Trump’s ex-secretary of state says he is leaving Biden with a foreign policy nightmare

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Since being fired from Donald Trump’s administration, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has been vehemently critical of the president’s decisions. Tillerson, in an interview with Foreign Policy published this week, offered insights on some of the global challenges that President-elect Joe Biden will be facing after he is sworn into office.

Tillerson, not unlike former National Security Adviser John Bolton, has described Trump as a low-information president — and Tillerson stressed during the interview that the outgoing president is leaving behind a foreign policy mess.

Discussing U.S. adversaries that include dictator Kim Jong Un and Russia, Tillerson told Foreign Policy: “We squandered the best opportunity we had on North Korea. It was just blown up when he took the meeting with Kim, and that was one of the last straws between him and I. With Putin, we didn’t get anything done. We’re nowhere with China on national security. We’re in a worse place today than we were before he came in, and I didn’t think that was possible. ” Continue reading.

‘Volatile’ Trump ‘verbally and emotionally’ abused ex-DHS secretary Nielsen because she refused his ‘illegal’ demand to close US-Mexico border

AlterNet logoFrom former Attorney General Jeff Sessions to former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, President Donald Trump has made life miserable for many of the Republicans who have been part of his administration. And the forthcoming Philip Rucker/Carol Leonnig book “A Very Stable Genius: Donald Trump’s Testing of America,” according to The Guardian’s David Smith, shows that there was also considerable tension between Trump and former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.

The Guardian has obtained a copy of the book, which has a January 21 release date on Amazon — and Smith reports that Trump believed Nielsen wasn’t tough enough when it came to U.S/Mexico border policy. Nielsen became secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in December 2017 and resigned in April 2019.

“In some instances,” Rucker and Leonnig write in the book, “the volatile president was verbally and emotionally abusive toward Nielsen. ‘Kirstjen, you’re just not tough enough,’ Trump would tell her. Trump complained Nielsen did not ‘look the part’ of Homeland Security secretary.” Continue reading.

Nikki Haley’s real disclosure: Concerns about Trump’s dangerousness went right to the top

Washington Post logoEver since September 2018, we’ve been trying to figure out who the “senior administration official” was who wrote that anonymous New York Times op-ed. This official described a “resistance” from inside the Trump administration that has worked to “frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.” The author now has a book coming out.

So when Nikki Haley tells us that the president’s former chief of staff and secretary of state spearheaded just such an effort, maybe the story isn’t that she said no?

Haley has a new book of her own, which describes her being approached by John Kelly and Rex Tillerson to, in her words, “undermine” the president. The details of that approach are somewhat in dispute. But here’s the gist of how Haley describes it, via The Washington Post’s Anne Gearan:

View the complete November 11 article by Aaron Blake on The Washington Post website here.

Giuliani Pressed for Turkish Prisoner Swap in Oval Office Meeting

New York Times logoDuring a contentious Oval Office meeting with President Trump and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in 2017, Rudolph W. Giuliani pressed for help in securing the release of a jailed client, an Iranian-Turkish gold trader, as part of a potential prisoner swap with Turkey.

The request by Mr. Giuliani provoked an immediate objection from Mr. Tillerson, who argued that it would be highly inappropriate to interfere in an open criminal case, according to two people briefed on the meeting.

The gold trader, Reza Zarrab, had been accused by federal prosecutors of playing a central role in an effort by a state-owned Turkish bank to funnel more than $10 billion worth of gold and cash to Iran, in defiance of United States sanctions designed to curb Iran’s nuclear program.

View the complete October 10 article by Jo Becker, Maggie Haberman and Eric Lipton on The New York Times website here.

Rex Tillerson airs concern about Jared Kushner’s secret dealings with foreign leaders

Washington Post logoIn newly disclosed testimony, former secretary of state Rex Tillerson said President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, operated independently with powerful leaders around the world without coordination with the State Department, leaving Tillerson out of the loop and in the dark on emerging U.S. policies and simmering geopolitical crises.

In a transcript of his testimony to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Tillerson also described the challenge of briefing a president who does not read briefing papers and often got distracted by peripheral topics, noting he had to keep his message short and focus on a single topic.

