Trump aide’s U-turn on ‘moron’ jibe
Foreign minister pledges loyalty
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 ExxonMobil chief executive.
Shortly afterwards, Tillerson’s spokeswoman 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 on Wednesday to reassure Trump of his convictions may well be too little and 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 the 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.
Tillerson’s dwindling cohort of allies say he has been given an impossible job and is doing his best with it.
Although Trump denied yesterday that his secretary of state 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 – who ran the world’s largest corporation with near-dictatorial control – 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 the president’s character, such as when Trump said there were “fine people” among those marching at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
“The president speaks for himself,” Tillerson said at the time.
Tillerson has also been uncomfortable with the chain of command in the West Wing, sometimes “table dropping” his proposals in meetings – springing PowerPoint slides on his national security colleagues without advance notice.
“He, from my perspective, is in an incredibly frustrating place,” Senator Bob Corker said of Tillerson, calling him one of several administration officials “separating our country from chaos”.
“He ends up not being supported in a way that I would hope a secretary of state would be supported.”
Two career businessmen with different world views and management styles, Trump, 71, and Tillerson, 65, came together in something of an arranged marriage in December. Each has been exasperated at the way the other has handled his job, current and former officials said.
But tension has escalated badly over the past few weeks as Tillerson and his small circle of aides clashed with White House officials over matters as big as the direction of US policy in Afghanistan and as small as Tillerson’s habit, according to White House officials, of neglecting to return phone calls.