Tag Archives: Rex Tillerson

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Paging Rex Tillerson … hello?

Of all the individuals from the Donald J. Trump administration who have fallen off the grid, one of them stands out to where I want to know what he must be thinking about the trouble that continues to swirl around the ex-POTUS.

Rex Tillerson. Perhaps you recall he was Trump’s initial secretary of state. Trump nominated the tough-talking Texan, the one-time Exxon-Mobil chief executive officer to lead our diplomatic corps. He didn’t last very long in the job, about 13 months.

He called Trump a “fu**ing moron,” never denied saying it and then got canned via Twitter message that Trump fired off.

Tillerson wasn’t an effective secretary of state, to be sure. How could he be, given that he reported to a numbskull who undercut him at every turn?

And, yes, he was right about the moronic status of the then-POTUS.

What in the world is this fellow thinking these days as we watch the 1/6 committee zero in on Trump, his key aides and the events that led to the insurrection against the government?

He probably doesn’t wish to be thrust back under the glare of the political spotlight. Some of us, though, want to hear what’s on his mind and in his heart.

Are you out there, Rex?

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

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Bolton joins line of national security advisers in trashing POTUS

James Mattis pounded Donald Trump, saying he is intentionally seeking to divide the nation.

John Kelly said the nation needs to do a better job of assessing the character and competence of those who seek elective public office.

John Bolton says Donald Trump is unfit for public office and says he endangers our national security by looking first at his re-election chances and how any decision affects them.

Mattis and Kelly are former Marine Corps generals; Mattis served as defense secretary and Kelly served as homeland security secretary and then White House chief of staff. Bolton is a former U.N. ambassador and a longstanding conservative foreign policy hawk.

These are just the latest in a long line of national security officials who once worked for Trump. What do they have in common? They are trashing a sitting U.S. president. They are telling us that Donald Trump is dangerous, uninformed, unwilling to become informed.

Let’s not forget, too, that Rex Tillerson, the former secretary of state, once called Trump a “fu**ing moron.”

As I look at a reasonably big picture, I see an executive government branch in a state of absolute chaos and pandemonium. This is all a function of a president who now wants to win a second term. My goodness! There can be no way in the world we should allow this to continue.

And I can say that even while setting aside that the Nitwit in Chief has committed at least two impeachable offenses and should have been convicted in that Senate trial that acquitted him.

God help us if this clown wins the upcoming election!

national news

What is Jared doing to our foreign policy?

One of Donald Trump’s “best people” is being heard once again.

He is former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who went from hero to zero in less than two years. Trump hired him as the nation’s top diplomat, heaping praise on the former ExxonMobil CEO as a man of unsurpassed brilliance; he booted him out, saying he was dumb as a stump.

But the former secretary of state is being heard again. He is telling interviewers about how the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner — a young man with zero diplomatic experience — pushed Tillerson aside to conduct foreign policy … in the Middle East, of all places!

Tillerson met with the House Foreign Relations Committee recently and gave a scathing report on working within the Trump White House. According to the Daily Beast: “One of the challenges I think that everyone had… to learn to deal with was the role, the unique situation with the president’s son-in-law [Kushner] and daughter [Ivanka] being part of the White House advisory team,” Tillerson said, according to the transcript The Daily Beast obtained. “There was not a real clear understanding of the role, responsibilities, authorities… which made it challenging for everyone, I think, in terms of how to deal with activities that might be undertaken by others that were not defined within the national-security process itself.”

I want to stress with all the energy I can muster that Jared Kushner has no business conducting sensitive negotiations with Middle East heads of government and heads of state. He is as totally unqualified to negotiate with anyone in that region as the president is to hold the office to which he was elected. Yet the president has given this hanger-on the responsibility of hammering out a comprehensive peace agreement in the Middle East?

Let’s face it, Rex Tillerson was right when he called Trump a “fu**ing moron,” an epithet he never has denied hurling in the president’s direction.

And the president has placed an empty suit in charge of one of the most challenging diplomatic tasks anywhere on Earth.

Amazing.

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‘Dumb as a rock’ Tillerson isn’t so dumb

This is the kind of story that makes me shake my head in utter disbelief.

Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has said that Russian strongman Vladimir Putin was better prepared than Donald Trump for his 2017 meeting with the president, which prompted this response from the Leader of the Free World:

“Rex Tillerson, a man who is ‘dumb as a rock’ and totally ill prepared and ill equipped to be Secretary of State, made up a story (he got fired) that I was out prepared by Vladimir Putin at a meeting in Hamburg, Germany. I don’t think Putin would agree. Look how the U.S. is doing.”

Ah, yes. The president of the United States is at his “finest” when he gets his Twitter digits limbered up.

However, this does beg the question: If the president who pledged to surround himself with the “best people” was going to hire a secretary of state, why would he select someone who is “totally ill prepared and ill equipped” to do the job of representing U.S. foreign policy interests?

Tillerson wouldn’t have been my first choice as secretary of state. However, he is far from being “dumb as a rock.”

He also was right when he described the president as a “moron.”

national news

Trump’s delusion is accelerating

Donald J. Trump either really doesn’t read anything or has become increasingly delusional.

I’ll go with, um, both possibilities.

The Southern District of New York U.S. attorney’s office has said former Trump friend/Mr. Fixer Michael Cohen should serve prison time for his pattern of lies to federal authorities. Cohen might get four to five years in the slammer for his greed-driven felonies.

Trump responded immediately via Twitter — of course: Totally clears the President. Thank you!

Hmm. Let me think about that. OK, Mr. President. It doesn’t clear you in the least.

Nothing has cleared the president, certainly not his hysterical yammering about there being “no collusion” between his campaign and the Russian operatives to interfered in our 2016 election.

Special counsel Robert Mueller issued a separate memo regarding Cohen, saying he has provided “substantial help” to the special counsel team that is investigating the allegations of collusion.

Does any of that imply — even tangentially — any “clearing” of the president? No. It doesn’t.

It tells me that Mueller is still at work, although I am among those Americans who hopes he is getting close to the conclusion of his exhaustive, meticulous and comprehensive investigation.

Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has stated this week that Trump refuses to read anything, that he acts impulsively, that he sought to commit illegal acts. Tillerson said he sought to advise the president of the illegality of what he wanted done; that was when the men’s relationship turned frosty.

Tillerson’s assertion about the president’s refusal to read anything rings even more true today as he comments in the wake of the sentencing memo regarding Michael Cohen “totally clears the president.”

Pay attention, Mr. President. Your delusions are getting the better of you. You are in deepening trouble, sir.

national news

Tillerson isn’t ‘dumb’; however, POTUS might be another matter

Rex Tillerson shouldn’t have served as secretary of state.

He didn’t have the foreign policy chops one would expect in such a sensitive diplomatic post. However, he isn’t “dumb as a rock,” as the president has said in a tweet. Nor is he “lazy as hell.”

Tillerson is an accomplished Texas business mogul. He also was surrounded by a legal team at State that told him that Donald John “Stable Genius” Trump was making demands that violated the law.

So that’s what Tillerson said this week, incurring the Twitter wrath of the president.

Sigh. I hasten to add that if there is any dumbness to be found inside the Trump administration, I believe it can be seen in the man who runs the show. Seriously, man.

The nonsensical idiocy that flows from his Twitter account tells me that the president of the United States — the elected head of state — is deficient in (a) the use of the English language and (b) any sense of propriety for the high office to which he was elected.

He should refrain from calling anyone “dumb.”

However, he won’t.

national news

‘Dumb as a rock’? Seriously, Mr. POTUS?

Donald J. Trump, president of the United States, has just posted a Twitter message about a man he nominated to become the secretary of state, the nation’s top foreign service officer.

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. Now it is a whole new ballgame, great spirit at State!

Yep, that’s our president, the guy who sought to present the United States’ foreign policy statements through its secretary of state.

Now he calls the man he fired earlier this year “dumb as a rock.”

I don’t believe Rex Tillerson is “dumb as a rock.” He ran ExxonMobil oil company before he took the job as the nation’s top diplomat. I don’t believe he was well-suited for the job at State.

It is simply astonishing, though, that the president — our head of state, our commander in chief, the leader of the free world — would resort to the kind of language he is using to denigrate someone he hired for this most sensitive of jobs.

And we’re expected to take the president seriously?

national news

Rex T breaks his silence in a big way

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Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is now a private citizen. He isn’t a silent citizen, though.

Here is what he told graduating cadets at Virginia Military Institute: When we as people, a free people, go wobbly on the truth even on what may seem the most trivial of matters, we go wobbly on America.”

