Donald Trump Says Rex Tillerson Was ‘Dumb As A Rock’ & ‘Lazy As Hell’

Fact checked

Donald Trump just blasted Rex Tillerson in tweet singing the praises of Mike Pompeo

The US president tore into his first secretary of state, saying he was dumb and lazy after Tillerson complained about his time at the State Department during a radio interview.

Tillerson, who was pushed out earlier this year, described President Trump as someone almost entirely driven by impulse, who doesn’t read, and who would ask him to break the law or breach treaties in his demands for immediate action.

Trump responded in a tweet on Friday saying:  “Mike Pompeo is doing a great job, I am very proud of him, his predecessor, Rex Tillerson, didn’t have the mental capacity needed. He was dumb as a rock and I couldn’t get rid of him fast enough. He was lazy as hell.”

RT reports: Just two years ago, however, Trump was calling Tillerson – CEO of ExxonMobil at the time – “one of the truly great business leaders of the world.”

What happened? Most likely, Tillerson’s interview with CBS, which aired Thursday, in which he bad-mouthed his former boss as someone who acts on instinct and doesn’t like to read.

“What’s challenging for me … is to go to work for a man who is pretty undisciplined, doesn’t like to read, doesn’t read briefing reports, doesn’t like to get into the details of a lot of things,” Tillerson told CBS News’ Bob Schieffer. “We are starkly different in our styles, we did not have a common value system.”

“I’d have to say to him, ‘Mr. President, I understand what you wanna do, but you can’t do it that way. It violates the law, it violates treaty.’ He got really frustrated,” Tillerson said. “I think he grew tired of me being the guy who told him, ‘You can’t do that.’”

Trump sacked Tillerson in March this year, replacing him with Pompeo, the former congressman from Kansas who was heading the CIA at the time.

The reshuffle at Foggy Bottom came almost six months after NBC reported that Tillerson had called Trump a “f***ing moron” at a meeting in 2017, prompting the president to tweet about IQ tests. While Tillerson did not explicitly deny the quote, he rejected NBC’s claims that he had offered to resign, only to be talked out of it by Vice-President Mike Pence. Trump himself called the NBC story “fake news.”

Tillerson dismissed another whisper campaign about his impending firing, in December last year, as “laughable,” and State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert insisted that there were no plans to fire the secretary.

3 Comments

  1. Rex was not fitting into the Jewish foreign policy agenda. But I thought Rex was part of it when i listened to his speech about letting gays into the Boy Scouts. He was all for that.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.




This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.