Hillary Clinton on Wednesday warned President Trump against ignoring — and undercutting — State Department officials, saying that doing so would ultimately make the United States “weaker.”
“He’s just flying blind,” Clinton said on NBC’s “Late Night With Seth Meyers.”
“And you know, he doesn’t listen to people — he undercut his own secretary of State about diplomacy on the North Korea problem.”
“I think it weakens us. I think it gives a lot of aid and comfort to these leaders of countries that are trying to frankly take advantage of us during this time when we don’t seem to have a particular strategic understanding of our role in the world.”
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Clinton, who ran against Trump in the 2016 presidential election, previously served as former President Obama’s first secretary of State.
She told Meyers that there is currently a “sense of demoralization” in the State Department, as well as a general feeling that “the country is kind of going off in the wrong direction,” suggesting that diplomatic initiatives have suffered under the Trump administration.
“Diplomacy is key to solving any of these contentious problems. And if you don’t pay attention to the people that have a contribution to make — you’re just kind of, you know, making it up as you go — then you’re going to lose a lot of the expertise and experience that we built up over generations.”
Trump appeared to undercut Secretary of State Rex Tillerson last month after the administration’s top diplomat suggested that the U.S. had a line of communication with North Korea.
The president, however, said he told Tillerson that he was “wasting his time trying to negotiate with” Pyongyang.