December 7, 2018

Donald Trump, Who Only Hires the Best People, Says His Former Secretary of State Is as “Dumb as a Rock”

The president fires back after Rex Tillerson’s critical comments.

Cheriss May/Zumapress

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President Donald Trump  took to Twitter on Friday to lambast Rex Tillerson, his own pick as his administration’s first Secretary of State, in unusually harsh terms, calling him as “dumb” and “lazy as hell.”

Trump’s tweet comes a day after Tillerson made his first public appearance since being fired by President Donald Trump in March. At a Thursday Texas event, Tillerson talked about his old boss’s lack of discipline and his dislike of reading. Tillerson said the president often floated illegal plans, and concluded that Trump probably fired him because the president “grew tired of me being the guy every day who told him he can’t do that.”

In October 2017, NBC reported that Tillerson had called Trump a “moron” during a Pentagon meeting. (The State Department denied the claim.)

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In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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