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OP ED : Rex Tillerson Has A Moral Responsibility To Burn The Trump White House Down

  

Category:  News & Politics

Via:  johnrussell  •  6 years ago  •  27 comments

OP ED : Rex Tillerson Has A Moral Responsibility To Burn The Trump White House Down

Burn It Down, Rex


Michelle Goldberg -  NYT Opinion Writer

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/16/opinion/burn-it-down-rex.html

Since the beginning of this nightmare administration, we’ve been assured — via well-placed anonymous sources — that a few sober, trustworthy people in the White House were checking Donald Trump’s worst instincts and most erratic whims. A collection of generals, New York finance types and institution-minded Republicans were said to be nobly sacrificing their reputations and serving a disgraceful president for the good of the country. Through strategic leaks they presented themselves as guardians of American democracy rather than collaborators in its undoing.

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The success of this informal alliance is hard to gauge. Last August, after the president said there were “very fine people” among the white supremacist marchers in Charlottesville, Va., senior officials rationalized their continued role in the administration to Mike Allen of Axios. “If they weren’t there, they say, we would have a trade war with China, massive deportations, and a government shutdown to force construction of a Southern wall,” Allen wrote. Since then, we’ve had a government shutdown over immigration, albeit a brief one. A trade war appears imminent. Arrests of undocumented immigrants — particularly those without criminal records — have continued to surge.

Over the past 14 months we’ve also seen monstrous levels of corruption and chaos, a plummeting of America’s standing in the world and the obliteration of a host of democratic norms. Yet things could always be worse; the economy is doing well and Trump has not yet started any real wars.

Increasingly, however, the people who were supposed to be the adults in the room aren’t in the room anymore. The former Deputy National Security Adviser Dina Powell left in January. Gary Cohn, head of the National Economic Council, announced his resignation on March 6. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was terminated by tweet on Tuesday. National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster will reportedly be among the next to go, and Trump may soon fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions, possibly as a prelude to shutting down the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Adding to the tumult, a parade of lesser officials have either quit or been fired, including the White House communications director Hope Hicks, staff secretary Rob Porter and Trump’s personal aide John McEntee.

The self-styled grown-ups are, for the most part, being replaced by lackeys and ideologues. Larry Kudlow, the CNBC pundit Trump has appointed to succeed Cohn, is known for the consistent wrongness of his predictions. Tillerson was a terrible secretary of state, but unlike his chosen successor, the director of the C.I.A., Mike Pompeo, he never trafficked in nut-job Benghazi conspiracy theories or anti-Muslim invective. John Roberts of Fox News reported that McMaster could be replaced by uberhawk John Bolton, who last month wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “The Legal Case for Striking North Korea First.” (Bolton has described proposed talks between Trump and Kim Jong-un of North Korea as an opportunity to deliver a harsh ultimatum.)

This new stage of unbound Trumpism might make the administration’s first year look stable in comparison. That would partly vindicate the adults’ claims that things would be even messier without them. But it would also mean that by protecting the country from the consequences of an unhinged president, they helped Trump consolidate his power while he learned how to transcend restraints.

Whatever their accomplishments, if from their privileged perches these people saw the president as a dangerous fool in need of babysitting, it’s now time for some of them to say so publicly.

This month, Jon Lovett, a former speechwriter for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, published a scathing open letter to Powell, the former security adviser. During her time in the administration, he wrote, she assured appalled onlookers that the adults were playing a stabilizing role: “You reached out to tell those of us on the outside you were saving us from a lot. You don’t understand, friends of yours conveyed to all of us, how bad it is.” Lovett wrote that he was skeptical of this argument but unable to dismiss it. The real test, he thought, would come when she and Cohn and others like them were no longer in the White House: “If you couldn’t speak out because you had to stay, when you left, you had to speak out.”

Of course, unlike Omarosa Manigault Newman, who confessed horror at her former boss’s presidency on “Celebrity Big Brother,” they haven’t. Their defenders among anti-Trump Republicans say it’s because some of them still have a role to play in staving off potential disaster. One Republican in regular contact with people in the White House told me that Powell and Cohn “need to protect their capacity to reach in and help manage in the event of any national crisis.”

