Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said President Trump often floated ideas that would have been illegal if carried out, and he characterized the president as a “pretty undisciplined” person who “doesn’t like to read.”
“So often, the president would say, ‘Here’s what I want to do and here’s how I want to do it.’ And I would have to say to him, ‘Mr. President, I understand what you want to do, but you can’t do it that way. It violates the law,'” Tillerson said Thursday evening in Houston during an interview with former “Face The Nation” host Bob Schieffer, the longtime CBS journalist.
“I’d say, ‘Here’s what we can do,'” Tillerson said. “We can go back to Congress and get this law changed. And if that’s what you want to do, there’s nothing wrong with that. I told him I’m ready to go up there and fight the fight, if that’s what you want to do.”
Tillerson said Trump acts on his “instincts” and, as a result, he appears impulsive. But Tillerson said impulsiveness was not what Trump was aiming for — he just is “trying to act on his instincts.”
Tillerson, who previously was CEO of Exxon Mobil, compared Trump’s leadership style to the “disciplined, highly process-oriented” environment of the oil giant. The difference made it more challenging “to go to work for 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.’”
Tillerson was fired from his post in March by a tweet from Trump, who announced at the time he would nominate then-CIA director Mike Pompeo to take his place.
