he doesn t have a lot of allies in washington. it s easy to forget th