--:-- [Scene: A Mattress Firm store. Luke Vander Ploeg, a producer for Today Explained, is speaking.]
--:-- Luke Vander Ploeg: Okay, Luke Vander Ploeg, Today Explained producer. That's me. I know we can go to mattressfirm.com slash podcast to learn how we can improve our sleep, but where are we right now?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Oh, well, we're at Mattress Firm. In our neighborhood.
--:-- Luke Vander Ploeg: Yeah, but my house is right down the street. Makes perfect sense because this is America's neighborhood mattress store.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It is indeed.
--:-- Luke Vander Ploeg: Let's go inside.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: All right.
--:-- [Scene: Inside the Mattress Firm store. Zach Beecham, a senior reporter at Vox and host of The Worldly Podcast, enters.]
--:-- Zach Beecham: Hi Sean, welcome back.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hello, did the president just fire his secretary of state on Twitter?
--:-- Zach Beecham: So that's a good question and it depends on what you mean by fired and I i seriously i'm serious about this right so Tillerson was fired. He was fired, we think, via Twitter.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We think because he didn't know and Trump didn't speak to him. He found out about the firing, according to a State Department official, via Twitter.
--:-- Zach Beecham: Really? That's what CNN is reporting right now, according to a State Department official they spoke to.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay. We know that he didn't want to resign because the State Department said so in an official statement.
--:-- Zach Beecham: Right. We know that Trump didn't tell him because the State Department said so in an official statement.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So maybe he got fired some other way formally via paperwork.
--:-- Zach Beecham: But if you find out about your firing via Twitter, that does seem a lot like getting fired via Twitter.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The president and his secretary of state have been disagreeing from what seems like day one on foreign policy. Iran, Russia, North Korea.
--:-- Zach Beecham: Can we assume that this might actually be policy related?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Some of the reporting I've seen suggests that this was about North Korea. That Trump was trying to clear the decks of a negotiator he didn't like that much. before he sat down with Kim Jong-un.
--:-- Zach Beecham: That actually makes a certain amount of sense.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The weirdness is that Tillerson has been much more open to talks than Trump. Trump has repeatedly shot him down, even at one point publicly saying Tillerson was wasting his time trying to negotiate with North Korea.
--:-- Zach Beecham: Elliot Cohen, who was a counselor to the State Department under George W. Bush, called Tillerson, and this is a quote, one of the worst secretaries of state we've had.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What made him so bad?
--:-- Zach Beecham: So Tillerson did two things that combined to make him a uniquely awful secretary of state.
--:-- [Scene: A discussion of Tillerson's performance as Secretary of State.]
--:-- Zach Beecham: The first one is that he was terrible at getting the president's ear on anything. His public statements, always contradicting the president, his inability to work with the president in private.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He would annoy Trump by saying things like, that's your deal when they disagreed with each other, which sounded like kind of condescending and insulting to the president.
--:-- Zach Beecham: They just didn't get along.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And for those reasons, he just was never able to really shape policy on key issues.
--:-- Zach Beecham: The other way that secretaries of state wield influence is by building up the State Department as an important force, getting people inside the department, winning bureaucratic fights to concentrate policy responsibility in state, advocating for its budget, increasing the number of diplomats we have, things like that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Tillerson did the exact opposite of all of those things.
--:-- Zach Beecham: Under his tenure, 60% of the top ranking, the equivalent of five-star generals in the State Department, 60% of them left.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Applications to join the State Department, new ones, fell by half according to the best data that we have on the subject matter.
--:-- Zach Beecham: And career people are quitting at all sorts of different levels.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he has been pushing budget cuts.
--:-- Zach Beecham: He has been laying people off or at least trying to.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And when you do that, you demoralize an institution and you drain it of the people who are most talented in it.
--:-- Zach Beecham: And when it comes to political appointments, you can see that really clearly. Only 64 out of 153 Senate confirmable positions have been filled.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Right. That may sound weird, but it's been over a year and the top jobs at the State Department, most of them are still vacant.
