Rex Tillerson considers resigning in protest of Donald Trump
No one outside of the Kremlin has any idea why Donald Trump picked ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson to be his Secretary of State. That includes Rex Tillerson, who has admitted in interviews that he has no clue why he was offered the job, and whose performance has revealed that he doesn’t really want to do the job. But now Tillerson is considering resigning in protest of Donald Trump and his behavior.
Multiple major news outlets are now reporting that Rex Tillerson is considering turning in his resignation
(link), and there are appear to be multiple reasons for it. For one thing, Tillerson is feeling general frustration over Donald Trump’s unwillingness to allow him to properly staff the State Department, which has largely turned into an empty shell over the past six months. Then there’s the fact that Tillerson was offended at how Trump publicly attacked another cabinet member, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, this week.
Tillerson and Sessions have no known history together. But it’s not difficult to imagine Tillerson seeing Trump publicly slamming Sessions in unprofessional fashion, and figuring he could be the next to face Trump’s public wrath. It’s also possible that, with Congress about to make it impossible for Trump to ever ease Russian sanctions, Tillerson – a longtime oil puppet of the Kremlin – no longer has any strategic reason to remain on the job.
So now it’s something of a race to see whether Rex Tillerson or Jeff Sessions resigns first, the former because he’s sick of Trump’s crap, and the latter for essentially the same reason. As we’ve previously pointed out, Sessions has personal and strategic reasons not to resign just yet (link). So our guess is that Tillerson makes it out the door first. After all, he never wanted to be there in the first place, and has no real reason to stay.
