Rex Tillerson is the former CEO of Exxon and former Secretary of State during Trump's first administration.
I would, however, add: He's a criminal moron. The typical proverbial Dumb (Moron) and Ugly (criminal) American. These two credentials make him who he is.
The real troubling question is how could 77 million Americans vote for a moron, twice? There must be something really disturbing in knowing that a country that is the leader of the First World can elevate mediocrity so high in its governance structure.
My answer from personal experience is that many many Americans are themselves morons who don't even know it. The only reason the US dominates in certain sectors is because of its immigrants who have constantly injected fresh "smart" genes into a rotten gene pool, thus rescuing the deleterious inbred peasant genes that the English founding settlers brought with them.
In the political world, Donald Dumb is like those crazy white American youngsters who one day snap and go around killing people. He is the adult equivalent of such a toxic combination of immaturity, frustration, anger, acne (mental in his case, short of his cankles), propensity to cheating and criminality, too much degenerate violent American television, video games and such.
In other words, Donald Dumb is an American ten-year-old who never grew up, and who refuses to do what his parents tell him to do and instead causes havoc only to be noticed and recognized. The man-child is begging to be loved and told how great he is. The poor sap. We do not wish him ill. We just wish him out of our lives and into his golden palaces and toilets.
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Maybe Rex Tillerson Was Right. Maybe Donald Trump Really Is Just A Moron.
S.V. Date
Sun, August 31, 2025
Illustration: HuffPost; Photos: Getty Illustration: HuffPost; Photos: Getty
WASHINGTON – Exactly 10 days after taking the presidential oath of office early this year, Donald Trump nearly drowned dozens, potentially hundreds, of his own citizens in California’s Central Valley.
Trump, unilaterally, decided he would solve Los Angeles’ wildfire problem by “opening up” taps to let billions of gallons of water being stored in two reservoirs in the Sierra Nevada foothills flow into Southern California.
“Photo of beautiful water flow that I just opened in California. Today, 1.6 billion gallons and, in 3 days, it will be 5.2 billion gallons,” he bragged on social media, along with a photo of water flowing in a stream. “Everybody should be happy about this long fought Victory! I only wish they listened to me six years ago – There would have been no fire!”
Except not a single drop of those billions of gallons could possibly have made it to Los Angeles or anywhere even close. They would have, however, overflowed the banks of rivers leading out of Lake Kaweah and Success Lake, threatening residents in communities on their shores.
“It was clearly nothing but a poor publicity stunt. And it was a dangerous one,” California Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla said at the time. “An unexpected, non-noticed release threatens lives, threatens the safety of communities if you flood somewhere without the proper coordination.”
Disaster, quite possibly including drowned residents, was averted thanks to quick action by local water management officials who talked the Army Corps of Engineers down from carrying out Trump’s order to open the floodgates on the two dams to maximum capacity and persuaded them to release a lesser amount instead.
That, however, did not stop Trump from continuing to boast about his decision, adding in the hydrologically impossible claim that the water in question had originated in Canada. “The water comes down from the northwest parts of Canada, I guess, and ― but the Pacific Northwest and it comes down by millions and millions of barrels a day. And I opened it up,” he said at the National Prayer Breakfast on Feb. 6.
“Thank you very much, Canada, we appreciate it,” he said at an Oval Office photo opportunity two months later. “They had all that water pouring out right into the Pacific. They had a big valve, like a giant valve as big as this room and they turned the valve. Takes one day to turn it.”
[Trump's childish way of thinking: Canada is north, and "above" the US. So if Canada opens a tap, water will flow downward to the US. ]
University of Michigan psychology professor David Dunning, one of the co-discoverers of the “Dunning-Kruger effect” that describes how some people with little competence in any specific field nevertheless overestimate their level of expertise, said he was hard-pressed to explain Trump’s belief that water from Canada somehow flows to California, except for their relative placement on a standard map of North America.
“People take things they know and misapply them,” Dunning said. “In his case, north is up and south is down, and I’m guessing here, because water flows down, if he opens up the tap, water will flow down from Canada to irrigate the crops in California.”
White House aides did not respond to queries about Trump’s decision that wasted billions of gallons of water or, for that matter, any other issues for this story.
Whatever Trump’s actual thought process, the episode offers just one example of Trump’s failure to understand a problem but a willingness to nevertheless make a decision based on a conspiracy theory he has heard about, the uninformed speculation of one of his country club members or even just a whim grounded in nothing more than supreme confidence in his own “gut instinct.”
