WATCH: Foreign Policy Expert Mocks Rumored Trump Choice of Nikki Haley for Secretary of State

‘I Think There’s a BMW Factory There’

Rumors are flying that President-elect Donald Trump may choose not Rudy Giuliani but South Carolina Republican Governor Nikki Haley to be his Secretary of State. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, citing sources close to the Trump team, first broke the news Wednesday afternoon as Kate Snow anchored.

Snow was interviewing one of the preeminent experts of foreign policy, the editor of Foreign Policy magazine, David Rothkopf, who is also a professor of international relations and, among many other roles, is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 

Rothkopf could not help but mock the choice of Gov. Haley. After all, she would be filling the shoes of John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright, Warren Christopher, and Thomas Jefferson.

“I thought it was impossible to find someone with less foreign policy experience than Rudy Giuliani, but bingo,” Rothkopf said. “Here is somebody with no foreign policy experience at all, as a governor.”

He ran down Haley’s résumé, noting she has “a degree in accounting, went into the fashion business, became a local legislator, went on to being a governor.”

“I mean, there may have been foreign policy types who passed through South Carolina, I think there’s a BMW factory there,” he quipped. “Foreign policy is not a part of her job, it hasn’t been a part of her life.”

Rothkopf then blasted Trump for taking the outsider schtick too far, citing the fact that Reince Priebus has zero experience in government, yet Trump literally gave him the second-most powerful job in the United States government. He called Trump’s chief strategist the alt-right movement’s hero Steve Bannon a “catastrophe,” with no government experience. “Let’s give him the job that Valerie Jarrett had.” 

“At a certain point you need somebody in the room who knows what’s going on,” Rothkopf said.

Someone with foreign policy experience and who knows what’s going on, AmericaBlog editor John Aravosis, who posted these videos, succinctly describes what’s happening to our government.

“Trump thinks the Secretary of State position, and perhaps every cabinet position, is like filling an ambassadorship to, say, Paris, where you give it as a gift to someone who helped you a lot on the campaign, rather than making the appointment based on actual merit,” Aravosis rightly observes. 

He adds:

You don’t hand the keys to the country to your kids, which Trump is now doing. Trump asked for security clearances for his kids, which simply is not done — it is none of Ivanka’s business to be informed of Top Secret foreign policy decisions in between using her dad’s presidency to hawk $10,000 broaches on QVC.

You don’t ask your daughter’s husband, Jared Kushner, to effectively run the transition based on who may, or may not, have ticked off his crooked jailhouse father.

And you don’t put a white supremacist enabler in the top strategy job at the White House.

Indeed.

On Monday, we should note, Rothkopf wrote, “President-elect Trump is a profound threat to the United States of America.”

It doesn’t get any clearer than that.

 

Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr and a CC license