Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson made it clear today to an audience of young, military graduates what he thinks of the man who he had to pretend to respect for the last year and a half:
"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."
There was no doubt Tillerson was speaking about Trump, whose delusional pathology Tillerson obviously now views as a threat to the country:
"A responsibility of every American citizen to each other is to preserve and protect our freedom by recognizing what truth is and is not, what a fact is and is not and begin by holding ourselves accountable to truthfulness and demand our pursuit of America's future be fact-based -- not based on wishful thinking, not hoped-for outcomes made in shallow promises, but with a clear-eyed view of the facts as they are, and guided by the truth that will set us free to seek solutions to our most daunting challenges."
He also warned about a “crisis of ethics and integrity in our society and among our leaders,” again unmistakably referring to Trump.
But a crisis is something unexpected. Tillerson walked into Trump’s cesspool with his eyes wide open. It wasn’t a “crisis” he was witnessing but an ongoing sickness. His responsibility to the country he purports to care about was not to call that out after the fact but denounce it immediately. Which is why the reaction to his speech has mostly been, “too little too late.”
And Tillerson is simply joining a long line of government officials who felt suddenly free to speak their minds after leaving the orbit of the sociopathic Orange Menace and the sycophants who continue to churn his bullshit.
With Tillerson, though, you get the impression of someone who likely many times during his tenure as Secretary of State wondered whether it was worth abasing himself before such a lowlife, mobbed-up con man like Trump. And even though he was a lousy Secretary of State, the former CEO of Exxon Mobil was probably the happiest man in the world to be asked to leave the train before it wrecked.