--:-- Zach Beecham: That's pretty bad. That's really bad.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We don't have an ambassador to South Korea.
--:-- Zach Beecham: Think about that. We're about to negotiate with a North Korean leader directly, president to supreme leader for the first time ever in history.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We don't have an ambassador to South Korea, the key country that's involved or related to these negotiations.
--:-- Zach Beecham: That's crazy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Trump has pegged Mike Pompeo to replace Rex Tillerson.
--:-- Zach Beecham: Can he turn the franchise around?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Pompeo has apparently been a decent manager at the CIA where he is now.
--:-- Zach Beecham: OK. So it's possible that he might push back against the budget cuts.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He might work to restore confidence in the department.
--:-- Zach Beecham: I don't know.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's also the case that he might be perceived as too closely aligned with the Trump administration and Trump priorities.
--:-- Zach Beecham: Hopefully he doesn't make the same mistake Tillerson did of forcing people out and concentrating his time and attention on a very small handful of people, thereby not connecting with the rest of the department, making everybody else seem unwelcome and useless.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But state right now is a husk.
--:-- Zach Beecham: It will take a tremendous amount of work just to rebuild the institution to be a functional diplomatic organization.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And Pompeo has to do that and he has to manage these upcoming North Korean negotiations and he has to deal with the fallout of this Russian attack in London and every other crisis that percolating around the world.
--:-- Zach Beecham: We got that move of the U Embassy to Jerusalem that formally going to happen later this year apparently
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There a lot of stuff to deal with when you have an emaciated State Department
--:-- Zach Beecham: So I don know if anyone could successfully fix everything that wrong with the State Department while also dealing with the consequences of President Trump's foreign policy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So what's standing between the job and Mike Pompeo? Does he have to be confirmed by the Senate?
--:-- Zach Beecham: Yes. He has to go through that whole rigmarole, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah. Pompeo needs to be confirmed again.
--:-- Zach Beecham: And there's going to be a lot of stuff coming up about him.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Pompeo has really close connections to this group called the counter-jihadists, who are the progenitors of the major anti-Muslim conspiracy theories in the United States.
--:-- Zach Beecham: Sharia law is taking over the American legal system. The Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated the federal government in various different states.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Pompeo himself personally has said, there are organizations and networks here in the United States tied to radical Islam in deep and fundamental ways.
--:-- Zach Beecham: And they're not just in places like Libya and Syria and Iraq, but in places like Coldwater, Kansas and small towns all throughout America.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This network is real.
--:-- Zach Beecham: This is not true. This is for the record.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There are no secret Islamists trying to take over Coldwater, Kansas. That's not a thing.
--:-- Zach Beecham: Got it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But this is a guy who has a lot of skeletons in his closet and he made it through a CIA director. but being the secretary of state is different.
--:-- Zach Beecham: How so?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, you have to negotiate with other countries. You have to meet with people of all kinds of different and diverse backgrounds.
--:-- Zach Beecham: And Tillerson, for all his faults, really did have a long history of working with people from different places.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Right. But Pompeo, you know, when you have said things that are offensive and you align yourself as he has with people like Frank Gaffney, perhaps the leading anti-Muslim bigot in the United States, how do you work with US allies in the Muslim world?
--:-- Zach Beecham: How do you go incredibly speak to people in a country like Iraq or Indonesia?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the biggest issues on the table right now are obviously North Korea.
--:-- Zach Beecham: You've still got a brutal civil war in Syria.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You have a series of upcoming decisions about the Iran deal, whether to keep it, how to deal with it, and so on.
--:-- Zach Beecham: You have a promise from the Trump administration to punish Russia somehow for the election hacking and various different Russian shenanigans.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You've got a Chinese president who just abolished term limits and has basically set himself up to be dictator for life in China.
--:-- Zach Beecham: There are so many different things that could go wrong if they are not handled well diplomatically or at least handled normally.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And now the new secretary of state is coming in at a time when it's not clear if he's going to be able to actually do his job with his organization so depleted.
