Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Friday of President Donald Trump: “I’ve never questioned his mental fitness.”
CNN, to whom the United States’ top diplomat gave the remark in an interview, said Tillerson was responding to a question about Michael Wolff’s new book “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump’s White House.”
In an interview Friday morning, Wolff told NBC’s Savannah Guthrie that “100 percent” of the people around Trump question his intelligence and fitness for office.
Tillerson reportedly called Trump a “moron” at a July meeting at the Pentagon, a report he did not deny when given the chance. (“I’m not going to deal with petty stuff like that,” he told an inquiring reporter.)
Tillerson told CNN that he intended to stay in his job “for the whole year” and that his relationship with the President “is a developing one.”
“In terms of what I would do different, I’m going to build on my ability to communicate with the President better,” he told the outlet. “I had to learn is what is effective with this President. He is not a typical of Presidents of the past. I think that’s well recognized. That’s also the why the American people chose him.”
Responding to Wolff’s reporting on Trump’s apparently short attention span, CNN reported, Tillerson said “I have never seen the President leave a meeting with a foreign leader.”
