Competence. I’m limiting myself
to competence. Nobody would seriously doubt Anthony Blinken’s competence.
I’m not talking about moral compass — just competence.
Raw competence. Same thing for John Kerry — uh, I guess he was Obama’s second Secretary of State; Hillary Clinton was the first, so Kerry was the second.
I go back very far: under Carter it was Cyrus Vance; before that, Henry Kissinger — people who were highly competent.
That was not Trump. Trump surrounded himself with a bunch of sub‑mediocre yes‑men. Sub‑mediocrities. They were just yes‑men: “The great leader! The great leader!”
So who would he surround himself with again? Marco Rubio as Secretary of State? Marco Rubio — when he goes to the toilet, he brings along a GPS to find his anal cavity. He’s not a Secretary of State.
Then he’s got Tulsi Gabbard {
Norm cuts her no slack} in National Intelligence. What does she know about intelligence? Not very impressive.
Jared Kushner — Jared looks like he’s been on puberty blockers for the last thirty years, with that porcelain‑vase face. Somebody needs to tell Jared to get off the puberty blockers and grow a little facial hair.
Witkoff went to Hofstra University, and his only qualification is that he knows the difference between an iron and a wood. He was Trump’s golfing partner.
And the same thing if you look at the credentials of Joe Kent — I’d never even heard of the school he went to. He went to Norwich College, which is a military college, and then somehow ended up heading another intelligence agency. {
fwiw, on Jimmy Dore's show interviewing Whitney Webb, Kent comes up and Whitney said something like, be cautious of him - she did not elaborate and mentioned that she has not written about him yet and can't verbalize what she is thinking yet}
So Trump is smart enough, at least, to know that all the people he surrounded himself with are stupid. They were all yes‑men — “Oh great leader, oh brilliant one,” all of that.
Basically, in the Trump administration there was an information void.