I suspect most reporters are flocking to the State Department to hunt up information concerning the firing of State Department Inspector General Steve Linick last Friday – the third IG fired in six weeks, all announced late on Fridays – and the pundits will ruminate on the possibilities of Secretary of State Pompeo being involved in illegal and/or corrupt behavior with regards to either illegal use of State Department employees for walking his dog, or the delivery of billions of dollars worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia.
It’s a good idea, and I look forward to hearing what they find.
BUT WHAT struck me is President Trump’s behavior. Here’s the transcript from whitehouse.gov:
Q Mr. President, can you explain, sir, why you decided to fire the inspector general at the State Department?
THE PRESIDENT: Yeah, I don’t know him at all. I never even heard of him, but I was asked to by the State Department, by Mike. I offered — most of my people, almost all of them — I said, “You know, these are Obama appointees. And if you’d like to let him go, I think you should let them go, but that’s up to you.”
He’s an Obama employee. I understand he had a lot of problems with the DOD. There was an investigation on him — on the inspector general. I don’t know anything about it.
So I don’t know him. I never heard of him. But they asked me to terminate him. I have the absolute right, as President, to terminate. I’ve said, “Who appointed him?” And they said, “President Obama.” I said, “Look, I’ll terminate him.”
I don’t know what’s going on other than that, but you’d have to ask Mike Pompeo. But they did ask me to do it and I did it. I have the right to terminate the inspector generals. And I would have — I would have suggested — and I did suggest, in pretty much all cases, you get rid of the attorney generals, because it happens to be very political, whether you like it or not. And many of these people were Obama appointments, and so I just got rid of him.
My summation of the above?
Gee, I dunno. Someone told me to fire him, so I did!
Yeah, that’s how it comes out for me. Maybe your mileage will vary, but to me this is the essence of incompetent leadership. Rather than carefully considering the request, the past performance of IG Linick, the information that Linick was planning to present in his report on the State Department, and going from there, he just shrugged and fired the guy.
A competent President would at least have laid all that out at the press conference, and perhaps even fired Pompeo rather than Linick. If, at least, the suspicions that the Saudi Arabian arms deal was not on the up and up turn out to have some correspondence with reality.
But, no. We have a guy who evades responsibility for his actions, while trying to take the kudos of others’ actions when they turn out well. Well, just remember ol’ President Truman’s watchword. Remember? Or is that too much to ask?
