Fox News quoted unnamed sources as saying that Trump was expected to discuss the secretary of state scenario with Former Boeing and Ford executive Alan Mullaly during a meeting at Trump Tower in New York.
The bizarre thing here is that Mullaly would seem a much better fit for Defense, a management job where his remarkable skills in turning around Boeing and then Ford might serve us well. DOD may get more money from the Trump administrations but, as Mr, T himself tweeted, there are massive issues of cost over runs in paying not just for Air Force One but the messed up J35 fighter planes. Each of these babies, built by Boeing rival Lockheed, will cost as much as the President’s Boeing 747 except that we are committed to building 100s of these things.
From Geekwire: The 71-year-old Mulally has cut a wide swath in the manufacturing sector: He rose through the ranks at the Boeing Co. and eventually became president and CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes. Because of Boeing’s status as the largest U.S. exporter, that position is considered one of the top “diplomatic” posts in American industry – so maybe it’s not such a stretch to imagine Mulally as secretary of state.
Mulally left Boeing in 2006 to become CEO at Ford. That’s where he made his mark during the auto industry crisis, when Ford was the only one of Detroit’s Big Three automakers that passed on getting a bailout (although it took out a $5.9 billion government loan).
In 2014, Mulally resigned at Ford and joined Google’s board of directors. This year he became a senior fellow at Seattle University’s Albers School of Business.
Mulally bemoaned the state of American manufacturing during a Seattle University lecture last year.
“The facts say that no country has been sustainable if you don’t have a really strong manufacturing base,” he said. “I see a change in that. I haven’t heard enough from the candidates who are running for office. They need to be saying more about that, and the economy.”
Since then, Trump has been saying a lot about making American manufacturing great again and boosting jobs. But it’s not clear whether that would be a big part of the future secretary of state’s portfolio.