Yet, the questions lingered. As more and more details regarding Ross and the Bank of Cyprus, Ross and the Russians, and Trump and the Russians emerged, as national television commentators such as MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow devoted programs to the evolving story, concerns multiplied. This was not a case of idle speculation about foreign intrigues. This was a case of the executive branch failing to cooperate with the legislative branch, and of too many members of the legislative branch acquiescing to a muted oversight role.
To their credit, a few senators refused to accept that diminished role. On March 10, 2017, Booker, Baldwin, Blumenthal and Markey wrote again to demand responses to the unanswered questions.
“As previously undisclosed contacts between the Trump presidential campaign and Russian officials have been revealed, we believe it is important for the public to know the full extent of relationships that may exist between the Russian Federation and members of the President’s Cabinet,” they declared. “The continued absence of a written response to our questions is alarming and raises new questions about the links between the Russian government, the Bank of Cyprus, and the Trump business and political apparatus.”
The authors of the letter explained that “as members of the U.S. Senate, we have a constitutional responsibility to exercise proper oversight.” That was clearly the case. Yet, because so many senators failed to accept that responsibility, and because the Trump administration took advantage of the opening created by that failure, the questions about what exactly Wilbur Ross was doing in Cyprus, about what he knew and when he knew it, remained unanswered.
— 17 —
THE FOSSIL-FUEL-POWERED DOLLAR DIPLOMAT
Rex Tillerson
Secretary of State
“I feel,” Nebraska senator George Norris warned a century ago, “that we are about to put the dollar sign on the American flag.” Decrying the advocacy by munitions merchants, speculators and stockbrokers for legislation that would further involve the United States in the European conflict that would come to be known as World War I, Norris thundered: “We are going into war upon the command of gold.”
Along with a handful of allies that included Wisconsin senator Robert M. La Follette, Norris argued that the United States need not entangle itself in a distant war between the armies of kings and kaisers. The Nebraskan suggested that cynical appeals to patriotic sentiment by advocates for war cloaked the self-serving economic agenda of wealthy elites. “We are about to do the bidding of wealth’s terrible mandate,” Norris said of congressional action that steered the country toward war. “By our act we will make millions of our countrymen suffer, and the consequences of it may well be that millions of our brethren must shed their lifeblood, millions of brokenhearted women must weep, millions of children must suffer with cold, and millions of babes must die from hunger, and all because we want to preserve the commercial right of American citizens to deliver munitions of war to belligerent nations.”
Norris, La Follette and the courageous foes of U.S. involvement in World War I, most of them Midwestern progressive populists, recognized the profound danger that arose when U.S. foreign policy became intertwined with the pecuniary demands of plutocrats and profiteers.
It is not just in matters of war and peace that those dangers arise, of course. When CEOs are calling the shots, everything from trade policy to energy policy and responses to climate change are warped by unenlightened self-interest. The potential for the corruption of America’s foreign policy expands dramatically when businessmen with international interests assume positions of power. This is one of the reasons why, during the post-election transition period, almost two dozen senators urged President-elect Donald Trump to follow the advice of the nonpartisan Office of Government Ethics and divest from his business holdings before taking office.
“As a businessman with interests in the United States and around the world, your holdings have the potential for serious conflicts between the national interest and your personal financial interests,” wrote Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren and twenty-two of her colleagues in a December 13, 2016, letter that argued: “Whether the president of the United States makes decisions about potential trade agreements or sending troops into war, the American people need to know that the president is acting in their best interest.”
This was a sound argument for how Trump, whose candidacy was opposed by the majority of Americans, might bring a measure of legitimacy to his presidency. It was also a sound standard for examining Trump’s nominees for key cabinet posts, particularly Rex Tillerson, the CEO of ExxonMobil who Trump had tapped to serve as secretary of state.
Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee considered Tillerson’s nomination, Wisconsin congressman Mark Pocan, the Wisconsin Democrat who serves as first vice chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus [CPC], had offered a framework for applying the standard. “President-elect Trump’s nomination of ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, as secretary of state, signals that U.S. diplomacy is now in the pockets of big oil. Tillerson has spent his entire career putting the profits of Exxon over our country’s national interests,” said Pocan in a December 13, 2016, statement issued by the CPC. “Not only does Tillerson have billions of dollars at stake with sanctions on Russia, his company has been under a formal investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for inaccurate accounting practices that affect global climate regulations,” Pocan explained. “Our country needs a secretary of state who will guide U.S. foreign policy with a steady hand, not place profit margins ahead of diplomacy.”
Pocan was right. The nomination of Tillerson to serve as secretary of state put a dollar sign on the American flag. To propose that this plunderer be allowed to represent the United States on the global stage was to assert that, under Donald Trump, America’s first and only foreign policy would be crony capitalism. That was an insult to our best history, and a dangerous threat to our future.
