Rex Tillerson is a disaster as secretary of state. It’s not clear what he could have done to be a success in the role, working under Donald Trump, but a New York Times profile written by Jason Zengerle makes a powerful case that Tillerson has managed to be a double disaster, screwing over the State Department and American diplomacy on his own as well as because of Trump.
Yes, Trump is belligerent and ignorant and untruthful and all the other things we know him to be, and Tillerson is constantly wrestling with Trump’s latest “Rocket Man” tweet about North Korea’s Kim Jong-un or the like; Tillerson was also blocked from hiring a number of experienced deputies because they’d been critical of Trump. But he also did corporate nonsense like this:
He hired a small consulting firm, Insigniam, that did work for him at Exxon Mobil to conduct a “listening tour” of State Department rank and file through an online questionnaire and about 300 personal interviews.
Many State Department employees found that Insigniam’s questions, both online and in person, betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of what they did. “They came away with the impression that we’re very ‘patriotic’ and ‘professional,’ ” a senior State Department official says. “You don’t need a [expletive] survey to know that. It’s completely demeaning.”
But Zengerle’s reporting on Tillerson’s relationship with Trump includes something revealing about Trump’s relationships with his cabinet more generally:
According to some people who are close to Trump, his disappointment with Tillerson is as much personal as it is professional. “Trump originally thought he could have a relationship with Tillerson that’s almost social,” says one Trump adviser, “the way his relationships are with Wilbur Ross and Steve Mnuchin.” But unlike Trump’s commerce and Treasury secretaries — plutocrats who, like Trump, are on their third, younger wives — Tillerson, who is 65 and has been married to the same woman for 31 years, has shown little interest in being the president’s running buddy; instead of Saturday-night dinners with Trump at his Washington hotel, Tillerson favors trips home to Texas to see his grandchildren or to Colorado to visit his nonagenarian parents.
So to have a good relationship with Trump, it helps if you’re not only a wealthy white guy who’s enthusiastic about screwing over working people, but if you also have a trophy wife and a desire to suck up while eating lousy food at a Trump hotel.