America, this is your president

John Feeley, the Ambassador to Panama and a former Marine helicopter pilot, is not averse to strong language, but he was nevertheless startled by his first encounter with President Donald Trump. Summoned to deliver a briefing in June, 2017, he was outside the Oval Office when he overheard Trump concluding a heated conversation, “Fuck him! Tell him to sue the government.” Feeley was escorted in, and saw that Mike Pence, John Kelly, and several other officials were in the room. As he took a seat, Trump asked, “So tell me—what do we get from Panama? What’s in it for us?” Feeley presented a litany of benefits: help with counter-narcotics work and migration control, commercial efforts linked to the Panama Canal, a close relationship with the current President, Juan Carlos Varela. When he finished, Trump chuckled and said, “Who knew?” He then turned the conversation to the Trump International Hotel and Tower, in Panama City. “How about the hotel?” he said. “We still have the tallest building on the skyline down there?”

  New Yorker

As bad as this asshole is for us in the public, imagine what it must be like for people who have to deal with him in person.

Feeley had been a Foreign Service officer for twenty-seven years, and, like his peers, he advocates an ethos of nonpartisan service. Although he grew up as what he calls a “William F. Buckley Republican,” he has never joined a political party, and has voted for both Democrats and Republicans. When Trump was elected, he was surprised, but he resolved not to let it interfere with his work. His wife, Cherie, who also served for decades in diplomatic posts, said, “In the Foreign Service, we don’t have the luxury of gnashing our teeth at political outcomes. The hope is that person recognizes how delicate and complex it is to make foreign policy. It’s boring and it’s slow—but it’s how you make good products over time.” Still, Feeley was disheartened by his initial meeting with Trump. “In private, he is exactly like he is on TV. [...] “He’s like a velociraptor,” he said. “He has to be boss, and if you don’t show him deference he kills you.”

[...]

Last December, half a year after the meeting in the Oval Office, Feeley submitted a letter of resignation. Many diplomats have been dismayed by the Trump Administration; since the Inauguration, sixty per cent of the State Department’s highest-ranking diplomats have left. But Feeley broke with his peers by publicly declaring his reasons. In an op-ed in the Washington Post, titled “Why I Could No Longer Serve This President,” he said that Trump had “warped and betrayed” what he regarded as “the traditional core values of the United States.”

[...]

As Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson had endorsed a thirty-one-per-cent budget cut and a hiring freeze on diplomats; in August, half a year into his term, seventy-one ambassadorships were unfilled, along with scores of other senior posts. Feeley was especially concerned about the frayed U.S. relationship with Mexico. When I spoke to him early in Trump’s term, the customary channels of communication had been replaced by a new one, between Jared Kushner and Mexico’s foreign secretary. “It’s all pretty much just between them,” Feeley told me. “There’s not really any interagency relationships going on right now.”

When Tillerson was fired, this March, eight of the ten most senior positions at State were unfilled, leaving no one in charge of arms control, human rights, trade policy, or the environment. For diplomats in the field, the consequences were clearly evident. In 2017, Dave Harden, a longtime Foreign Service officer, was assigned to provide relief to victims of the war in Yemen, one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters. The entire diplomatic staff for the country was barely a dozen people. “We worked out of a three-bedroom house,” he said. “It felt like a startup.” There was no support from State, and no policy direction, he said: “The whole system was completely broken.” Harden resigned last month.

This administration is a complete disaster. And the GOP is now responsible.