Who in the world do you think Tillerson is referring to when he said we “go wobbly on the truth”?

He didn’t mention Donald J. Trump by name, but Tillerson appears to be unsheathing his rhetorical weaponry at the president.

He talked about accepting “alternate realities.” Which reminds me of White House adviser Kellyanne Conway’s priceless coining of the term “alternative facts.”

Tillerson’s tenure at State didn’t go well from the beginning. It ended when Trump fired him and then replaced him with CIA director Mike Pompeo. Tillerson left the agency quietly, but to his credit he is not remaining quiet.

“If we do not as Americans confront the crisis of ethics and integrity in our society and among our leaders in both private and public sector, and regrettably at times even the nonprofit sector, then American democracy as we know it is entering its twilight years,” Tillerson said to the VMI cadets.

Yes, we are witnessing an epidemic of “crisis of ethics and integrity in our society.” I believe its source of late has been in the halls of power at the highest levels of our government. I also believe that Rex Tillerson knows that to be true as well.

I am glad his voice is being heard once again. The former chief diplomat has an important message to deliver.

International news

Secretary Pompeo gets to work

Mike Pompeo’s nomination to be secretary of state cleared the Senate committee vote he needed by the narrowest of margins. It was a single vote.

Then the full U.S. Senate voted today to confirm him. The vote was 57-42; Republican John McCain was absent and unable to vote.

What does this mean for the new secretary? The way I see it, it means he has little bipartisan backing to tackle the difficult tasks of forging a foreign policy that commands the attention and respect of our nation’s allies and, yes, its foes.

Secretaries of state traditionally get huge margins. The only recent secretary of state to be confirmed by a margin comparable to the one that Pompeo earned was, interestingly, Donald J. Trump’s first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson.

The Associated Press reported that every secretary of state dating back to the Carter administration had received at least 85 Senate votes for confirmation.

Why is this important? Foreign policy shouldn’t fall along partisan lines. It shouldn’t reflect the deep divisions within our nation’s partisan political machinery. The United States should speak with a single voice when it deals with foreign policy. That’s long been a tradition. Sadly, that longstanding practice now appears to be buried under the deep and bitter partisan divisions.

It reflects the chasm that separates Republicans and Democrats. It is unhealthy in the extreme, particularly since Secretary Pompeo now must take the lead on preparation for the unprecedented summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un, the mercurial leader of North Korea.

Pompeo and Kim already have met. No one has reported precisely how that first meeting — conducted under the cover of secrecy — produced, other than the president saying something about Pompeo and Kim getting “along well.”

The Senate vote will stand, though, as a message that the new secretary of state doesn’t have the bipartisan support he needs to move forward as the prime spokesman for our foreign policy apparatus.

My hope is that he earns it.

International news

Pompeo to become diplomat with thin backing

Mike Pompeo is likely to be confirmed as the nation’s next secretary of state, but he’ll take strange route on his way to leading the nation’s diplomatic corps.

Pompeo is the CIA director whom Donald Trump selected to succeed Rex Tillerson at the State Department. He has run into trouble on his way to confirmation: Pompeo won’t have the blessing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which conducted confirmation hearings on Pompeo’s nomination.

A Republican committee member, Rand Paul of Kentucky, is going to vote against Pompeo’s nomination. That will result more than likely in a vote of no confidence from the panel.

That won’t derail his confirmation. The full Senate will get to vote on it, but Pompeo will gain the support of Senate Democrats who might be in trouble in states that Trump carried in the 2016 presidential election. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota and Joe  Manchin of West Virginia come to mind; let’s toss in Bill Nelson of Florida while we’re at it. They’re all running for re-election, which seems to give Pompeo a leg up in this strange journey toward confirmation.

Actually, I hope Pompeo does get confirmed. The State Department needs a steady hand and I think Pompeo can provide it … if only the president will allow him to lead the agency.

Tillerson had to fight the occasional battle against being undercut by the president. Tillerson would make a pronouncement and then Trump would countermand him. I don’t want that to happen with the new secretary of state, who’s got a big job awaiting him immediately — which happens to be the preparation for the planned summit between Donald Trump and North Korean despot Kim Jong Un.

What’s more, as head of the CIA, Pompeo has joined other U.S. intelligence officials in confirming the obvious: that the Russians meddled in our 2016 election.

This man needs to be our secretary of state.