These decisions are distinct from policies his administration has pursued in his second term that are long-standing aspirations of the Republican Party and its dominant wing that Trump seized control of a decade ago. Striking Iranian nuclear sites, deploying ICE en masse across the country, cutting Medicaid, extending and deepening tax cuts, defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — all of these things might have happened under any GOP president, particularly one who rode to power on anti-establishment, anti-elite populism.
A host of other Trump decisions, though, do not spring from well-developed or even hastily dashed-off ideologies. There is no conservative think tank, for example, churning out white papers proposing to end wildfires by dumping water into the ground 200 miles away. They result from the nation’s 47th president believing something comically incorrect and clinging to it in the face of all evidence to the contrary.
They happen because the president is astonishingly ignorant — in the words of one of his top advisers in the first term, “a moron.”
Some of these beliefs, such as the insistence that sea-level rise will somehow create more oceanfront property, have little real-world impact. Others have had major consequences. Trump’s certainty that other countries pay tariff revenue to the United States has created a drag on the U.S. and global economies, spiking prices for consumers and battering domestic farmers and manufacturers.
That he is willing to go to the mat for patently incorrect ideas in this second term, of course, should come as little surprise. In his first term, he embellished a hurricane tracking map with his magic marker, making it appear that cities in Alabama were in the storm’s path. It led to alarmed calls and forced the local National Weather Service office to issue a statement that there was no threat.
Most famously, he once extrapolated from a scientist’s finding that ordinary disinfectants killed the COVID-19 pathogen on hard surfaces to suggest that people could inject it into their bodies to eliminate the virus. Makers of Clorox and other products rushed out statements warning against ingesting them.
“I’ve never met anyone else remotely like him,” said Charles Leerhsen, who co-wrote Trump’s book, “Surviving at the Top” in 1990. “He is and was profoundly stupid, completely lacking in intellectual curiosity.”
‘A fucking moron’
Getting to the root cause of Trump’s ignorance, which appears to be as broad as it is deep, is complicated by his tireless mendacity.
Does Trump actually believe an obviously false idea is true? Or is he simply lying — that is, he knows what he is saying is false but is saying it nevertheless? Those who have worked with him say it’s sometimes hard to distinguish.
“He can’t tell the difference between truth and falsehood,” said John Bolton, who served as one of Trump’s national security advisers in his first term and who was recently raided by the FBI following his repeated criticisms of Trump on television. “A lie is knowing something is not true and saying it anyway. For Trump, it’s sort of what he wants it to be, and he kind of makes up things.”
Others have been more blunt about Trump’s relationship with knowledge and facts.
Annie Leibovitz, the iconic photographer who has done multiple sessions with Trump, said in 2018: “You do not know anyone as stupid as Donald Trump. You just don’t.”
Former top aides from his first term in office famously made their views known to one another to describe their boss. Defense Secretary James Mattis reportedly said Trump had the understanding of a “fifth- or sixth-grader,” while chief of staff John Kelly once called him an “idiot.”
Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is said to have called him a “moron,” which was clarified later as a “fucking moron.” Tillerson at the time did not deny having called Trump that and could not be reached for comment.
However, in a 2018 appearance at a cancer center benefit, he publicly described details that were actually far more damning: “A man who is pretty undisciplined, doesn’t, doesn’t like to read, doesn’t read briefing reports, doesn’t, doesn’t like to get into the details of a lot of things, but rather, just kind of says, ‘Look, this is what I believe, and you can try to convince me otherwise.’ But most of the time, you’re not going to do that.”
Trump’s own statements through the years provide plenty of evidence for those assessments and, beyond that, suggest a lack of understanding of physics, geometry and even simple arithmetic.
In the first months upon re-taking office, for instance, Trump repeatedly told audiences that the war in Ukraine was especially deadly because of the lack of hills.
“You know, the bullet ― very flat land, as I said, and the bullet goes, there’s no, there’s no hiding, and a bullet, the only thing going to stop the bullet is a human body,” he told the World Economic Forum on Jan. 23 via a video feed.
In reality, bullets, like everything else, are affected by gravity and fall to the ground at an accelerating rate. What’s more, any number of things can stop a bullet, including cars, walls, trees and so on.
To push his false claim that climate change is a “Chinese hoax,” Trump says that even if it were true, what would be the harm, as it would create more valuable land. “You’ll have more oceanfront property,” he said several times during his 2024 campaign.
His belief defies common sense. While rising sea levels may temporarily create more shoreline in localized areas with inland valleys, the total amount of oceanfront land decreases as water height increases.
More recently, Trump has taken to claiming that he will reduce the price of prescription drugs by mathematically impossible amounts.
