Remember all the people who juggle flaming batons or played the ukulele outside Trump Tower in an attempt to win Trump’s hand in Secretary of Stateness? All just for show.
The beauty pageant that was Mr. Trump’s secretary of state selection was full of drama: Would the disgraced Gen. David H. Petraeus be exonerated? Would Mitt Romney swallow enough of his pride to get into the good graces of the man he had called a fraud? Would Rudolph W. Giuliani somehow come in from the cold?
And in the end, seemingly at the last minute, Mr. Tillerson, the chief executive of Exxon Mobil, swept in to receive the president-elect’s nod.
… Mr. Trump said he had always wanted Mr. Tillerson, implying that the rest was for show. He called him the “man that I wanted right from the beginning.”
Trump previously said he’d been unfamiliar with Rex Tillerson, and only considered him for the position after James Baker brought up the ExxonMobil CEO’s name. But it’s not Trump’s announcement that Tillerson was always The One that’s the most interesting. It’s the why.
“He’s led this charmed life,” Mr. Trump said. “He goes into a country, takes the oil, goes into another country. It’s tough dealing with these politicians, right?”
Goes in, takes the oil, and runs? That’s exactly Trump's idea of foreign policy.
At times in 2011 and during the 2016 presidential election, Trump has said the US should have taken Iraq's oil before leaving.
Trump brought up the idea of taking Iraq’s oil, along with that of other countries where the US was engaged militarily, repeatedly, during the campaign.
"You know, it used to be the victor belong the spoils," Trump told NBC News' Matt Lauer. "Now, there was no victor there, believe me. There was no victory. But I always said, take the oil."
Stealing Iraq’s oil would have been 1) physically impossible and 2) a war crime. But then, no one on the Trump team seems to understand war crimes. Certainly Tillerson refused to say the term when asked about Russian actions in Syria, Ukraine, or anywhere else.
But if Trump had Tillerson in mind from the beginning, then the unpresidented elect apparently didn’t get the Exxon CEO’s name in a last minute conversation with Jim Baker. So just where did he get his info on Tillerson? There are almost too many possibilities. They could have shared a maildrop.
Rex Tillerson, the businessman nominated by Donald Trump to be the next US secretary of state, was the long-time director of a US-Russian oil firm based in the tax haven of the Bahamas, leaked documents show.
But the easiest answer is that Trump got Tillerson’s name where he did most of his foreign policy. From his boss.