Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has hired Mary Kissel, a vocal ‘Never-Trumper’ formerly at the Wall Street Journal, as a senior advisor for policy and strategic messaging.
Kissel’s history of criticizing the President
The new hire comes at at time when, with upcoming Democrat control of the House of Representatives, Trump’s foreign policy gets a new focus. As the President attempts to tackle fraught foreign policy issues abroad, he’ll have someone working on his behalf who has not always had kind words to say about him.
Politico reports:
Mary Kissel often took a dim view of President Donald Trump’s foreign policy. As a Wall Street Journal editorial writer, she tweeted about his “frightening ignorance,” criticized his approach on Syria and China, and said Putin “scored a great propaganda victory” at the Helsinki summit in July.
And Trump swatted back. After Kissel said in a March 2016 appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that Trump has “no principles, he has no policies,” the president counter punched on Twitter. “Major loser!” then-candidate Trump wrote, adding that Kissel had “no clue!”
Former WSJ editorial writer Mary Kissel, who recently took a senior State Department job, has repeatedly slammed Trump’s foreign policy — and once even drew his ire on Twitter https://t.co/q39UvZ1glI
— POLITICO (@politico) November 28, 2018
Here is just a sample of Kissel’s disdain for the President:
Trump’s speech 75 minutes because he has no coherent thoughts. A rambling mess of personal vanity, fearmongering, isolationism.
— Mary Kissel (@marykissel) July 22, 2016
Talk about buttering up your boss!
The Trump administration’s “hiring ideological enemies” problem
This is an ongoing problem within the Trump administration. The President is a political outsider – he ran for president having never served in public office before. He came to Washington clean up the kind of political stink that attracts unscrupulous “friends” – or as he calls it, the Swamp.
That makes allies hard to come by in Washington, and explains why, even to this day, the Trump administration is still not fully staffed. It has also led to a lot of foxes in the hen houses, as evidenced by the anonymous op-ed controversy from months back where an anonymous administration official wrote an article about how he and other dissenters regularly try to thwart the President’s agenda. (RELATED: White House Narrows Down Anonymous Op-Ed Author to 12 Possibilities.)
President Trump isn’t going to accomplish his ambitious agenda if his administration is staffed with people who fundamentally disagree with him on key issues. And it’s also going to be difficult for Trump to get anything done when his own employees outright despise him.
Trump should give himself an early Christmas present and start to really clean house within his administration before his agenda is thwarted by someone who may be a saboteur.
