Two very odd (well, in terms of “normal” US politics) notes from two of the more “mature” senior cabinet members, Tillerson and Mattis.
First, Rex Tillerson, the Secretary of State, appearing on Fox News Sunday, where he was asked by Chris Wallace about the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination pointing at Charlottesville and Trump’s tepid reaction to the racism and white nationalism on display there as disturbing. Emphasis mine.
WALLACE: Does that make it harder for you to push American values around the world when some foreign leaders question president’s values?
TILLERSON: Chris, we express America’s values from the State Department. We represent the American people. We represent America’s values, our commitment to freedom, our commitment to equal treatment to people the world over. And that message has never changed.
WALLACE: And when the president gets into the kind of controversy he does and the U.N. committee response the way it does, it seems to say they begin to doubt are—whether we’re living those values.
TILLERSON: I don’t believe anyone doubts the American people’s values or the commitment of the American government or the government’s agencies to advancing those values and defending those values.
WALLACE: And the president’s values?
TILLERSON: The president speaks for himself, Chris.
WALLACE: Are you separating yourself from that, sir?
TILLERSON: I’ve spoken—I’ve made my own comments as to our vales as well in a speech I gave to the State Department this past week.
(Video and transcript. More of the story here. )
“The president speaks for himself” is a phrase we keep hearing over and over from the White House. Some of the time — like when it comes from whoever is acting as Trump’s press secretary, it means, “I’m not going to try to explain exactly what the President is saying because I don’t want to put words in the President’s mouth and/or damned if I know.” From others, though, it begins to feel like a distancing in position from the speaker and the President they serve while still respecting the chain of command.
Meanwhile, we also have informal video of Secretary of Defense James Mattis, reassuring some troops this past week that they need to “just hold the line until our country gets back to understanding and respecting each other and showing it.”
Mattis notes in the video that the United States has two “powers” in the world: “the power of intimidation, and that’s you, if someone wants to screw with our families, our country and our allies,” but also “the power of inspiration, and we’ll get the power of inspiration back.”
(More on the story here. This was apparently before Trump’s Friday evening diktat about transgender members of the military.)
It’s a weird couple of data points. Both men seem to be acknowledging in their own way that the US image abroad is currently not what it should be, and that conditions at home are likewise, but in vague enough language to avoid actually critiquing the figure at the center of the problem, their boss.
Part of me thinks of a ship’s captain telling their crew to buck up, keep steady, and depend on the the ship to ride out the storm, she’ll hold together. Part of me thinks of a battered wife trying to convince their kids that Daddy loves us all very much, he’s just going through a hard patch right now. Part of me thinks of the Internet, designed to deal with damage to the system by rerouting and bypassing nodes that are unreliable.
I don’t know. But this really, still, does not seem normal.