Rex Tillerson Prints Out Trump's Tweets to Figure Out What Our Foreign Policy Will Look Like That Day

During a conversation Wednesday at Stanford University, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told the audience that he has his staff print out Donald Trump’s tweets for him so that he can do his job and, presumably, figure out what the U.S. will believe in that particular day. Or, as he put it, he thinks, “How do we take that and now use it?”

“Now on the one hand you can say, well, that’s nuts, why don’t you get an account?” Tillerson asked former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, with whom he spoke at the event, according to a partial transcript published by CNN. (The fact that Tillerson does not have his own Twitter account is not, in my opinion, the most “nuts” thing about that statement, but I digress.)

“On the other hand, I’ve actually concluded that’s not a bad system because it goes out and I don’t know it’s going to go out, so there’s not a whole lot I’m going to do until it’s out there,” Tillerson added. Which… yes, that is how tweets generally work, but is an atypical strategy for crafting foreign policy.

Tillerson also characterized Trump’s social media use as “world-class” and “very unconventional.” OK then.