Donald Trump on Thursday employed the tried and true I know you are, but what am I? defense against Rex Tillerson’s claim that he’d been unprepared for a 2017 meeting with Vladimir Putin, tweeting that it was actually his former secretary of state who was “ill prepared and ill equipped” for his job. “Rex Tillerson, a man who is ‘dumb as a rock’ . . . made up a story (he got fired) that I was out-prepared by Vladimir Putin at a meeting in Hamburg, Germany,” he tweeted. “I don’t think Putin would agree,” Trump wrote. “Look how the U.S. is doing!”
The impetus for this outburst, of course, was Tillerson’s suggestion to a House committee on Tuesday that the president was on “unequal footing” with the Russian strongman during their first meeting in Germany two years ago, adding to concerns that Trump is regularly played by more cunning world leaders. “Putin is a very nimble adversary who’s been at this for 20 years now,” Andrew Weiss, a Russia scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told The Washington Post, which first reported Tillerson’s comments. “The Hamburg meeting sounds like it was one of Putin’s wildest dreams: a freewheeling backroom-style conversation with a U.S. president.”
The president denied being caught off guard by Putin—he was “perfectly prepared,” he told the Post—but he himself has spoken proudly of winging it in high-stakes meetings with foreign leaders. “I don’t think I have to prepare very much,” Trump told reporters last year ahead of his first summit with North Korea dictator Kim Jong Un. “It’s about attitude.”
Of course, Trump’s meetings with world leaders have gone as well as expected for a guy improvising his way through them, which is to say he can hardly take a trip abroad without angering allies or praising dictators. Part of that is because he’s unprepared. Part of it is because, as Tillerson once reportedly said, he is a “fucking moron.”
Tillerson, who was fired in 2018, didn’t win much favor with Trump for venting his frustrations. The president repeatedly undercut his diplomatic efforts during his tenure as secretary of state, at one point even challenging him to an I.Q. test. He’s continued to bash Tillerson since replacing him with Mike Pompeo, tweeting in December that the ex-secretary of state “didn’t have the mental capacity needed” for the job, and was “lazy as hell.” As is often the case with Trump, though, the accusation is something of an admission.
— Visit our brand-new, searchable digital archive now!
— How Beto O’Rourke lost his narrative
— Wall Street’s dangerous new addiction
— Can Kamala Harris catch fire?
— Is Uber’s the biggest I.P.O. flop in history?
— From the archives: Sixteen words that changed the world
Looking for more? Sign up for our daily Hive newsletter and never miss a story.