I don’t find this entirely convincing. If these people see the administration as unequipped to handle an emergency, they owe the country a firsthand account of our vulnerability. But there is, at least, a certain logic to the argument made in their defense. That logic, however, only holds for those who remain on decent terms with Trump. Which means that if there’s one person who has no excuse for not speaking out, it’s Tillerson, once one of the most powerful private citizens in America, now humbled and defiled by his time in Trump’s orbit.

There’s little doubt that Tillerson holds Trump in contempt and disagrees with large parts of his agenda. After Charlottesville, Tillerson refused to say that the president’s words represented American values. (“The president speaks for himself,” he told Fox News.) In office, he struggled to save the Iran nuclear deal and opposed Trump’s — and Jared Kushner’s — support for a blockade of Qatar by other Arab states. After his ignominious firing, he gave a live address in which he didn’t even mention the president’s name.

“Rex is never going to be back in a position where he can have any degree of influence or respect from this president,” my Republican source said. Because of that, the source continued, “Rex is under a moral mandate to do his best to burn it down.” That would mean telling the truth “about how concerned he is about the leadership in the Oval Office, and what underpins those concerns and what he’s seen.”

In this case, patriotism and self-interest point in the same direction. Before entering this administration, Tillerson was a vastly more respected businessman than Trump; as chief executive of Exxon Mobil, he presided over what The Times described as a “state within a state.” Now the first line of his obituary will be about a year of abject failure as the country’s lead diplomat, culminating in a humiliation fit for reality TV.

The only way he will ever change that is by joining those who would bring this despicable presidency down. If Tillerson came out and said that the president is unfit, and perhaps even that venal concerns for private gain have influenced his foreign policy, impeachment wouldn’t begin tomorrow, but Trump’s already narrow public support would shrink further. Republican members of Congress like Bob Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, might be induced to rediscover their spines and perform proper oversight.

Last year, Axios’s Allen and Jim VandeHei half-jokingly called the insiders trying to circumscribe Trump the “Committee to Save America.” Now the committee, having failed, is disbanding. The least they could do is be frank with the rest of us about what we’re up against.


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JohnRussell
Professor Principal
1  seeder  JohnRussell    6 years ago

As Trump goes farther and farther out of the realm of normality, now is the time for all Americans, particularly those who have information about Trump, to speak out. That most certainly includes Rex Tillerson. 

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
2  seeder  JohnRussell    6 years ago

Whatever their accomplishments, if from their privileged perches these people saw the president as a dangerous fool in need of babysitting, it’s now time for some of them to say so publicly.

 
 
 
bbl-1
Professor Quiet
3  bbl-1    6 years ago

Tillerson has a moral responsibility? 

Tillerson spent his life in the world of ExxonMobil.  His first allegiance was always to them, above all others.

However, since he experienced the experience of being a part of Trump World and is indeed in his twilight years it is possible that somewhere in his inner being he accepts the urge to finally do the right thing for Constitution and country. 

The greatest enemy of Donald J. Trump is honesty and truth.  Tillerson has seen and heard much.  It is time the American people hear it too.

 
 
 
Paula Bartholomew
Professor Participates
5  Paula Bartholomew    6 years ago

I hope he lays all of Trump's shit bare.

 
 
 
JBB
Professor Principal
5.1  JBB  replied to  Paula Bartholomew @5    6 years ago

I hope he lays all of Trump's shit bare. Besides everything else it's looking, um, stormy for Donald Trump.

"Fasten your seatbelts. It is going to be a bumpy ride" - Bette Davis as Margo Channing in All About Eve...

 
 
 
JBB
Professor Principal
5.1.2  JBB  replied to    6 years ago

No, US born and bred but I am the great great great great great great grandson of Daniel Boone...

 
 
 
sixpick
Professor Quiet
6  sixpick    6 years ago

Is this lady who wrote this opinion piece, Michelle Goldberg, the one who carries the Obama doll around in her purse?

I think we have discovered the source for much of the insanity.

 
 
 
lib50
Professor Silent
7  lib50    6 years ago

Tillerson, McCabe, Comey, McMaster (coming soon), numerous others already spoke with Mueller.  Do you think nobody has been paying attention to all that is said and done in and around Trump?  As for you pathetic attempt to make Trump's lies normal, forget it.  This is not white lies or political lies and misrepresentations.  This is pathological lying to a degree outside any normal behavior.  The pathological part is my opinion.  Calling out the breadth and scope of Trump lies is not an opinion.

 
 

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