--:-- Zach Beecham: I think there's a silver lining here, Zach, which is that the first female CIA director has just been nominated.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, that's fine.
--:-- Zach Beecham: But Gina Haspel is not exactly your exemplar of an ethical CIA agent.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Damn it.
--:-- Zach Beecham: She was heavily involved in the torture program under the Bush administration.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Forget it.
--:-- Zach Beecham: and ran, as far as I'm aware, or at least was deeply involved in, CIA black sites in Thailand.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How does this look to the world?
--:-- Zach Beecham: I mean, they were probably just getting used to Rex Tillerson, and now he's gone.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Look, the one constant that I've experienced when I travel overseas during the Trump administration is people of all walks of life, from cab drivers to government officials, being like, what is wrong with your country?
--:-- Zach Beecham: And you get a real sense that people are writing off the U.S., at least temporarily, as a leader in the world, as a country that shapes the international order and helps solve problems.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And now with the State Department in chaos, I mean, look, maybe there'll be an improvement if Pompeo seems like somebody who has the president's ear and he builds trust inside the State Department.
--:-- Zach Beecham: But right now, it looks like American foreign policy is in shambles and at odds with itself.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Zach Beecham writes about foreign affairs for Vox.
--:-- [Scene: A break in the conversation, followed by the return of Ezra Klein, editor-at-large at Vox.]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Also, we made this song to help. All the former staffers, all the former staffers, all the former staffers, all the former staffers, all the former staffers, all the former staffers, all the former staffers, all the former staffers, my Becky Deska. Rex and Trump just broke up, Pompeo's waiting in the wings.
--:-- [Scene: A discussion of the turnover in the Trump administration.]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay, Luke what do we see here mattresses just all sorts of mattresses of all all different sizes shapes even colors
--:-- Zach Beecham: Yeah actually okay oh that one's a beauty rest black hybrid that sounds fancy that does
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: this one over here is a beauty rest legend there's a lot of selection in here basically if not for a bit of walking space the whole store is filled with mattresses
--:-- Zach Beecham: There are so many mattresses in here
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Good thing they offer you a 120-night sleep trial to ensure perfection and a 120-night low-price guarantee so you know you paid the perfect price
--:-- Zach Beecham: Yeah that's good
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah go to mattressfirm.com slash podcast and learn how you and improve your sleep
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Rameswaram from this is Today Explained, and I'm talking to Vox's explainer in chief, Ezra Klein.
--:-- Ezra Klein: Welcome to today's show. I'm Ezra Klein here with my guest.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Ezra, what is the turnover rate in the Trump administration at this point?
--:-- Ezra Klein: So as of Gary Cohn's resignation, it was, if I'm remembering this correctly, I believe 44, or 45 percent.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yikes. That made it the highest turnover rate ever recorded in a presidential administration at this point.
--:-- Ezra Klein: This is not normal. Like everything else in the Trump administration, this is not normal.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Like this is retail food levels of turnover.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And why does this keep happening? What's the root of the problem here? Is it right at the top?
--:-- Ezra Klein: So there are a couple of explanations that I think are worth taking into account here.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: One is that Donald Trump is terrible to work for.
--:-- Ezra Klein: Possibly it is not surprising that a guy whose television persona was firing people on national television is not a great boss.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But Donald Trump is also very difficult to brief.
--:-- Ezra Klein: Just in the daily work of doing your job, you go in and you've got time with him on some issue or another.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And you spend a couple of minutes of your time briefing him about that issue.
--:-- Ezra Klein: And then the rest of it, following every rabbit hole and squirrel chase and dark alley he wants to run down, his electoral college victory, stuff he saw on Fox News, people he doesn't like.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It is not an easy place to work.
--:-- Ezra Klein: It is not a place where you feel good about what's going on a lot of the time.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: A lot of the folks in the Trump administration are there because they feel at this point it's their duty to keep things from getting worse.
