Top Trump aide eats his words
Foreign minister rows back after calling president a ‘moron’
THE MOMENT was as remarkable as it was unprecedented: a sitting US secretary of state took the microphone to pledge his fealty to the president – despite his well-documented unhappiness in the job and the growing presumption in Washington that he is a short-timer.
Rex Tillerson said on Wednesday that he would stay as long as President Donald Trump wanted him to, and Trump said he had “full confidence” in the former Exxon-Mobil chief executive.
Shortly afterwards, Tillerson’s spokesperson also felt compelled to publicly deny an NBC News report that Tillerson had called the president a “moron”, adding he was determined to remain in his job.
But Tillerson’s move to reassure Trump of his convictions may well be too little, too late for the long term, according to the accounts of 19 current and former senior administration officials and Capitol Hill aides, most of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to offer candid assessments.
The already tense relationship between the two headstrong men – one a billionaire former real estate developer, the other a former captain of the global oil industry – has ruptured into what some White House officials call an irreparable breach that will inevitably lead to Tillerson’s departure.
His dwindling cohort of allies say he has been given an impossible job and is doing his best with it.
Although Trump denied yesterday that Tillerson had threatened to resign, the president has been piqued for months by rumours of disloyalty that have filtered up to him from the State Department.
In private meetings, the president has also been irked by Tillerson’s arguments for a more traditional approach on policies, from Iran to climate change to North Korea, and his frustration when overruled. Trump has chafed at what he sees as arrogance on the part of an employee.
And as Tillerson has travelled the globe, Trump believes his top diplomat often seems more concerned with what the world thinks of the US than with tending to the president’s personal image.
Meanwhile, Tillerson has struggled to submit to the whims and wishes of a boss who governs by impulse. Deliberative in style, he has been caught off guard by Trump’s fiery and injudicious tweets and repulsed by some flashes of his character, such as when Trump said there were “fine people” among those marching at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville.
“The president speaks for himself,” Tillerson said at the time.