AUGUST 10, 2019
Washington, D.C. – A former Foreign Service officer whose resignation took effect this week tore into President Trump on Friday evening, labeling his administration cruel and incompetent.
“What’s different is kind of the naked unapologetic cruelty. That’s the first thing. The second thing is, you know, the sheer managerial incompetence of this administration. The rollout of the Muslim ban, that executive order, was disastrous,” Chuck Park said on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360.”
Park, who wrote a blistering op-ed this week about his time in the government under Trump, joined the Foreign Service in 2010 under former President Obama. He wrote this week that he could no longer be part of what he called the “Complacent State.”
“The past three years have felt like the house is on fire,” he said Friday. “And not only is it on fire, but there is a man purposely lighting more fires.”
“There is a slow buildup, and maybe I’ll call it moral distress, with each successive kind of tweet or action. I mean, it started with the Muslim ban, the executive order in January 2017. And then defending white nationalists after Charlottesville. It was family separation. It was revelations about squalid detention centers.”
Park also said he was frustrated by what he suggested was an erratic foreign policy in which prepared platforms would be reversed by Trump’s tweets.
“As an example, a cable will contain talking points for the day, let’s say on trade, and I am tasked with memorizing those talking points and finding meetings with senior foreign officials and delivering dutifully those talking points,” he said.
“And it is happening to me that, in a meeting with a foreign official, kind of mid-sentence, that official that I’m talking to will pick up their cell phone and point to a tweet from the president that directly contradicts what I’m saying in person.”
The Foreign Service falls under the State Department, which has seen its diplomatic corps around the world thinned, particularly among its top tier with 30 ambassadorships remaining vacant, according to the American Foreign Service Association.
Courtesy/Source: The Hill
