Friday, December 7, 2018

Trump Calls Rex Tillerson ‘Dumb as a Rock’ and ‘Lazy as Hell’

President Trump today attacked via Twitter his former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson calling him "dumb as a rock" and "lazy as hell".

Driving the attack were apparently comments made by Tillerson about Trump last night in Houston.

  “Part of it was obviously we are starkly different in our styles,” Tillerson said at a Houston fundraiser for the MD Anderson Cancer Center, when asked by CBS News’ Bob Schieffer about how his relationship with the president soured.

“We did not have a common value system. When the president would say, ‘Here’s what I want to do, and here’s how I want to do it.’ And I’d have to say to him, ‘Mr. President, I understand what you want to do, but you can’t do it that way, it violates the law. It violates treaty,’” Tillerson said, according to The Houston Chronicle.

“He got really frustrated. I didn’t know how to conduct my affairs with him any other way than in a very straightforward fashion, and I think he grew tired of me being the guy every day that told him, ‘You can’t do that,’” he said.

“I’d say, ‘Here’s what we can do,’” Tillerson said. “’We can go back to Congress and get this law changed. And if that’s what you want to do, there’s nothing wrong with that.’ I told him, ‘I’m ready to go up there and fight the fight, if that’s what you want to do.’”

Trump, he continued, “doesn’t like to read” briefing papers and “doesn’t like to get into the details of a lot of things.”

-RW 

4 comments:

  1. I'm not sure that a failure to read briefing papers is a negative, given who writes them and my assumption that they simply suggest "Establishment" policies.

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    1. Yeah, better to act on pure instinct alone, as it has served DJT so well... *snark*

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    2. In foreign policy, Candidate Trump's instincts were quite refreshing: openly questioning why the US government is involved in foreign wars and disproportionately footing the bill for NATO, seeking friendly relations with Putin, etc. President Trump has been quite a different matter. That could be due to the normal games that candidates play before they are elected, but my suspicion is that Trump got captured by the neocons early (because he has no philosophical grounding). That op-ed about the inside "Resistance" confirmed at least part of this, as the author claimed that he had to constantly stop Trump's instincts of friendlier relations with Russia. So, in foreign policy, his instincts could be preferable to briefings.

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  2. Failure to read briefing papers = didn't think like we wanted.

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