Mark Pocan holds the U.S. House seat once occupied by “Fighting Bob” La Follette, who joined with George Norris in the great debates of a century ago. La Follette decried what he and others referred to as “dollar diplomacy.” La Follette’s weekly magazine defined dollar diplomacy as “the policy of using the Department of State and the presidential office in promoting the interests of American bankers in other countries.” “Dollar diplomacy,” La Follette argued, “is altogether too suggestive of the kind of business that has for its command: Your money or your life!”
The senator, who earned “profile in courage” marks from a young John Kennedy, was right to be concerned. Lives were at stake then. Ultimately, lives were lost because policies based on greed and self-interest trumped common sense and humanity. The dollar diplomacy of Donald Trump and Rex Tillerson again threatened lives—American lives and the lives of innocents around the world. Trump’s nomination of Tillerson demanded scrutiny as the looming menace that it represented.
When the scrutiny came, Rex Tillerson failed the test.
Startlingly.
Tillerson’s witless, contradictory and obfuscatory testimony before the Foreign Relations Committee in early January 2017 confirmed fears that the ExxonMobil CEO was, and is, too conflicted, too ill-prepared and too disengaged from accepted understandings with regard to diplomacy, sustainable development and human rights to be seriously considered for the position of secretary of state.
The most unsettling exchange took place after an initial round of questioning by New Jersey senator Robert Menendez. The veteran member of the Foreign Relations Committee asked what should have been a simple concluding question: “For all of these answers you’ve given me, does the president-elect agree with you?”
Rex Tillerson replied: “The president-elect and I have not had the opportunity to discuss this specific issue or this specific area.”
Again, Senator Menendez: “Well, in your statement on page three, you say, ‘In his campaign, president-elect Trump proposed a bold new commitment to advancing American interests in our foreign policy
. I hope to explain what this approach means and how I’d implement that policy if I am confirmed as Secretary of State.’ I assumed to some degree you’ve had some discussion about what it is that that world view is going to be in order to understand whether you are willing to execute that on behalf of the person you’re going to work for?”
“In a broad construct and in terms of the principles that are going to guide that, yes, sir.”
“I would have thought Russia would be at the very top of that, considering all that’s taken place. Did that not happen?”
“That has not occurred yet, Senator.”
“That’s pretty amazing.”
In an interview following the exchange during the January 11, 2017, hearing, Senator Menendez said it was “beyond my imagination” that Tillerson had not engaged in serious discussions about major foreign policy issues and concerns with President-elect Donald Trump.
No matter what Americans think of Trump or Tillerson, no matter what they think about U.S. relations with Russia and the issues that have arisen with regard to those relations, the notion that a corporate CEO would accept a nomination to serve as secretary of state without engaging in extended and serious discussions about major issues should be greeted with shock and dismay.
It is not as if Donald Trump’s selection of his choice for secretary of state was a snap decision.
Trump’s high-profile search for a nominee to take charge of the State Department took weeks. He rejected prominent prospects, such as 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, during the most closely examined and consequential period of the cabinet-
selection process.
Trump finally settled on a candidate who NBC News introduced to Americans as a “64-year-old veteran oil executive [who] has no government or diplomatic experience.”
Yet Tillerson told the Senate that he and Trump did not engage in substantive discussions regarding hot-button issues that could complicate the working relationship between an incoming commander in chief and a nominee who would be charged with explaining and implementing what many expected would be a radical restructuring of foreign relations.
Reflecting on Tillerson’s characterization of his conversations with the president-elect, Senator Menendez said: “I don’t know how he’s going to get to speak for [Trump] unless he knows what positions and views he has.”
If Tillerson’s conversations with Trump were as cursory as the nominee suggests, then it was clear that he had failed to display the basic curiosity and due diligence that would be expected of even the lowest-level diplomat. Indeed, Rex Tillerson’s testimony indicated that he did not begin to recognize the responsibilities that go with the position he was seeking, let alone the unique challenges that would be associated with serving as Donald Trump’s secretary of state. That was more than concerning. That was disqualifying.
Yet, the committee, and ultimately the Senate, approved Tillerson, who embarked on his new job with a lackadaisical, unfocused and ineffectual approach that seemed to suggest that his primary mission would be to implement Trump’s radical downsizing of the State Department in order to pay for dramatically increased Pentagon spending. Less than months into Tillerson’s tenure, the White House proposed to cut the budget for the State Department and the Agency for International Development by 28 percent.
Diplomacy was being ditched. International human rights advocate Michael Abramowitz warned that the cuts “would make the world a more dangerous place.” The president of Freedom House reminded Americans in a March 16, 2017, statement that “foreign assistance and diplomacy are critical to defend democratic values and U.S. interests at a time when both are increasingly under threat. When the United States pulls back, authoritarian powers that oppose our values, and interests will step in.” But Tillerson welcomed the cuts.
