Score one for Rex Tillerson

| 6:40 pm EST November 10, 2019
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Rex Tillerson is not a particularly good guy. His tenure at ExxonMobil was marked with unethically limitless greed, and disastrous crimes against the environment. But while Tillerson was the kind of villain who was willing to partner with Vladimir Putin to make a buck, we’ve learned that he’s definitely not the kind of villain who would conspire with Putin against the United States.

Now we’re learning that Rex Tillerson apparently did even more to try to curtail Donald Trump’s villainy than we knew. Last month the news surfaced that Tillerson refused to go along with Trump’s request that he help get a Rudy Giuliani-connected Turkish criminal off the hook. It turns out Tillerson was doing even more than that.

Nikki Haley, who has turned out to be one of the true villains of the Trump era, is publishing a new pro-Trump book in the hope of cashing in by pandering to what’s left of Trump’s base. In the book, she’s accusing Rex Tillerson and John Kelly of having tried to get her to conspire with them against Trump.

Considering Haley’s consistent penchant for lying, we doubt that’s even close to how it really went down. But it likely does mean that Tillerson and Kelly made some kind of effort to get Haley to help them curtail Trump’s most damaging behaviors. Kelly is a vicious racist; we award him no points. And we have no interest in anyone who is still working for Trump while claiming they’re doing it to try to reel him in; at this point it’s far too late for that. But score one for Tillerson, who is coming off as arguably the least awful of almost anyone in the regime.