--:-- Ezra Klein: How far back does this go?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: From the very beginning, you've heard about this fight between the globalists, right, with Gary Cohn and Jared Kushner and the sort of Trumpist cultural conservatives.
--:-- Ezra Klein: You should put Jeff Sessions and Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller in that group, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They're a very hard line on immigration, et cetera.
--:-- Ezra Klein: Then you've had the establishment Republican side, folks like Reince Priebus.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But if you look throughout the Trump administration, Mike Pence.
--:-- Ezra Klein: Because Donald Trump himself does not have strong views, at least strong views that he holds to about where policy should go, he does not resolve these wars between these different factions.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And because he does not resolve the wars between these different factions, the White House is in a continuous state of disequilibrium.
--:-- Ezra Klein: If you can ever knock off someone else, things might actually be different.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because depending on who Trump has spoken to last, depending on who's controlling the information flow to him, everything can change.
--:-- Ezra Klein: When there's that much to be gained by knifing your adversary within the administration, then your adversaries are consistently getting knifed.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Everybody's leaking on each other.
--:-- Ezra Klein: They're undercutting each other.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It is a unbelievable constant slice of chaos because nobody can ever just settle on the idea that, well, this is what we are doing.
--:-- Ezra Klein: This is what the president believes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Whenever somebody weakens, the other side goes to Trump is like, you should get rid of this person.
--:-- Ezra Klein: You got to feel like this is hardest for Chief of Staff John Kelly, whose job may also be on the line, it sounds like.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How does he work into all the dysfunction in the administration that we're seeing?
--:-- Ezra Klein: So John Kelly is, of course, the general who succeeds Reince Priebus.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And Kelly is a kind of personality who impresses Donald Trump.
--:-- Ezra Klein: He's forceful. He's hyper masculine in an old school way. He's a general. Trump likes generals.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And Kelly comes in saying that he is not going to try to manage Donald Trump, but he's going to try to impose discipline on the process by which information reaches Donald Trump.
--:-- Ezra Klein: So there's this hope. There's this kind of moment of John Kelly dawn where, you know, OK, we're finally going to get the normal White House everybody's been waiting for.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And of course we don't. And John Kelly doesn't have connections in a deep way to the Hill, to the establishment Republican Party.
--:-- Ezra Klein: And so Kelly was not able to play any role at all in resolving these disagreements.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They just keep exploding.
--:-- Ezra Klein: When we keep seeing people dismissed from the administration this way, do we have to wonder if our best people will be attracted to jobs in the cabinet, in the administration anymore?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I don't think we have to wonder. I don't think they will be.
--:-- Ezra Klein: If you go into the Trump administration right now, you are courting reputational ruin.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because you may end up standing behind Donald Trump while he delivers Charlottesville remarks, for instance.
--:-- Ezra Klein: You might expose yourself to tremendous legal risk, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You're going to need to lawyer up.
--:-- Ezra Klein: There's all these inquiries going on along the administration.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If you somebody who values your own reputation you may not get out with it intact
--:-- Ezra Klein: And a lot of the people like Trump himself Famously Rex Tillerson did not deny calling Trump a fucking moron He just did not deny it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think he said, well, that's a silly thing to be talking about, more or less.
--:-- Ezra Klein: Isn't it amazing that he lasted this long after not walking that back?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It was amazing.
--:-- Ezra Klein: And then he had to go out and give this, you know, like hostage video press conference.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Let me tell you what I've learned about this president, whom I did not know before taking this office.
--:-- Ezra Klein: He loves this country. He puts Americans and America first. He's smart. He demands results wherever he goes, and he holds those around him accountable for whether they've done the job he's asked them to do.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But this goes to a different point, which is the other point about what brought people like Rex Tillerson into the administration is that at the beginning, there was this belief that Donald Trump was a showman.
--:-- Ezra Klein: Right. And during the campaign, he had been putting on this great reality show of the Trump presidential campaign.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so a number of people came into the administration believing that if Trump had a good operation around him and had given his history before the campaign, that maybe this wasn't going to be like the crazy campaign Trump.
