good sign. everyone forgets who the first cabinet officer was to resign in donald trump s presidency. it was me. oh, right. seven and a half hours. i was the first to go. you should write a book about that. the longest 7 1/2 hours in my life. so, i don t think the turnover, the upheaval that comes with the turnover can be overstated. imagine a large public company like exxonmobil, for example, where the turnover and ceo was every 14 months. you would have a very difficult time launching any long-term initiatives. the reality is and i know this because i ve been through it several times. when a secretary leaves and a new secretary comes in who has to be confirmed by the senate, basically anything at the senior most levels of that department
confirmed and having the history he has in congress will probably have relatively easy time becoming secretary of state. i think that the new potential head of the c.i.a. is going to have a serious, grilling because of the issues around intense interrogation and torture. she is likely to get confirmed, but that is not going to be an easy passage. there will be a lot of tough questions for her from both sides of the aisle. do you think she s likely to be confirmed? she s going to need democratic votes. she s going to need democratic votes. she ll get a hard look and she will get roughed up in her confirmation hearing i am sure. but if i had to bet today whether she would get confirmed i would say probably yes. mr. secretary. good morning. from a homeland security perspective, this instability and all this movement in and out of white house and now the state department, how does that impact homeland security? this can t be a very well, first i have to say
had not spoken with the president and learned of his firing because of the tweet. goldstein was fired shortly thereafter. trump never got over tillerson calling the presidents a moron but trump was conciliatory when he spoke about differences with tillerson while tillerson had little to say about his boss. i wish tillerson well. rex and i have been talking about this for a long time. we we got along actually quite well, but we disagreed on things. when you look at the iran deal, i think it s terrible, i guess he thought it was okay. i wanted to either break it or do something and he felt a little bit differently. so we were not really thinking the same. i think rex will be much happier now. i received a call today from the president of the united states at a little after noontime from air force one and
it s just been one after the next. and there will probably be somebody else today, mika. we wake up everyday and we don t know what s happening. i m sure the white house is very upset after the pennsylvania race last night, but the tillerson announcement and the quick announcement of mike pompeo took everybody by surprise up here. you know, and the worry about it is first just more chaos from an administration that wants to cut diplomacy funding, that won t send us ambassador nominees, that sends out crazy tweets even about the leaders of our friendly nations much less our adversaries. and this is just more of the same chaos makes us less safe. right. i worry it raises the risk of accidental or unnecessary war. so what is the level of the destabilization at this point. some might fear that one one disastrous event might not be handled so well given the instability we have all the way to the top?
well, that is our worry. mika, there are some strong people on the national security team, general mcmaster, general dunn for the joint of the head chiefs. you hear rumors about mcmaster going. right. definitely. some of those strong people at the top i think they try to check the president s worst impulses. secretary tillerson tried to check his worst impulses. the accounts are that he tried to encourage the president to stay in the paris climate deal. he said the iran deal, which is being complied with, it s better to hold it together than to blow it up. but it looks like the president is increasingly not following the advice of the people who know what they re talking about who are around him and that s what that s a great, great worry right now. senator kaine. good to see you this morning. thanks. you tweeted yesterday about mike pompeo who will be nominated now to be secretary of state. you called him, quote, dangerous. you said the secretary of state should always s