Secretary of State Rex Tillerson doesn’t plan to leave the Trump administration any time soon.
“I intend to be here for the whole year,” Tillerson told CNN Friday.
Tillerson has rejected speculation that he will soon be out of a job repeatedly in recent months, following reports that he called President Trump a “moron” in front of other government officials. Those rumors were stoked by reports that the White House has thought seriously about finding him a successor.
“Are we getting a new secretary of state or not?” a congressional Democratic aide asked in December. “That is an open question and that affects everything else.”
The former Exxon Mobil CEO allowed that friction can come with the territory of working for Trump.
“I do think one of my roles is to always give him all sides of the issues even when I know it’s not the side that he really wants to consider,” Tillerson said. “I think it’s part of making good decisions that I know he at least has had visibility to all aspects of the decision he’s about to make.”
Tillerson has disagreed with Trump on multiple high-profile policy decisions, according to reports, including the withdrawal from the Paris climate deal and the president’s procedural denunciation of the Iran nuclear deal in October.
But he has also led a high-stakes pressure campaign against North Korea, in the face of the regime’s development of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, while midwifing a relationship between Saudi Arabia and Iraq that he hopes will help counter Iranian influence in the Middle East.
All the while, Tillerson is also planning a long-awaited reorganization of the State Department’s bureaucracy. “I think we’re going to have a very productive 2018,” he said Friday. ”The State Department gets stronger every day, understand what we’re trying to do. And I look forward to having a very, very successful 2018.”
