Trump Expected to Name Rudy Giuliani Secretary of State, Jeff Sessions Defense Secretary – Why?

Trump Isn’t Hiring the Best People and He’s Putting Them in the Wrong Positions

President-elect Donald Trump is soon expected to announce Rudy Giuliani to be his Secretary of State, and Senator Jeff Sessions to be his Secretary of Defense. 

Why?

Giuliani has no tangible foreign policy experience. He was a federal prosecutor, the Mayor of New York City, and founded a security firm which some see as a lobbying organization. Giuliani partners has subsidiaries in Asia and Japan, so there are immediate conflicts of interest that would need to be addressed.

So why make Giuliani Secretary of State?

In a word, loyalty.

Donald Trump rewards loyalty, and Giuliani has stood by his side, defending then-candidate Trump with lies and hate throughout the campaign. 

And he is eminently unqualified to be the nation’s top diplomat.

Donald Trump often brags he hires only “the best people,” and clearly in Giuliani he not only has not done so, he is shoveling him into the wrong position. Giuliani is neither statesman nor diplomat.

‘Rudy Giuliani’s Dangerously Stupid Foreign Policy Vision’

In fact, a 2007 op-ed in Foreign Affairs published a Giuliani “foreign policy manifesto” which was panned as “not particularly realistic” and one that “certainly does not contemplate peace,” by James Joyner at Outside the Beltway, a foreign affairs analysis journal in his piece, “Rudy Giuliani’s Dangerously Stupid Foreign Policy Vision.”

“Indeed, it seems he intentionally picked out the worst parts of the foreign policies of George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter,” Joyner wrote of Giuliani’s “manifesto.”

That of course was 2007. Have things changed?

Outside the Beltway today calls the expected choice of Giuliani a “bizarre choice…for a position that he clearly doesn’t seem to prepared to fill.”

Giuliani “has no professional experience in the area, for example, and other than providing opinions on foreign policy on Fox News Channel and elsewhere, hasn’t really expressed much outward interest in the area in the past,” Outside the Beltway’s Doug Mataconis writes. 

Then there’s Senator Jeff Sessions, whose goal in life has always been to be a Supreme Court justice. Once nominated for a federal judgeship, Sessions saw it slip through his fingers when the Senate refused to confirm him over his lengthy history of racial bias. Sessions has labeled the NAACP and the ACLU “un-American” and “Communist-inspired.”

So why would Trump want Sessions to be his Defense Secretary?

Session has served on the Senate’s Committee on Armed Services, but never as Chairman. The closest he’s come is chair a defense subcommittee.

Other than that, loyalty.

But Sessions’ anti-LGBT and racist history will not enamor him with the U.S. military.

Donad Trump isn’t hiring the best people, and worse, he is putting these people in the wrong positions.

 

Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr and a CC license