“We’re going to get the drug prices down — not 30 or 40%, which would be great, not 50 or 60. No, we’re going to get them down 1,000%, 600%, 500%, 1,500%,” he said at a July reception for Republican members of Congress.
For Trump’s claim to be correct, pharmacies would have to refund many times the value of a prescription each time they filled one. A medication costing $100, for instance, would have to be handed to the patient at no charge along with $1,400 in cash.
Info from randos
Among the biggest challenges faced by his aides during his first term was countering Trump’s predilection for believing outlandish claims, regardless of their source, even though he had at his fingertips a vast network of agencies created specifically to obtain and catalogue information.
Instead, Trump solicits the opinions of his old friends in New York real estate and the members of his various country clubs in Florida and New Jersey, those close to him say. And when no one in the White House or his agencies is willing to correct him, the predictable happens.
“He talks to people who are members of the Mar-a-Lago club, or he talks to people at receptions, and they tell him things, and he takes them as true, even if his intelligence people are telling him to the contrary,” Bolton said.
He recalled an instance where Trump falsely insisted, based on information from one of his friends, that the United States had extensive land holdings in Japan that could be sold off. “We spent weeks chasing it down,” Bolton said. “But in Trump’s mind, if he knows something that the intelligence people don’t know or his advisers don’t know, it just verifies to him that he’s the only one who really knows everything.”
“If you don’t have people close to him willing to stand up to him and tell him ‘no,’ then his crazy thoughts become crazy policy,” said one current top Trump adviser on condition of anonymity.
A different friend, a fellow golfer who plays Trump’s courses, according to another top Trump adviser, was behind two separate conspiracy theories that Trump accepted as gospel.
The first claimed that illegal immigrants had voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton in droves in 2016 by casting a ballot, then going out to their cars to don different shirts and different hats, then going back in to vote again — and repeating this process for hours.
Trump actually created a task force to investigate illegal voting based on this tip in May 2017. It disbanded quietly in early 2018 after finding nothing.
The golfer friend’s second important tip was that the U.S. Navy’s newest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald Ford, was having F-18 fighter planes falling overboard and sinking because its high-tech electromagnetic launch system was not providing enough thrust for the planes to get airborne.
Trump’s response to this information — which was completely false — was to repeatedly order Pentagon officials to tear apart the already completed carrier and replace the new system, which was specifically developed to reduce stress on the planes at takeoff, with decades-old steam catapults.
The military’s strategy for dealing with the nonsensical order was to ignore it, correctly assuming that Trump would eventually forget and move on to something else. In the case of the Gerald Ford, it appears to have worked. The carrier is now in service using the electromagnetic launch system that Trump, when he is reminded of it, continues to deride.
‘I’m, like, a smart person’
Notwithstanding proof of his profound ignorance, though, Trump has, through the years, insisted that he possesses a genius-level intellect.
Among his favorite phrases is “I know more about,” followed by the subject in question.
“I understand the polls a lot better than many of the pollsters understood the polls,” he said in early 2017.
“Technology — nobody knows more about technology than me,” he boasted in a 2018 Fox News interview.
“I know better than anybody about sanctions, and tariffs and everything else,” he said in July at a White House photo opportunity.
“’I know more about grass than any human being, I think, anywhere in the world,” he said two weeks ago.
In March of 2020, in one of his early coronavirus news conferences he staged in the Rose Garden, Trump was asked why the United States had a worse testing rate for the virus than South Korea. Trump responded: “I know South Korea better than anybody.” And then, to prove it, he added: “Do you know how many people are in Seoul? Do you know how big the city of Seoul is? Thirty-eight million people.”
In fact, Seoul’s 9.6 million population is a mere fraction of that number. (It does, however, have an elevation of 38 meters — abbreviated “38 m” on its Wikipedia page).
Just five weeks later, Trump told reporters during a visit to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta that he fully understood the science behind vaccine research and suggested it might have been because his uncle had taught at MIT.
“I like this stuff. I really get it,” he said. “People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability.”
And as much as Trump has bragged about his own intellect through the years, he has simultaneously denigrated that of others.
He has repeatedly called all his predecessors in the job “stupid” for having forged trade agreements that — in Trump’s inaccurate view — allowed other nations to “cheat” the United States. He calls critics “dumb” and “not smart” and, frequently, “low IQ.”
“He’s an average mentally person, I’d say low in terms of what he does. Low, low IQ for what he does,” Trump said of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, who is widely credited with guiding the U.S. economy out of the pandemic without bringing on a recession. “I think he’s a very stupid person, actually.”
Marc Short, who worked in Trump’s White House as Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, said Trump’s certainty about his own views was the norm. “He just generally believes that we are all wrong and he is right,” Short said.