“The level of spending that the State Department has been undertaking in the past—and particularly in this past year—is simply not sustainable,” the secretary of state said in remarks delivered in Tokyo on March 16, 2017, during an Asian tour where he often sounded more like a Pentagon chief talking up war prospects with North Korea than the nation’s chief diplomat.
Tillerson prattled on, Trump-like in his defense of the indefensible. He promised that a downsized and diminished Department of State would “be able to do a lot with fewer dollars.” He was wrong. The only thing the State Department will do with Rex Tillerson at the helm is attach the dollar sign to the American flag.
PART 3
THE HACKS
In the tired hand of a dying man, Theodore Senior had written: “The ‘Machine politicians’ have shown their colors… I feel sorry for the country however as it shows the power of partisan politicians who think of nothing higher than their own interests, and I feel for your future. We cannot stand so corrupt a government for any great length of time.”
—EDMUND MORRIS, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
If I stayed in Washington, I might end up a government hack.
—ELLIOT RICHARDSON, recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom
The Republican Party was, for a vital century, the major American political party that most frequently aligned with the cause of human rights, conservation, honest governance, regard for science and enlightened internationalism. The necessarily realistic Frederick Douglass wrote in the late nineteenth century: “I knew that however bad the Republican Party was, the Democratic Party was much worse. The elements of which the Republican Party was composed gave better ground for the ultimate hope of the success of the colored man’s cause than those of the Democratic Party.”
Douglass did not speak those words as an abolitionist alone. The absconder from human bondage who taught men like Abraham Lincoln to despise slavery is remembered in the shorthand of history for that blessed work. But he was, as well, a champion of women’s rights and popular sovereignty, a diplomat and an international traveler who recognized the necessity of solidarity with oppressed peoples in distant lands, and the publisher of a North Star newspaper that took as its motto “Right is of no Sex—Truth is of no Color—God is the Father of us all, and we are all brethren.”
In speeches, books, letters and conversations, Douglass referred to the Republican Party as “the sheet anchor,” “the ark,” a party of “moral power… from first to last, on the side of justice” that “has only been baffled, in its efforts to protect the negro in his vote, by the Democratic Party.”
One Douglass biographer quoted the great man as declaring that “the Republican Party is the ship and all else is the sea around us.”
Yet, when Donald Trump referenced Frederick Douglass at a Black History Month event on February 1, 2017, he announced that “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice.” The bizarre mixing of tenses led the author and social commentator Touré to comment: “I doubt he knows who Frederick Douglass was.” The Washington Post speculated on the even more unsettling prospect that the president “simply had no idea that the famous black abolitionist Frederick Douglass was, in fact, dead.”
The mystery was not resolved when a reporter asked White House spokesman Sean Spicer to explain. “Today [the president] made the comment about Frederick Douglass being recognized more and more, do you have any idea what specifically he was referring to?”
“Well I think there [were] contributions,” Spicer replied. “I think he wants to highlight the contributions that he has made and I think that through a lot of the actions and statements that he is going to make, I think that the contributions of Frederick Douglass will become more and more.”
Late Night’s Seth Meyers played the Spicer comment that evening.
“Who among us wouldn’t panic if asked to recite stuff you learned in high school, but how did you not have time between the President’s remarks and your press briefing to Google Frederick Douglass?” asked the comedian. “And not his full bi
ography, just simple stuff. Like ‘Is Frederick Douglass alive?’” That was a legitimate question.
But not the right question.
The right question is, “Has the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln and his comrade Frederick Douglass died?” And the right answer to that question is yes.
The issue here is not one of partisanship or ideology. It is a matter of basic premises. And basic principles.
Well into the twentieth century, many leading Republicans took seriously their “Party of Lincoln” sobriquet and the responsibility that went with it. They worked to earn the votes of African Americans and all supporters of equal justice under the law, declaring in the party’s 1960 platform that “this nation was created to give expression, validity and purpose to our spiritual heritage—the supreme worth of the individual. In such a nation—a nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal—racial discrimination has no place. It can hardly be reconciled with a Constitution that guarantees equal protection under law to all persons. In a deeper sense, too, it is immoral and unjust. As to those matters within reach of political action and leadership, we pledge ourselves unreservedly to its eradication.”
While Democrats struggled with their party’s internal contradictions on the civil rights issues of the early 1960s—deferring far too frequently to the demands of southern segregationists who held powerful committee chairs in the House and Senate, and who commanded machines that delivered needed electoral votes—Republicans demanded action. “When President John F. Kennedy failed to submit a promised civil rights bill, three Republicans (Representatives William McCulloch of Ohio, John Lindsay of New York and Charles Mathias of Maryland) introduced one of their own,” noted the New York Times in recalling the great struggles of the era. “This inspired Mr. Kennedy to deliver on his promise, and it built Republican support for what became the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”