how much of this is a management problem by the president of hiring, how much is some of the best people may not have been available because they were never trumpers or said negative things about the candidate? that s exactly right, there is a split there. there s a large group of people ruled persona nongrata because they spoke out against trump or backed one of his opponents. donald trump tends to rush into picking people without going through the normal investigate process. i think it s important for people to remember that even had jackson survived these allegations which were raised by senator tester from montana, there still was the fact that he had never done anything remotely like managing something at the scale of veterans affairs. 300,000 employees. exactly. and so it s not clear that even had he had had unblemished record that donald trump presented that he would have gotten confirmation of the senate because it is so far out of the scope of anything he d done before.
we re going to make america great again. we re going to use our best people. i m going to get the best people. we re going to deliver. we re going to get the best people in the world. we don t want people that are b level, c level, d level. we have to get our absolute best. we re going to use our smartest and our best. we re not using political hacks anymore. it s a sophisticated chess match, but i have the best people lined up. you need people that are truly, truly capable. we have to get the best people. back now with the panel. joining the conversation is philip bump. it was a very strong argument that he made during the campaign and seemed like the person who could deliver on it given his business background. as one learns more about michael cohen and some of the things he was involved with legally, maybe that s evidence that he didn t have a track record of hiring the best people. how much of this is a management problem by the president of hiring, how much is some of
so look, i ran against a guy, right. i never endorsed the guy. i don t like all the chaos. i don t like the divisions. but there was a fundamental difference between tillerson s view of how to do things. because remember, as the ceo of exxon, he was making deals all over the world, okay, and he was traditional. trump is not traditional. he just is his own playbook only tillerson you could say it s just tillerson but gary cohn is gone. how many names do you add to that list before you say it s management problem? cohn basically said don t put these tariffs on. there s a handful of people in the country who are for these tariffs. people are overwhelmingly, which is kind of shocking to me because i would in congress when we would fight about trade. but overwhelmingly people said this is not a good decision. i mean, it s a traditional way of thinking versus somebody that is untraditional. what tillerson has done, the
ambassador, if you were in the trump administration, you just said. les talk about that. let s talk about who s going to be advising and talking withed the president when it comes to this meeting and what s going to happen. sar is ra huckaby sanders said the president had a incredible team to prepare him for these talks. but who are we talking about here when we talk about the diplomats when it comes to ambassador of south korea. there is none. the state department talk experts when it comes to the dpsh. who would that team comprise of? first i think the state department has a lot of very talented people who are not well-deployed at this point. and my suggestion is that secretary tillerson would make it his top priority to identify people who can do this and put them to work. in fact as a general concept i think he ought to spend a lot more time getting the assets that he s got back to work. because this is a real management problem at the state department that he has to devote som
this crime that he was convicted of happened less than a mile from where i live. and the community, obviously, is happy to have someone like him off the streets. as a father and member of the community, it s difficult to keep that separation between my professional and personal self. i try to focus on the fact that he is not a management problem. he s actually, i ll use the term, he s a model confinement to me. never gives us any problems and does everything asked of him. the requirements of my profession is to treat him no differently than i would a petty thief, and that takes practice. it really does. morris was arrested when he was 16 and has been at the jail for three years now. he is housed in the confinement unit. because of the nature of his crime. if word got out that he had brutally assaulted an elderly woman and a young girl and beat the young girl into a vegetative state, he would probably suffer a similar fate. it s a situation we cannot risk.