President Trump started his morning off by declaring NBC news report fake news, attacking them for not getting verification from him, as if the news doesn’t exist unless Trump says it does.
Rex Tillerson never threatened to resign. This is Fake News put out by @NBCNews. Low news and reporting standards. No verification from me.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 5, 2017
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The President is angry that NBC reported that his Sec. of State Rex Tillerson called him a moron and wanted to resign. Tillerson refused to address the moron quote, but tried to soften the resignation blow by saying he wasn’t considering it.
In the wake of the NBC report, Buzzfeed reported that although Tillerson was very frustrated with Trump, a U.S. official said he would likely stay in his position due to his agreement with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.
Tillerson, Mattis, and Mnuchin made a “suicide pact” in which all three members of President Trump’s Cabinet would leave if one of them becomes a target of the president.
Tillerson was reportedly driven to consider resignation over the President’s inappropriate speech to the Boy Scouts of America, which Tillerson used to helm, and foreign policy disputes with regarding Qatar and Iran.
The President expects news organizations to run reports by him for verification? That’s not how the news works. The news is the news even if Trump doesn’t agree with it or like it. But even worse, Trump has established that his word is worthless. Trump claims he sees things that never happened, he makes up attendance numbers to his own events, he peddles conspiracies and he is currently denying the fact that Russia interfered with the 2016 election to help him.
The President literally wants news organizations to get his verification before they print the news. This is authoritarian and not acceptable for the president of a democracy.
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