Trump’s “terrible hiring skills” came back to bite him…and the nation
- Jul 2, 2024
- 3 min read
Updated: Jul 3, 2024
July 3: On This Day In 2017
Like many others who got to know Trump personally, Rex Tillerson quickly learned that Donald Trump is a stupid man. Well, to be fair, what Tillerson actually called Trump was a “f…king moron.” Is that the same as “stupid?” Anyway…
The problem isn’t simply that Trump is a “moron,” it’s that his hiring practices are awful too, so he becomes surrounded by people who were terrible at their jobs.
Trump likes people who “look the part,” as if he's casting a movie. Rex Tillerson was a civil engineer who became chairman and CEO of ExxonMobil. Why did Trump pluck this oil and gas man for the diplomatic spot on his Cabinet? A senior transition aide told Politico that he and Trump just “hit it off … strong guy … outsized, Texan, can-do swagger.”
Curiously, no one mentioned the big Russian bear in the room: Tillerson’s Exxon had deep ties to Russia and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Putin had even awarded Tillerson Russia’s high honor: “The Order of Friendship” in 2013.
How’d he end up doing in the job Trump gave him? Well, Trump fired him after barely more than a year, noting that “Tillerson was dumb as a rock and I couldn’t get rid of him fast enough. He was lazy as hell.”
What made Tillerson so bad at the job?: OTDI 2017 Tillerson told the UN Secretary General that Russia’s war criminal president Vladimir Putin should be the one who got to decide the fate of Syria’s war criminal president Bashar Al-Assad. Also, as tabulated by Dan Drezner, then at the WaPo:
He kept his department woefully understaffed. So, major U.S. ambassadors had to reach out to the National Security Council rather than the Tillerson’s State Department because, as one ambassador explained, “There’s just no one to talk to at the State Department.”
His own State Department couldn’t stand him. One diplomat, who had quit, visited his former colleagues. “To a person, I heard that the State Department was in ‘chaos,’ ‘a disaster,’ ‘terrible,’ the leadership ‘totally incompetent.’”
He united congressional Democrats and Republicans in their contempt of him. Senator Bob Corker (R-TN) called his questioning of Tillerson in a Foreign Relations Committee session “a total waste of time. I don’t want to do this anymore.” Tillerson had evaded questions about Trump’s slashes to the State Department budget.
He hated the press and they hated him…and it spiraled downward. One reporter commented just two months into Trump’s term: “Tillerson might just be moving down the learning curve…”
One close associate told WaPo, “Rex is just exhausted. He can’t get any of his appointments approved and is running around the world cleaning up after a president whose primary foreign policy adviser is a 36-year-old amateur,” son-in-law Jared Kushner.
Is a functioning Department of State led by a functioning Secretary of State too much to ask for?
Btw: It was Trump’s third chief of staff who explained to the world that Trump has, as he put it, “terrible hiring skills.”
Dive Deeper
Politico’s reporting on why he picked Tillerson
CNN has the assessment of Tillerson’s Russia connection
NBC reported on the “moron” comment
Slate has the expletive-included “moron” version
Here’s Trump’s “dumb as a rock” tweet
Foreign Policy has the details on Tillerson’s passing Assad to Putin
The Washington Post’s tallied Tillerson’s full scorecard
Summary: Tillerson fails at the State Dept job Trump gave him; further evidence of Trump's "terrible hiring skills." One's a fucking moron, the other's dumb as a rock.