Trump led Ted Cruz into thinking he was up for the Attorney General job, all the time laughing his ass off at the despised Texas ego-maniac. He called Cruz in for a very public meeting, encouraged him to blab to the press that he was being considered to head the Department of Justice... and then promptly humiliated him by appointing an incompetent DC joke, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. Thursday we were wondering if he wasn't doing the same thing to Romney with the Secretary of State position. Huckabee and Gingrich have been leading a smear campaign against Romney inside the transition apparatus. Huckabee went to the press and said that "It would be a real insult to all those Donald Trump voters who worked really hard" if he picked Romney and Gingrich's take was-- aside from hoping for the position for himself-- the same, almost word-for-word, as Huckabee's. On Fox Huckabee said that the only way Romney "could even be considered for a post like that [is if] he goes to a microphone in a very public place and repudiates everything he said in that famous Salt Lake City speech and everything he said after that, where he said Donald Trump wasn’t fit, that he lacked character. I mean on and on. That’s beyond just the normal political infighting that we all experience."Will Romney grovel for job? Fox News is reporting that Romney basically has no dignity left at all and he's prepared to grovel to Trump's heart's content. They want that public apology, as part of the Trump 3 ring circus-- and humiliation of the establishment.
A transition official told Fox’s Ed Henry that some in Trump’s inner circle want the former Massachusetts governor to apologize in order to be seriously considered for the secretary of State.Trump is reportedly considering whether to pick Romney or former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani for the coveted cabinet position.Giuliani is the preferred choice of Trump’s loyalists and grassroots supporters, while Romney is a favorite of establishment conservatives.
And the Wall Street Journal claims Giuliani is actively and aggressively lobbying for the post. "He has spent the last two weeks," they reported, "engaged in an unusually public fight to land the secretary-of-state slot in the next administration. Mr. Trump, the Republican president-elect, is also considering nominating Mitt Romney, the GOP’s 2012 presidential nominee and former investment banker. But Mr. Giuliani and his allies continue to press his case."
Giuliani’s quest for the nation’s top diplomatic post is a sharp deviation from prior presidential transitions, in which candidates for top jobs avoided the news media so as not to damage their prospects. A spokeswoman for Mr. Romney didn’t respond to a request for comment.In addition to secretary of state, Mr. Giuliani is being considered for the country’s most senior spy position, director of national intelligence, according to people familiar with the transition team’s deliberations....Ethics experts said Mr. Giuliani’s work for foreign governments wouldn’t prevent him from taking a job in the Trump administration but would likely raise questions about potential conflicts of interest.
What an administration this is going to be! Yesterday, Daniel Larison, writing for the American Conservative called the choice between Romney and Rudy a dreadful choice, pointing out that the quarrel between the two camps "is that it has essentially nothing to do with the contenders’ qualifications for the position in question."
This is not an argument over whether it would be better to choose an experienced foreign policy hand or to pick a political ally, but rather it is a fight over which unqualified individual with no foreign policy experience to speak of should get the job. The Trump loyalists’ objections to Romney are not based on policy differences, nor are they even questioning Romney’s managerial competence in running a government department, but are focused entirely on Romney’s opposition to Trump during the campaign. Likewise, the argument for Giuliani is not that he is better-prepared to be Secretary of State, but simply that he was on board with Trump early on and served as a loyal surrogate.Lost in all of this is that neither of them is remotely qualified to do the job, and choosing either would represent the elevation of someone with dangerous foreign policy judgment. One is reflexively hawkish, and the other is absurdly belligerent. One tends to be more fixated on provoking Russia, while the other is in league with a deranged cult and obsesses over the threat from Iran. Both are remarkably ignorant about foreign policy issues, and neither one has any business heading the department responsible for our relations with the rest of the world, but it seems that we’re going to end up with one or the other. Republicans may prefer one or the other based on their views of Trump, and some rightly prefer neither, but whichever one wins this contest our foreign policy and our interests will be the losers.
