On Oct. 12, 2017, I said in these columns that my money was on Trump but not his Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. To refresh your political memory, Rex Wayne Tillerson was the chairperson and chief executive officer of ExxonMobil when he was nominated as the secretary by Trump in his first trial for the presidency. Things soured between the president and his secretary of state. Tillerson was reportedly angered by the political speech President Trump delivered at the 2017 National Scout Jamboree. It was really a controversial speech; Trump talked to the young boys about party scandals of his rich and famous friends and debauchery parties on their yachts. (If the boys’ giggling was a gauge, Trump’s stories were really off-color.)
In October 2017, news reports surfaced regarding a deteriorating relationship between Tillerson and Trump. According to the reports, in a July 20 meeting, Trump suggested a tenfold increase in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, which would cost trillions and take centuries; afterward, individuals familiar with the meeting told journalists that Tillerson called Trump a “moron.”
Almost all those liberal media pundits and Democrat senators remarked that Trump was "publicly castrating" Tillerson and, therefore, he should resign. The NeoCon cabal, which had spiderwebbed the State and Defense Departments by then (if you remember, they had already completed the Iraq and Syria invasions), was pushing their trusted leader, Elliott Abrams, to be the U.S. deputy secretary of state. In front of Abrams, Tillerson contradicted the president's compliment of NeoCon buddies of Abrams; later, Tillerson told Abrams he would not be nominated. Consequently, the Neocons were demanding that Tillerson be fired. Trump’s suggested policy steps about the U.S. relations with China, North Korea, Iran and Russia had also met with toxic criticism from left to right.
At that time, I dared to put my two cents in the matter on Trump. I thought Mr. Trump, the embodiment of arrogance, would not even consider resignation for one iota of a second; but would gladly fire Tillerson not for policy differences on international issues but simply for calling him a “moron.” A man who thinks he is the smartest of all living creatures in the U.S. (nay, the whole wide world) can take any criticism, but anyone insulting his intelligence would be signing his own death warrant.
Well, I had not been and I am not now, thinking that Mr. Trump is exactly a brainbox. He had and has no idea about international affairs and geopolitical matters. Tillerson would know. Trump always appreciated President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, but he could still burn all the bridges with Türkiye over the terrorism-linked arrest of Andrew Bronson, an Evangelical-Zionist pastor.
Mr. Tillerson was not very fond of Türkiye either. When he met with President Erdoğan, he did not fully comprehend Erdoğan’s insistence that Türkiye could eradicate what the Obama administration called "the Daesh threat," so the presence of U.S. troops in Syria was not necessary.
If there was a bet on the issue, I could have won: Trump sacked Tillerson in no time. Later, Tillerson called the president “a man who is pretty undisciplined, doesn't like to read, doesn't read briefing reports, doesn't like to get into the details of a lot of things, but rather just kind of says, 'This is what I believe.’” In a Twitter message praising Mike Pompeo as his new Secretary, Trump said, “His predecessor, Rex Tillerson, didn't have the mental capacity needed. He was dumb as a rock and I couldn't get rid of him fast enough. He was lazy as hell. Now it is a whole new ballgame, great spirit at State!”
Now, please fast forward to a week from today. I am willing to bet that Mr. Trump’s intelligence quotient has not gone through the roof since 2017. Also, he had not developed his reading habits. He is eight years older since Tillerson accused him of not reading anything in detail. On top of it, he is a bitter man. His ego wouldn’t allow him to accept losing a race. He is bitter after a disappointing experience in the 2020 elections; he never believed that he lost it, but he was mistreated and cheated. He continues to feel angry about it.
So next week from today, not a newly elected president will be inaugurated but a personification of vengeance. You can judge Trump from the fact that he is bringing into the White House Elon Musk, a businessman known for his key roles in purchasing the space company SpaceX and the automotive company Tesla, Inc., X Corp (formerly Twitter), who calls Justin Trudeau, the former and probably the next, prime minister of Canada, a “girl” on the social media. You can judge Trump from the fact that he figuratively begged a New York judge not to sentence him on 34 felonies and won a free ride from the court. But he is the first felon elected president; he has already been convicted of falsifying business records to conceal payments made to the adult film actress Stormy Daniels as hush money to buy her silence over a sexual encounter between them. Trump shamelessly deducted $420,000 from his taxes, including costs related to the transaction.
His second reign will start with deportations and his proposed ban on abortion. He’ll probably try to do something about the soaring home prices and rents and nationwide housing shortages, but nothing comes out of it because state and local officials would not and cannot do anything to help him. The biggest state policy fights of 2025 will be on his intended changes regarding the U.S. military forces in the Middle East. He, again, thinks that he can change the 30-year-old NeoCon policy of creating a so-called “Kurdistan” (read: a Terroristan) as a tool to reshape the area. But the nick on his left ear should remind him that it is there for a reason: There is a deep U.S. that presidents cannot touch.
But, as professor Jahn Mearsheimer says, “Trump is Trump; he is the master showman.” Yet, this time, I am not betting on Trump; I believe he will have the shortest time in the presidency. But I cannot argue which comes sooner: Elon Musk’s "going mad" (his biographer Seth Abramson has said Musk is “deeply unwell” due to mental issues, drug use and stress) or Trump’s.
