Tillerson Isn't a Hero for Calling Trump a Disablist Slur

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Wednesday, October 11, 2017
Over the past few days, we've heard that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Trump a "moron" (and, later, that he called him "a fucking moron"). Tillerson gave a press conference where he didn't deny it, and Trump called the whole thing fake news, but added that, if it weren't fake news, he'd challenge Tillerson to an I.Q. test and win.

So the nation is definitely in good hands.

This morning, Courtney Kube, Kristen Welker, Carol E. Lee, and Savannah Guthrie report at NBC News the precipitating event that evoked Tillerson's disablist commentary:
Donald Trump said he wanted what amounted to a nearly tenfold increase in the U.S. nuclear arsenal during a gathering this past summer of the nation's highest ranking national security leaders, according to three officials who were in the room.

Trump's comments, the officials said, came in response to a briefing slide he was shown that charted the steady reduction of U.S. nuclear weapons since the late 1960s. Trump indicated he wanted a bigger stockpile, not the bottom position on that downward-sloping curve.

According to the officials present, Trump's advisers, among them the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, were surprised.
They were surprised? Oh.


Tillerson used a gross disablist word to describe the president, which is bad enough on its own, but the leak (which he orchestrated, or at least approved) was deployed for a very specific purpose: To suggest to all of us that he's "surprised" (with the rest of "Trump's advisors") by the depths of Donald Trump's depravity.

And it has worked! I have seen far more laughing about Tillerson using that word to describe Trump than I have serious discussion about why Tillerson continues in the employ of someone he believes to be unfit for the office, and I've seen even less commentary about how absurd it is that Tillerson would claim to be surprised by the fact that Trump is a vile wreck.

It's obscene that Tillerson continues to abet Trump's malignant presidency despite having no faith in his competency or decency.

It doesn't make him some kind of hero who's standing on the line between a dangerous, reckless leader and all the rest of us. To the absolute contrary, it makes him an enabler of our potential collapse.

This is something the political press should be telling you. That they're not is an indication of where they continue to stand in relation to Donald Trump, the man they helped elect.
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