According to Dunning, that particular trait of believing you know more than experts in pretty much every field goes far beyond the typical case of Dunning-Kruger.
“That’s an added layer,” Dunning said. “That’s self-deception.”
Trump does occasionally show flashes of intelligence. On the matter of daylight saving time, Trump earlier this year succinctly explained the pros and cons of keeping it year-round and concluded it was best left alone. On a more visceral level, he is adept at lashing out when put on the defensive, often with a low-brow insult that delights his devoted followers.
George Conway, who first met Trump during a Manhattan condo board dispute two decades ago, supported him during his 2016 campaign, but quickly became a vocal critic after Trump took office, said Trump clearly possesses at least one form of intelligence: the ability to sense weakness in others.
“It’s a psychopath’s emotional intelligence,” Conway said. “He can smell fear, and he can smell whether people are complying. He’s not intelligent in the sense that he absorbs information.”
A danger to the country
Ordinarily when the Army Corps of Engineers is planning to release water from its reservoirs, it coordinates with state and local officials days and weeks ahead of time to ensure it is done safely and productively.
During the winter months, when water is typically not released because it is not needed by farmers downstream, local maintenance crews use the opportunity to clear the channel of debris and perform other maintenance. Homeless people often set up camps near the waterways, which also draw anglers and other recreational users.
On Jan. 30, this extensive coordination never happened. To honor Trump’s order, Army Corps officials notified local authorities at around noon that it would be fully opening the floodgates that same evening.
“There was very, very little notice,” said Peter Gleick, a hydrology expert at the Pacific Institute in Oakland.
It was only because state and local water managers were able to persuade the Army Corps not to release the maximum flow of water that the channels did not flood. In the end, water flowed out of the reservoirs at 2,500 cubic feet per second, rather than the 5,000 the Army Corps had originally planned. They ended the dump after three days, with 2.5 billion gallons released, well short of the 5.2 billion Trump had bragged about.
Every bit of that was wasted after having flowed into a lake bed with no outlet. Much evaporated, while some percolated down into the ground — long before the summer months when farmers would actually need it.
Trump, apparently unaware that the Army Corps did not carry out his instructions as he had ordered — and thereby potentially saving lives and billions in property damage — continues to brag about his decision to this day.
“We actually sent in our military to have the water come down into L.A.,” he said, falsely, at the Aug. 11 news conference he staged to announce his takeover of Washington’s police department.
The idea that rain falling in Canada manages to flow to Southern California, despite multiple mountain ranges separating them, remains lodged in Trump’s mind.
“There’s absolutely no way, short of putting it in tanker trucks, to get that water to Los Angeles,” Gleick said. “There is zero Canadian water coming to California. There is no way. That water transfer is happening in Donald Trump’s head.”
Because of the refusal of the Army Corps staff to carry out Trump’s demand — which may technically have been insubordination under military rules — the water release episode appears to have passed without permanent harm.
Nevertheless, Trump’s decision-making is highly impulsive, based on his “gut instincts” rather than actual research, so it is impossible to predict whether or when his ignorance might next endanger people’s lives as it did in California’s Central Valley.
His inability or unwillingness to discern and use accurate information, however, is already hurting Americans in the one area where many of them believed he would help: his stewardship of the economy. Trump picked up his trade war where he had left off at the end of his first term, only this time, instead of focusing on China, he has broadened it to the entire world based on his failure to understand how tariffs work.
Trump, again calling his predecessors in the Oval Office “stupid” for not sharing in his confusion about international trade, started imposing high import taxes — paid entirely by Americans — immediately upon taking office. While those new levies were delayed several times, they are now finally taking hold, with consumer prices expected to increase even more in the coming months and job creation expected to slow.
Trump, falsely, continues to claim that the tariffs are somehow paid by exporters, even though his own economic advisers have tried to set him straight.
“It’s been explained many times, but he continues to repeat it,” Short said.
The willingness of at least some advisers to tell Trump he was wrong is likely the starkest contrast between his first four years and now, when his aides seem more keen to prove their loyalty by telling him what he wants to hear.
Likely exacerbating that is Trump’s embrace of autocracy and his eagerness to impose major policies without the approval of Congress or the states — meaning that Trump may well be even more willing to plow ahead with his ideas, facts be damned.
“You don’t have to be that smart to be an authoritarian,” Conway said. “All you need is a complete lack of conscience and restraint, an insatiable desire for control, worship and revenge, and a simple understanding of what makes people afraid. Trump’s reptilian intelligence meets that inglorious standard.”
