Tillerson:

A broken relationship with Trump

It’s normal for a president and his secretary of state to experience “some friction,” said The Economist in an editorial. Colin Powell was frustrated that he “never had the ear of George W. Bush”; John Kerry disliked Barack Obama’s micromanagement of foreign policy. “But there is nothing normal about the way Donald Trump has publicly scorned his secretary of state, Rex Tillerson”—or the toxic low to which their relationship has deteriorated. After Trump tweeted that Tillerson was “wasting his time” by trying to engage with North Korea, NBC News reported that the former Exxon CEO almost quit in disgust this summer and had described Trump as “a f---ing moron” to a room full of administration officials. Enraged that Tillerson refused to directly deny he had used the M-word, a furious Trump this week challenged his own secretary of state to a battle of the brains. “I guess we’ll have to compare IQ tests,” said Trump. “And I can tell you who is going to win.”

Tillerson should quit now, “and in a very public way,” said Julian Zelizer in CNN.com. He needs to take “a principled stand” and pressure congressional Republicans to recognize that Trump is sabotaging U.S. diplomacy and foreign policy, so they will intervene as they did when they passed new sanctions against Russia. Tillerson would be doing everyone a favor he if resigned, said Rich Lowry in Politico.com. The oil executive arrived at Foggy Bottom without a “welldeveloped worldview” and has “barely staffed his own department,” leaving crucial posts unfilled, including ambassador to South Korea. He should make way for someone “better suited to the role.”

Tillerson’s resignation “wouldn’t fix anything,” said Daniel Larison in TheAmericanConservative .com. Trump’s aides reportedly want “Mr. Exxon,” as the president has taken to sarcastically calling Tillerson, to see out the rest of 2017 in a show of stability and then step down so that his job can be filled by either CIA Director Mike Pompeo or U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. But both of those replacements “would confront the same problem”: a president who thinks all diplomacy is “weak” and who is prone to lobbing “random outbursts and threats” at other nations whenever he wants. The “adults” in Trump’s administration have failed in their efforts to save him from his worst impulses, “and nothing will be improved by swapping one of them out.”