“I learned to be much more concise with what I wanted to bring in front of him,” Tillerson tol

View the complete June 27 article by John Hudson and Josh Dawsey on The Washington Post website here.

Putin out-prepared Trump in key meeting, Rex Tillerson told House panel

Former secretary of state Rex Tillerson told members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee that Russian President Vladimir Putin out-prepared President Trump during a key meeting in Germany, putting the U.S. leader at a disadvantage during their first series of tête-à-têtes.

The U.S. side anticipated a shorter meeting for exchanging courtesies, but it ballooned into a globe-spanning two-hour-plus session involving deliberations on a variety of geopolitical issues, said committee aides, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss Tillerson’s seven-hour closed meeting with the committee.

“We spent a lot of time in the conversation talking about how Putin seized every opportunity to push what he wanted,” a committee aide said. “There was a discrepancy in preparation, and it created an unequal footing.”

View the complete May 22 article by John Hudson and Josh Dawsey on The Washington Post website here.

Tillerson calls Trump undisciplined. Trump calls Tillerson ‘dumb as a rock.’

Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson spoke publicly about the challenges he faced while working with President Trump in an interview on Dec. 6. (Reuters)

Absence does not make the heart grow fonder when it comes to President Trump and his first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson.

Nine months after Trump summarily dismissed his top diplomat by tweet, Trump and Tillerson were back to bickering as they traded accusations in a relationship that at turns has been icy and blistering.

After Tillerson publicly said their encounters grew rocky over Trump’s directives to do things that were illegal, Trump hit back in a tweet in which he branded Tillerson “dumb as a rock” and “lazy as hell.”

View the complete December 7 article by Carol Morello on The Washington Post website here.

Rex Tillerson on Trump: ‘Undisciplined, doesn’t like to read’ and tries to do illegal things

This post has been updated with Trump’s response, at bottom.

Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson spoke publicly about the challenges he faced while working with President Trump in an interview on Dec. 6. (Reuters)

Rex Tillerson came a little bit closer Thursday to saying what he actually thinks of President Trump.

The fired secretary of state, who while in office reportedly called Trump a “moron” (and declined to deny it), expounded on his thoughts on the president in a rare interview with CBS News’s Bob Schieffer in Houston.

It wasn’t difficult to read between the lines. Tillerson said Trump is “pretty undisciplined, doesn’t like to read” and repeatedly attempted to do illegal things. He didn’t call Trump a “moron,” but he didn’t exactly suggest that Trump was a scholar — or even just a steady leader.

View the complete December 7 article by Aaron Blake on The Washington Post website here.

Rex Tillerson is just the latest Trump aide to speak out after getting fired

The following article by James Hohmann with Breanne Deppisch and Joanie Greve was posted on the Washington Post website May 18, 2018:

Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson warned against what he called “a crisis in ethics and integrity” in American government and business on May 16. (Reuters)

THE BIG IDEA: On “The Apprentice,” Donald Trump only fired 15 contestants each season. As president, he’s fired Cabinet secretaries and White House aides at a much higher rate.

The historically high level of turnover that’s characterized the past 16 months has created bad blood and future risk for Trump. Several people who got pushed out unceremoniously, including via Twitter, are now publicly, if implicitly, criticizing him. While most casualties of Trump’s chaotic administration have remained loyal, they are liabilities who could become land mines down the road. Continue reading “Rex Tillerson is just the latest Trump aide to speak out after getting fired”

In Rebuke of Trump, Tillerson Says Lies Are a Threat to Democracy

The following article by Gardiner Harris was posted on the New York Times website May 16, 2018:

Rex W. Tillerson, former Secretary of State. Credit:  Jacquelyn Martin, AP

WASHINGTON — In a veiled rebuke of President Trump, former Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson warned on Wednesday that American democracy was threatened by a growing “crisis of ethics and integrity.”

“If our leaders seek to conceal the truth, or we as people become accepting of alternative realities that are no longer grounded in facts, then we as American citizens are on a pathway to relinquishing our freedom,” he said in a commencement address at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Va.

Even small falsehoods and exaggerations are problematic, Mr. Tillerson said. He did not mention Mr. Trump by name, although the president is prone to both. Continue reading “In Rebuke of Trump, Tillerson Says Lies Are a Threat to Democracy”