Talking Transition With Bill Kristol (Who Has Been There And Done That –Well)

[Valin]

Hugh Hewitt Show:

Hugh Hewitt

Thursday, November 10, 2016

 

Audio

 

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HH: Yeah, they are all Reagan administration appointees who ended up engulfed in scandal on the front page of the Washington Post. I had a seven hour flight last night, so I went back and looked. They had to have those two things in common – front page of the Post and a Reagan administration appointee. And it comes down to the decisions they make right now, Bill Kristol, will come back to haunt them in the weirdest ways if they hire down. Do you agree with me on this?

 

BK: Yeah, very much so. And especially, obviously with a president who has never been in Washington, never been in elective office, and you know, has run his businesses in a way that was sometimes effective, maybe, but very much with a small circle of trusted advisors. You can’t really do that in the White House. It’s a big operation, the federal government. So yes, it’s a very important 77 days. Also, I think the tone he sets as president-elect, don’t you think, is really important. I mean, this is someone who will have won a very close election. There’s a lot of suspicion, some of it reasonable, some of it, you know, hyperventilating at this point about what he will do and what he can do. But the way he conducts himself right now, before he becomes president, I think will be fairly important to the success of his presidency, at least in the early days.

 

HH: Oh, yeah, he has to get these first appointments right. And that leads me to the other, in the inevitability of scandal if you just hand out candy is there, but the big scandals always come from the, I call it transition rule number four. It’s the most loyal staffer in the room who’s going to bring the most pain. They’re the ones with the blind spots, the ‘I can’t fail’ frenzy that will sooner or later grow into a major scandal. And then the Washington Post will be calling and asking for comment, which means, you know, I’m thinking here of Bob Haldeman, Charles Colson, who’s a friend of mine, and I knew H.R. as well, and after his release from prison. I am thinking of Oliver North. I am thinking of a lot of people. The most loyal people are blind. How do you get the balance, Bill Kristol, between the loyalty you’ve got to have in a staff so that they don’t leak and advance themselves, and the blind loyalty that gets you killed politically?

 

BK: Well, that’s the challenge in all organizations, not just obviously in the White House, but especially there. Trump values loyalty so much that I, you know, would worry that he’ll value it too much. Now obviously, you’re entitled to have loyal people around you, and you’re entitled to reward people who have been loyal to you. But I would say there are specialty jobs, and you know a lot about this, where you want the most, you want people who are not loyal, but who are, let’s put it this way, who are loyal to the law, who are even sticklers, maybe, for the rules. And I said two or three weeks before the election, someone asked, and maybe, I can’t remember, maybe it was you, was there anything that I, Trump could do to convince me to leave NeverTrump. And the answer was probably, was no. But I said you know, one thing I think that would help him politically at the time, it turned out he didn’t need my advice, was say that he was going to take as his Attorney General and as his White House Counsel two individuals of total integrity whom he didn’t know personally, who were not political supporters of his even necessarily, they shouldn’t be opponents, obviously, but people who would make sure that his administration was conducted at the highest level of integrity. He would not meddle in their decisions on these kinds of matters. You know, take a Mike Mukasey and make him Attorney General again. He was there, obviously, the last two years of Bush. And I don’t know who should be White House Counsel. And there are many other people who could do this job, incidentally. Take Joe Lieberman, maybe make him Attorney General, someone who is not a Trump loyalist, someone who maybe isn’t even a particularly partisan conservative Republican and just say I’m going to, you know, I’ve lived my life, I’ve been in business, that’s a different world. I’m coming to Washington. I’m draining the swamp. And part of that is taking people to make sure that I am not going to have the kind of favor trading, back scratching, you know, insider-favoring administration of the kind we’ve seen.

 

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[Valin]

List of Trump’s potential cabinet appointees leaked; Update: Dimon for Treasury?
Allahpundit
Nov. 10 2016

BuzzFeed has it. Normally a president-elect has to balance two interests in filling a cabinet, patronage for his most loyal political allies and competent oversight for each department. Jared Kushner may be a trusted Trump aide but that doesn’t mean he should head Homeland Security. Trump’s task is harder than most presidents’, though, because he needs to please another constituency, his anti-establishment base. He can’t staff up with nothing but GOP retreads or else he’ll be signaling early that it’s business as usual in Washington. He needs an outside-the-box choice or two to show that he intends to do things differently.

 

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