Rex Tillerson once called Trump a « moron, » and the president just can’t let it go.
President Donald Trump appeared to challenge Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to “compare IQ tests” a few days after news emerged that Tillerson called Trump “a moron” this summer.
In an interview published Tuesday by Forbes, Trump said that he didn’t believe Tillerson called him a “moron,” before expressing confidence that he would have a higher IQ score than the man he made the country’s top diplomat.
“I think it’s fake news, but if he did that, I guess we’ll have to compare IQ tests. And I can tell you who is going to win,” Trump told Forbes reporter Randall Lane. Trump also told Lane that he didn’t see a need to appoint the hundreds of State Department positions that are currently unfilled.
“I’m generally not going to make a lot of the appointments that would normally be — because you don’t need them,” Trump said. “I mean, you look at some of these agencies, how massive they are, and it’s totally unnecessary. They have hundreds of thousands of people.”
NBC News broke the story last week that Tillerson openly called the president a moron, leading to a bizarre press conference in which Tillerson said Trump “is smart” and announced that he wasn’t quitting.
As Vox’s Alex Ward explains, tensions between Tillerson and Trump had been simmering for weeks:
