Chuck Park, the former U.S. foreign service officer who quit this week in protest of what he described as the “toxic agenda” of President Donald Trump’s administration, on Friday explained how “the past three years have felt like the house is on fire.”
“And not only is it on fire, but there is a man purposely lighting more fires,” Park told CNN host Anderson Cooper.
Park said a “slow buildup, and maybe I’ll call it moral distress, with each successive kind of tweet or action” had prompted him to resign from his State Department posting at the U.S. consulate in Vancouver, Canada.
“What’s different is kind of the naked unapologetic cruelty,” he said of the Trump administration.
He also called out “the sheer managerial incompetence” of the current White House, citing as an example the “disastrous” rollout of Trump’s January 2017 executive order that stopped citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S.
Park recalled how consulate officers had “no idea it was coming” and many were caught midconversation in pre-scheduled interviews with people from the affected countries when its announcement started to filter through.
In an opinion piece published by The Washington Post on Thursday, Park wrote he was “ashamed of how long it took me to make this decision” to resign, but that he could “no longer justify” his “complicity in the actions of this administration.”
Check out the interview here: