Rex Tillerson Managed to Outlast Hope Hicks - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Policy differences with your boss, especially if he is the president, are one thing; reportedly calling him a “moron” and declining to say whether he represents American values are quite another. And yet a little more than a year after Rex Tillerson was sworn in as the U.S. secretary of state, and amid umpteen stories of his imminent departure from that position, including in The Atlantic, he’s still in his job while high-profile Trump loyalists such as Hope Hicks are out.
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“I like conflict. I like having two people with different points of view, and I certainly have that,” Trump said at a news conference with the Swedish prime minister when he was asked about potential staffing changes at the White House. “And then I make a decision. But I like watching it, I like seeing it, and I think it’s the best way to go. I like different points of view.”
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Tillerson’s imprimatur has been the clearest in some of the thorniest issues facing the United States: the future of the Iranian nuclear deal, which is still alive despite Trump’s opposition to it; Qatar’s impasse with its Arab neighbors; and, of course, North Korea, where Tillerson has advocated dialogue from almost the beginning—and pursued a low-key but effective campaign to get other countries to cut ties or exert economic pressure on North Korea.
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Kennedy told me that at one point she believed Tillerson would leave after the State Department’s redesign (a process that’s not yet complete) and use that contribution as his legacy. But it seemed as if the incessant leaks made “him dig his feet in … to stick with the job whether he was enjoying it or not.”
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Tillerson and some of his colleagues may be safe for now—but there’s no guarantee that the president will be satisfied with them in the near future. When Laura Ingraham, the Fox News host, asked Trump last November about Tillerson, the president said his secretary of state was “working hard” and “doing his best.” But when she asked Trump whether the secretary would last for the duration of the president’s term, Trump replied: “We’ll see.”