--:-- Ezra Klein: Maybe this was going to be, you know, the Trump people knew from New York, which was, you know, a flamboyant, ostentatious businessman. but somebody who you could work with.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the thing is, that has now also been disproven.
--:-- Ezra Klein: You cannot go into the administration now believing that Trump will be anyone other than or anything other than Trump.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think it's really easy to get caught up in sort of the train wreck, but I got to wonder, how does this affect our country, our security?
--:-- Ezra Klein: And I want to make this point because it's really important.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The administration is bleeding, And the reason this is such a crisis of staffing for them, of management for them, is they've also lost the ranks underneath that.
--:-- Ezra Klein: So Gary Cohn, the National Economics Council chief, left 10 years ago, a week ago, it's hard to say. But he's gone.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And normally what you would say is, well, maybe his deputy will take his place.
--:-- Ezra Klein: But he had a pretty well-respected deputy, a guy who came from the management consulting world named Jeremy Katz.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But Katz left in January.
--:-- Ezra Klein: And it's not just there when the communications chief, Hope Hicks, resigned.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, too, did the deputy communications chief.
--:-- Ezra Klein: The State Department is widely known to have been gutted by Trump and by Tillerson.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What normally happens is that it's not weird for the top level people to burn out a year or two years in.
--:-- Ezra Klein: It's happening faster here.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What would then happen, though, is that the number twos would have been there.
--:-- Ezra Klein: And they're waiting for the number ones to leave so they can become the number ones.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But they're leaving first.
--:-- Ezra Klein: So they don't have a next in line.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So they don't just need to replace the principal. They need to replace the people under the principal.
--:-- Ezra Klein: There is this question of who is going to be running the government.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We are going to, as a country, make mistakes and miss opportunities and see ultimately disasters.
--:-- Ezra Klein: We've already seen what happens when this administration deals with an unforeseen crisis. Puerto Rico is what happens when it deals with an unforeseen crisis, and they still don't have power.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So what's going to come next?
--:-- Ezra Klein: And what are we going to do as this administration has to deal with it with even less staff, with even less experience around Donald Trump?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Ezra Klein is the editor-at-large at Vox.
--:-- Ezra Klein: He also hosts a podcast called The Ezra Klein Show.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Vox's Christina Anemachan sang for us up top, Noam Hassenfeld produced, Luke Vanderploeg also produces the show, Bridget McCarthy is our editor, Afim Shapiro is our engineer, Irene Noguchi is our executive producer, and the indispensable Breakmaster Cylinder makes music for us.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today Explained is produced in association with Stitcher, and we're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Julie Bogan does a heroic job of managing our social media.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can enjoy her work on Twitter at today underscore explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay, Luke, here we are at the mattress firm.
--:-- Luke Vander Ploeg: I'm seeing all sorts of shapes and sizes and colors of mattresses, but the one common thread here is that all of the pillows are yellow, green, or blue.
--:-- Zach Beecham: Why do we think that is?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Look, there's signs that tell you why.
--:-- Luke Vander Ploeg: Oh, there's a legend.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's a legend.
--:-- Luke Vander Ploeg: Legendary.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What is it?
--:-- Luke Vander Ploeg: Where is it?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Oh, it's back there.
--:-- Luke Vander Ploeg: Okay, what does it say?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yellow.
--:-- Luke Vander Ploeg: Yellow is firm.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Mattress firm.
--:-- Luke Vander Ploeg: Mattress firm.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Green is medium.
--:-- Luke Vander Ploeg: Mattress medium.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Blue is soft.
--:-- Luke Vander Ploeg: Oh, so they have, Mattress Firm doesn't just have firm mattresses.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: No, they've got all kinds.
--:-- Luke Vander Ploeg: All right, so which kind are you, Goldilocks?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I don't really know.
--:-- Luke Vander Ploeg: Well, I think we should find out.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So do I.
--:-- Luke Vander Ploeg: Maybe tomorrow.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Stay tuned.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay, mattressfirm.com slash podcast.
