Chertoff on Trump’s ability to handle a crisis: ‘I’d be guessing’
When I ask Michael Chertoff, the secretary of Homeland Security during President George W. Bush’s second term, whether he wakes up in the morning feeling safe, given what he’s seeing out of the White House, he talks about a lot of people: John Kelly, the man doing Chertoff’s old job as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security; Defense Secretary James Mattis; and what Chertoff calls the “strong architecture of security.”
He does not, however, cite President Donald Trump, a man whom he called “hysterical” during the campaign. Chertoff said during the transition that he’d been somewhat reassured, and now clearly has a tense mix of feelings.
It’s critical in a crisis for the White House to get out of the way of security professionals, Chertoff said. Bush and his aides were good at that, he explained. He doesn’t know if Trump and his team would be.
“You know, I’d be guessing,” he said.
“I draw comfort from the fact that the leaders of the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security have military experience, they’ve been in combat, they’re not going to get flustered, they understand how to make things work operationally,” Chertoff said in a conversation for the “Off Message” podcast at his firm’s offices, a few blocks from the White House. “And that’s cause for optimism, provided that, you know, you don’t get young kids in the White House trying to get in the way and play cowboy.”
Sometimes, though, it’s the president who seems to be leading the administration’s off-the-cuff approach to policy-making and messaging—as he did this weekend with his tweets alleging, without citing evidence, that President Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower.
“In the more kind of deliberate moments, the approach is one that I think is a reasonable approach. And in some ways, you can even point out that having a somewhat disruptive effect on the settled order of things can be positive. Now, then there are times we get Twitter flurries that I don’t know that I would be, you know, likely to endorse,” Chertoff said.
Chertoff agrees with some changes the administration has already made, including moving to use the phrase radical Islamic terrorism—a point of contention with Trump’s new national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, who doesn’t like the phrase—as well as some of the thinking that led to the ban on travel and immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries.
But the rush to get the first version out in January, which led to the White House cutting out the agencies, can’t be the way government operates, Chertoff said. “I think it was kind of obvious, actually, that it was not fully baked when it was served,” Chertoff said.
As for Trump’s insistence that they did it that way to avoid giving warning to potential terrorists who might rush in, Chertoff says that was “perhaps over-dramatic.”
Chertoff is also worried about the operational aspects of how the White House would respond to a terror attack given what he’s seen out of the Trump administration so far, particularly given how many senior people in it, from the president on down, have no experience with a national crisis, and what he worries is a creeping sense of false security.
“If you go for a period of time without a crisis, often when a crisis occurs, you’re a little rusty, and one of the things we learned was to do a constant process of exercising, even in the absence of a real event, because that’s how you retain your muscle memory when you’re responding to an emergency,” Chertoff said. “And frankly, it’s something that this administration ought to consider doing as well.”
There’s a lot about Trump that still troubles Chertoff, including the president’s attacks on the press and, speaking in part as a former judge himself, his attacks on judges who’ve ruled against him.
“A president owes it to the Constitution, even if he disagrees, to be respectful,” Chertoff said. “We don’t elect a president to be the king, we elect a president to play a role within a system.”
Still, Chertoff remains skeptical, saying of Trump, “if I’m proved wrong, that would be great. If it turns out that my fears were misplaced, good.”
Despite his own reservations, Chertoff says he’s recommended to other people that they seek and accept jobs in the Trump administration, even if they also have major disagreements with Trump.
But go in ready to walk, he’s told them.
“What I’ve said is if they feel in the area they’re working that they can make a contribution, they should take the job. But don’t park your conscience at the door. If at some—and this is true with any president,” Chertoff said. “If at some point, your conscience is violated, or your fundamental values are not compatible with what the administration is doing, then you have to always be willing to pull your resignation out and leave.”