A fucking moron

It's not just Tillerson who thinks that.

Before a phone call to a foreign leader, American Presidents are normally supplied with talking points prepared by staffers at the National Security Council, which is housed in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the White House. Because conversations between heads of state can range widely, such materials are usually very detailed. But Trump, as a senior Administration official recently put it, is “not a voracious reader.”

  New Yorker

Understatement par excellence.

When Trump assumed office, N.S.C. staffers initially generated memos for him that resembled those produced for his predecessors: multi-page explications of policy and strategy. But “an edict came down,” a former staffer told me: “ ‘Thin it out.’ ” The staff dutifully trimmed the memos to a single page. “But then word comes back: ‘This is still too much.’ ”

[...]

"By the time I left, we had these cards,” the former staffer said. They are long and narrow, made of heavy stock, and emblazoned with the words “the white house” at the top. Trump receives a thick briefing book every night, but nobody harbors the illusion that he reads it. 

Current and former officials told me that filling out a card is the best way to raise an issue with him in writing. Everything that needs to be conveyed to the President must be boiled down, the former staffer said, to “two or three points, with the syntactical complexity of ‘See Jane run.’ ”

[...]

Given Trump’s avowed admiration for despots, and the curious deference that he has shown Putin, his staff was worried about the March 20th phone call. Putin had recently been elected to another six-year term, but American officials did not regard the election as legitimate. Staffers were concerned that Trump might nevertheless salute Putin on his sham victory. When briefers prepared a card for the call, one of the bullet points said, in capital letters: “do not congratulate.”

And we all know how that went.

Before [NSC adviser HR] McMaster delivered [a five-minute oral] briefing, one of his aides said to him, “The President is going to congratulate him no matter what you say.”

“I know,” McMaster replied.

[...]

McMaster, a decorated war hero, has joked to friends that his combat experiences compare favorably with his tour of duty at the White House. Trump’s combination of bullheaded ignorance and counter-suggestibility makes him singularly difficult to counsel. Before the President asked McMaster to become his national-security adviser, he had offered the position to a retired vice admiral, Robert Harward, who turned it down, reportedly saying to friends that the job was “a shit sandwich.”

[...]

Many eligible Republicans disqualified themselves by publicly expressing misgivings about Trump’s suitability for the Presidency. Others just didn’t have the stomach for a shit sandwich. But the military prides itself on not being political, and officers tend not to have spoken publicly about their impressions of Trump. “The professional code of the military officer prohibits him or her from engaging in political activity,” McMaster once wrote. Moreover, the military cultivates a sense of duty. Bill Rapp, a retired Army general who has been friends with McMaster for thirty-eight years, told me, “For a military officer, when the President says, ‘I need you to do something,’ there is only one answer.”

That could be changing.

For any Trump appointee, [McMaster’s friend Eliot] Cohen suggested, “the challenges to your integrity will not come when the President points at a crib and says, ‘Strangle that baby’—it’ll be much more incremental than that.”

[...]

Several months before McMaster accepted the N.S.C. job, his Ph.D. supervisor, Richard Kohn, had published an op-ed in the Washington Post arguing that even those Republican national-security experts who had opposed Trump as a candidate “must serve in a Trump administration if given the opportunity.” Because Trump is “a master of chaos with no core belief,” Kohn said, it would be imperative for the safety of the nation that he be surrounded by levelheaded professionals. “You will have to be prepared to speak truth to power, and then to be ignored, overruled, dissed and otherwise embarrassed,” Kohn warned, adding, “The gig may test your capacity for abuse.”

[...]

Another former N.S.C. official said, “There are two parallel tracks—there’s the interagency process, and then Trump makes a decision. But there’s often no suggestion that he’s making decisions with reference to that process. It’s two ships in the night.” The President, speaking to Fox News in November, put it more succinctly. When asked about his failure to fill key State Department posts, Trump responded that, when it comes to foreign policy, “I’m the only one that matters.”

[...]

Initially, [Ken] Pollack said, McMaster gave Trump “the benefit of the doubt,” assuming that he could understand complicated issues. Every day, McMaster subjected Trump to detailed briefings. According to Pollack, the President just sat there. “He would look like he was interested,” Pollack said. “He was probably trying to imagine how many times H.R. has to shave his head every day, while H.R. is going on and on about the complexities of Russia policy.” Only later, Pollack said, did McMaster realize that “the guy wasn’t absorbing a fucking thing he said!”

[...]

Thomas Ricks told me that McMaster surely approached his job in good faith, but added, “Watching him, I came to believe that, at a certain point, he was just putting lipstick on a pig.”

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.